Comments on Eric Reasons: Intellectual Property and Deflation of the Knowled...

As I say at my site, there have always been four i...

2011-10-23T19:31:27.396-04:00

As I say at my site, there have always been four interwoven economies, and the balance of them is shaped by our society:

* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");

And as has been pointed out to me since, there probably always a fifth economy based around "theft" or "conquest".

Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including due to robotics, AI, and other automation, due to better design, due to the accumulation of physical infrastructure, due to cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or due to the emergence of voluntary social networks.

Mainstream economists try to get around this long term trend by assuming infinite demand, but that is just not in accord with human psychology or social dynamics. See Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, or an emerging "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" ethic, or see any of the world's major religions -- including humanism -- about moving beyond materialistic values.

So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:

* A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income.

The particular balance achieved may be unique to a region's culture and history.

A YouTube video presentation of this idea can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

Google also on "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" for a great YouTube video on how creativity is actually dimished when intellectual work is done for gain.

Hey Eric, like your blog a lot, would you substitu...

2009-09-20T09:45:10.383-04:00

Hey Eric, like your blog a lot, would you substitute this (edited and now spell checked) redo of my comment for the one I just clicked on in? Thanks, and keep up the good blog! (you can keep or remove this preamble. :-)
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The problem with the analysis here lies in ignoring a main process of capitalism, that of production having momentum even as a market is collapsing. In this case (and in 2009) there will be and is declining production in the most web "socialized" sectors, sectors that will continue to produce valuable goods or IP after the capital moment has started to leave the equation - at least for awhile. For example, with frictionless piracy, the music business is quickly losing its capital base, and as it declines, it continues to release valuable music (95% of the tunes on an American iPod are pirated, and of those over 90% constitute the so called "top 50", the product of the declining labels). It's interesting to note this product (music, entertainment, art) is more and more skewed towards the "mega" artist with, somewhat counter-productively and distressingly, less and less of the vanishing capital going to newer (or older) artists, or more experimental artists or less "commercial" musicians or bands, because of the inherent capital risk of the less known vs the well-known and more presently popular.

So the argument that "you spend less money on music" and you have more of it, is only a view of the momentum and overshoot of a failing production machine, in a moment in time, probably a short time. Can there be in the future, a discovery, filtering and polishing of "news", music, and other creative processes, not done by "crowds" but by experts, writers, producers, engineers, if we kill the capital input into these processes? This is an important question since it's well proven the great joy we get from music, in this case, has turned out to follow a predictable human sample selection curve (ours) that is pure Pareto's law and must be funded to exist at its highest value? (Think Beatles or Cold Play or Jay-Z or Miles, vs the amateur punk band in your aunt's garage. Think your aunt's blog vs the NY Times' writers.)

It's very un PC, but it's still an error to conflate "socialist" art, (the punk band) with the output of well-funded IP "hit" machines, such as newspapers and record companies, particularly since everything "hit" driven is well-proven in social science to be statistically rare, a unit which mostly not only commands capital throughout history, but, as nobody mentions, requires it for its production. The filter and polish is not free. The French killed copyright during the revolution, but brought it back in a decade after expert authors' output dwindled.

Nowhere is this "Golden Goose" function - without which any analysis of IP and innovation can be accurately made - factored in by Lessig's or here. In fact a canard is usually substituted for this truth in order to support a convincing anti-IP argument: that the little guys everywhere will produce the replacement for the rare expert. This comforting egalitarian myth is something that social science tells us won't happen, and as real life and reality shows us, we humans, 95% of us, don't want to happen, don't want as our main source of art and intellectual and entertainment input.

Thanks Megan. I've read a lot of Lessig around...

2009-06-23T21:19:30.868-04:00

Thanks Megan. I've read a lot of Lessig around the web, but never went digging deeply into his books. Time to start.

Lawrence Lessig has been talking about just this f...

2009-06-23T13:09:16.042-04:00

Lawrence Lessig has been talking about just this for years. He has two books on it - one is "Free Culture" also Jonathan Lethem wrote a great article called "The Ecstacy of Influence" that speaks on the topic - You can find it online at Harper's.