Dick Pountain/ Idealog 255/ 07 October 2015 14:14
This column has always respected, but never wholly believed in, the proposition that "information wants to be free". My reservations stem from realism, namely that at present information bears costs for creating, storing and distributing it, costs that have to be met somehow. Exactly how they're met is a matter not for technology but politics (or political economy, to be pedantic). For example I do believe that all digitised archives of science and out-of copyright literature should be available online for free, with the costs paid by the taxpayer as part of the education budget. Of course free-marketeers will dispute this and claim that it should all be charged for. On the other hand I also believe that those who want to write, make music, act or whatever for a living should be able to be paid to do so, and that right now the market is better at doing that than the state. This magazine continues to exist because you thought it worth paying six quid for, and advertisers thought it worth advertising in, and hence I get paid to write this column.
We can imagine other ways to get paid for creating new information. In the old, defunct Soviet Union the state did indeed subsidise many of the arts. More recently it's become possible to make serious money from YouTube videos, or writing a blog that takes adverts (even in rare cases by charging a subscription). What's certainly true though is that until food, housing, clothing, transport and bandwidth also become free, it's not going to be possible to perform such information-producing activities full-time *without* getting paid, but doing them only in one's spare time will in many cases - say novelists, concert pianists, film actors and directors - may lead to a drastic loss of quality in the information produced.
There is a problem with markets, namely that they don't *truly* enjoy competition and aspire to become monopolies. What's more, the massive selling-power of our mass media amplifies a tendency toward "winner-take-all" in many markets, whereby a tiny handful of authors, games, pop and movie stars attract almost all of the huge revenues, leaving bare survival for the rest. A third fact about markets is that many people take the attitude that not only does information *not* want to be free but it actually wants to charge rent: sufficient rent in fact for them to live merely by owning and hoarding it rather than producing it. This tendency toward rent-seeking is most obvious in those film corporations who lobbied for the extension of copyright to 75 years to protect their revenues from back-catalogue, but less blatantly it also lies behind a trend in the software business toward rental rather than outright sale of programs. Microsoft Office 365, Adobe CS and even an increasing number of Android apps are choosing this route of monthly or annual subscription only (I recently discovered that both my two favoured Android office suites, OfficeSuite and Polaris have gone this way).
I've just finished reading "PostCapitalism", a remarkable book by Paul Mason, the economics editor of Channel 4 News, who argues that not merely does information want to be free, but that it will inexorably cause everything else to become free too. His analysis is surprisingly plausible (even if dense and hard-work in places). Digital information is a substance unprecedented in human history as it can be reproduced for nothing, and this fact has effects far beyond the digital realm, subverting the mechanism by which prices are set. Profitable markets depend upon inequality of information, and once everyone has the same, instant, price information margins get squeezed toward zero (for evidence, see Amazon). Digital automation and robotic technologies also make it possible to reduce the amount of human labour needed to produce material goods, threatening to do away with millions of jobs and wages. Information has become at the same time too valuable and too cheap, undermining our whole economic model based on private property.
In one possible future finance rules, jobless people live on credit and all profit comes from rent and interest rather than from exploiting labour. In another the state pays everyone a living wage to voluntarily perform self-organised tasks that used to be state services. If that sounds crazy, consider as Mason does a familiar present-day example: “The biggest information product in the world - Wikipedia - is made by 27,000 volunteers, for free. If it were run as a commercial site, Wikipedia’s revenue could be $2.8bn a year. Yet Wikipedia makes no profit. And in doing so it makes it almost impossible for anybody else to make a profit in the same space.” So which future road map is crazy?
[Dick Pountain feels inclined to paraphrase St Augustine, "Give me free information... but not yet"]
