“Free Culture is Killing our Culture”
If you watch the BBC you may have seen a recent episode of “It’s only a theory” where they had as a guest Andrew Keen, author of “The Cult of the Amateur”. His theory was that The internet (and in essence Free Culture) is killing our culture and our economy.
I won’t go into the narcissist arguments, we could all be better at considering others and being more humble. I’m also going to ignore the irony of writing a blog post which is a part of the problem in Andrew’s eyes.1
The theory managed to squeak by on a change of vote from Reginald D Hunter. His argument was very interesting though, he said that Andrew was afraid of the changes and that we hadn’t learned how to “make money” from the internet yet. That there changes were good and that killing the old culture was a good thing and we just need time to figure it all out.
Of course I was hoping to see the fear-inspired conjecture thoroughly rebuked. But after seeing why it was passed, I’m actually more impressed with Mr Hunter.2
Big media needs to die because it’s just an inefficient and too centralised way to make media. I find myself more and more simply enjoying content online and trying to pay for it. I have no problems with paying for content of course, but I’m altruistic, so of course I’m going to pay for content as much as I can, I actually commission plenty of artworks for Free Culture.
Free Software is sort of like the older brother of the free culture philosophy. Software has the advantage that it has a few extra advantages to being participatory, the fact that more of it can be compartmentalised and mixed together with other code without having to consider context as much. But just as much as Free Software has to find it’s way from the proxy funding of support contracts, Free Culture has to find it’s way from the proxy funding of advertising.
Thoughts?
1 I write this blog to get better at writing, it’s nice to get readers, but it’s not why I do it.
2 Of course recent episodes of Andy Hamilton’s overruling and general incompetent silliness has reduced my respect for the guy, so I was expecting him to vote silly.
Martin,
They haven’t figured out how to make -easy- money off the Internet. That is the problem. The Internet allows this “damn hippy fad” to continue to propagate a notion of charitable acts, and simply doing something for the sake of enjoying it. That will always befuddle economists and capitalists while also frustrating them because such acts are viewed as taking from their pockets.
Conventional means of marketing and sales implies a tight control over the exchange of product for money. Ultimately, from my point of view, the problem is laziness on the behalf of the marketers, sellers, and economists. If they were truly smart, perhaps even clever, they could exercise the notion of being an entrepreneur and and do what many -have- done: make money using the Internet.
From a very tangential point of view, I think many of the old-school economists fail to see the Internet as a highway. Anything can be conveyed over it — free or commercial. It is up to the market to use it properly for their ends. It is not the Internet’s fault, or even Free Software’s fault, if companies are essentially failing to figure that out. This requires a new way of thinking that Academics are still rolling around as theory while a few intrepid folks are actually profiting from it because they are acting more and talking less.
Okay… I didn’t intend to completely pop open a giant can of worms there, but I stand by what I said as at least a point to deviate from. That’s my take.
The basic problem economy faces on the internet and thats also the reason why advertisement is a very “popular” way to gain revenue, is the actual process of paying something. Its way more complex and risky, then the process of accessing the content. Often its in itself ridiculous expensive. Would you buy a coke, if you had to pay 40ct only to be able to pay the coke? Thats insane. Virtual money is way more costly then “real” money, very paradox, because “real” money is actually not cheap at all if you look at it’s entire “infrastructure”.
It’s all down to the concept of scarcity, which is the corner stone of market economy. Market economy works something like this: when a resource is scarce somewhere, you will look for a provider than has a surplus of that resource and is ready to exchange it against something you have that he wants. For example, Argh went hunting and has a lot of meat but no fruit. Urgh went collecting fruit and has a lot of fruit but no meat. Argh and Urgh agree to exchange meat against fruit to address their respective scarcity problems.
Money is the same, it’s just a resource that’s easier to carry and exchange than a wheelbarrow of strawberries. But it only works because of its scarcity. If everybody became a millionaire overnight, money would lose its value. And here lies the rub in buying over the net. You can’t buy with virtual money because it can potentially be duplicated so you have to come up with payment mechanisms that can link a virtual buyer and a virtual seller to a real buyer and seller that have real money and goods. The infrastructure to do this is far from simple and doesn’t cross borders easily. It is also hampered by the fact that on the net you are anonymous. Interestingly enough, payment is lot easier on a mobile phone because your phone is linked to a SIM card, that has a number, that is administered by a network operator that allocates it to a real person that is billed every month or has pre-paid for usage of the mobile. So payments engines have a way to link the purchase to a real person and therefore real money: bill the network operator and the operator will forward the bill to the buyer. You can’t do that on the net because you don’t have this chain so you have to devise ways to re-construct the chain for every single payment.
The other aspect about the net and computing that scuppers all economic models is the fact that it has completely changed the concept of scarcity. In the real world, duplicating an object takes time and effort, whether it’d be a pencil or an aircraft carrier. This gives you automatic scarcity and you can attach a price to it. In the virtual world, constructing an initial prototype (whether it be a computer program, a song, a book, a 3D aircraft carrier) is time consuming but duplicating it is easy and virtually free. So there is no scarcity on the objects anymore, there is scarcity on the skills required to build the original prototype. So if you follow standard economic principles, once a digital object is built, its price falls to 0 because it costs nothing to duplicate and there is no natural scarcity; the only possible scarcity is artificial and enforced through things like licenses, DRM, etc.
So free culture isn’t killing our culture or economy, it’s just applying the scarcity principle in market economy to digital goods. The problem is that all standard economic models are based around physical goods where there is a cost associated with duplicating them and don’t work anymore in a situation where duplication is free. In particular, the real world depends a lot on middle-men who can source a particular scarce resource, whether it be grocery retailers or music shops. They add real value to the supply chain in the real world but that value drops significantly with digital goods. So they basically find that they are out of a job in the digital world and aren’t too happy about it, which is probably where this accusation that free culture destroys our culture and economy stems from.
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