“In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.”

Kevin Kelly has posted some interesting thoughts about technology and wealth in the twenty-first century:

The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports — that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

- Kevin Kelly, Edge: Link.

Via Slashdot: What Makes Something “Better Than Free”?

Go read the entire essay. But first, I’ll spill the beans:

“Eight Generatives Better Than Free:
Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, Findability”
- Kevin Kelly

Comments @ Slashdot:

One thing that struck me about the list of eight things is that very, very few people are going to get rich off them, while they will allow a very large number of people to make a good living.

… The eight listed qualities of “better than free” are mostly services. They provide something personalized, or services that can’t be sold indefinitely, or things that are of limited if positive value. That’s extremely threatening to institutions like Microsoft or Disney, that have made oodles of money out of artificial scarcity.

It may well be that it will be much easier to make a good living in twenty or thirty years, but much harder to become rich. That doesn’t sound bad to me, but there’s going to be a whole lot of resistance by people with lots of money between now and then.

- David Thornley @ Slashdot: Link.

And:

when you can get a copy of any manufactured good you want dirt cheap, what good is money? Money is our proxy for value. If nothing has value, how can any proxy function? So, people who believe that value is generated by rarity will look for things that are rare, and this guy found several things that are rare even when everything tangible is copiable.

He kind of alludes to the fact that these eight things have been the actual source of value all along. But he seems to ignore that they all point back the way we have come — back away from WalMart, back away from centralization. And when you step back away from centralization, you realize, we don’t need need any big provider of employment.

All we needed was communication, and the people we were entrusting our communication (not the telephone company, although they did sometimes try) have, for the most part, held our communication for ransom.

- Joseph_Daniel_Zukige @ Slashdot: Link.

And:

The very essence of the Free Rider problem.

It’s also why donation systems, support your favorite artist drives, and other such alternative “models” don’t scale. There are too many parasites, or too many people who simply assume that someone else is picking up the slack. And people also become annoyed when they’re perceptually being nagged to “give”. Or, as you say, they no longer want to be the “sucker”.

- shmlco @ SlashDot: Link.

And:

The money DOES go to the people doing the work. Except the ‘work’ is the not necessarily the people who made the original work but the people who are adding value through immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability.

I believe that his real point is that it is no longer sufficient to ‘create’ something and then retire on royalties but you must go out and continually provide value for that creation in the ways he lists. This is the great shock to traditional businesses publishing books, music, software, etc. Their business model has been formed on the scarcity of copies and they have failed to adapt to the reality that copies are no longer scarce.

Actually, I kind of like the concept that you have to work for a living by continually providing value rather than create a monopoly on some idea or expression of an idea and coast on monopoly rents. [See Rent-seeking.]

- mspohr @ Slashdot: Link.