Digital commons
The central irony of the digital commons: since the practical means of separating of information from its substrate became available to all[1] any digital artefact — any code — can be instantly and costlessly replicated. No consumables, no materials,[2] no labour, no storage, no transport cost.Thus: problem]]: unless someone endeavouring to make money out of the materials she finds lying around on that common can extract rent somehow, her profit margins will quickly tend to zero — if it doesn’t start there — as the code she wishes to use in her product, and being its sole value, is freely reproducible toi anyone else who cares to bend down and pick it up.
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Hence, to make money out of the fruits of one’s past digital labours, one must seek rent. Two ways of doing that are by:
- exploiting antediluvian legal constructs designed to protect intellectual property rights, though these haven't fared awfully well on the whole,
or
- generating annuities by means of a practical, and defendable, monopoly. Happily, distributed digital networks lend themselves very nicely to that. Indeed, the fact that the greatest distributed digital network of them all, the internet, isn’t a monopoly is an irony almost too great to bear.
The honour roll of companies who have made a fortune from the internet coincides exactly with those who have built a defendable monopoly.
Extracting rent is the “Rolling Stones” paradigm: Spend fifteen minutes, asleep, writing a guitar riff and monetising it for sixty years. There is another way, and it is the modern way of making money in the internet age: play live. Be paid upfront for your unique experience and expertise, each time, to create new products which, once completed, are free for your client to use.
See also
References
- ↑ The JC dates this to the widespread introduction of email, but the fabulous James Burke makes a good argument that it started 200 is years ago with the Jacquard loom.
- ↑ Barring a trivial amount of electricity and no I am not including Blockchain in that sweeping generalisation.