Internet Idealism and the Digital Economy
06 Jan 2022Information may (still) want to be free, but the practical need to monetize skill and know-how is coming into focus.
When the creators of Wikipedia developed the on-line encyclopedia, they were making a statement about free access to information. So too was Wikileaks founder Julian Assange when he published sensitive government documents. Google, Facebook, and other dominant tech firms were animated early on by beliefs about information freedom, too. Our whole social life is infused with values and beliefs, few more important today than the word free, in its many meanings.
In the popular mythology of the web, this rhetoric of free is sometimes traced back to Stewart Brand’s off-hand remarks at a conference in which he said, among other things, that “information wants to be free.” A belief that information has personality, that it wants something, and that unfettered access to any form of knowledge is helpful and benevolent has been circulating for a long time.
Empires are made out of words, as Joseph Brodsky once said. By this measure, we have been living for decades under the rhetoric of free, where the political and commercial usages of this word have been blurred in our internet-enabled society.
But as of 2022, the rhetoric of free does not capture the imagination in the same way that it once did. We are all too aware of the downsides that social media products have brought to bear on the right to privacy, to mental health, and to the durability of our social institutions. That is, things are more complicated when ideals meet the realities of everyday life. More is needed from the web than unconstrained access to content. A large and growing population needs the ability to monetize their knowledge and skills through digital interactions. The next phase of development must involve commercialization not just for a handful of tech companies, but for everyone.
Here’s what we mean. If you are a consumer: your habits, tastes, preferences, and location information are valuable to others. If you are an influencer: you know that you have the power to direct your audience to ideas, trends, and products, and that is worth a lot more than today’s platforms are willing to pay out. And if you are a musician, a writer, an app developer, i.e., a creator: you are aware that the big platforms place far greater value on algorithms, marketplaces, and other means of distribution that they control, than upon the content that you create, that audiences enjoy, and which needs to sustain your livelihood.
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. - Stewart Brand’s actual comments
It’s the first part of Brand’s remark that matters now. Today’s social algorithms have almost nothing to say about the value people place on any piece of content: its all just free. But if we look back to history as a guide there’s already an algorithm for that: its called the price mechanism. We should see some advancements that relate to these concerns, for many more people.