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>Free physical goods in meatspace Those are made with materials, they're consumed, and they're worn/gone. >Free digital goods in cyberspace We've entered a d

>Free physical goods in meatspace Those are made with materials, they're consumed, and they're worn/gone. >Free digital goods in cyberspace We've entered a different world. Our old model breaks down. Here, things are copied, pasted, transmitted, and stored for negligible cost. When they're consumed, they remain. For software, there's an extra dimension of totalitarianism: a burger in meatspace (for now) doesn't scan your saliva and send the data back to the restaurant or receive an OTA update and transform into a hotdog mid-chew or dictate how and when you eat it. Here, the economic dynamics and tyrannies of meatspace (scarcity, wear-and-tear, cost of materials) can only be implemented with hacks (DRM, perpetual renting, etc., none of which ultimately work to fully simulate meatspace's mechanics of "when you eat a burger, you can't eat it again"). Free digital content has downsides, sure, but good luck making it not free. In cyberspace, it's information, and information wants to be free.

Barrin92 4y ago
transportation and storage costs of digital goods might be very cheap (although not entirely free) but the biggest cost for digital goods is the same it often is for physical goods and services, which is human labour. Meatspace doesn't inherently differ from digital space. things in meatspace, like say land, didn't always have prices on them. That's a legal invention, the enclosure of the commons, and whether that was a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate but it certainly wasn't a fact of nature. The process of transferring something to private ownership used to be as foreign to physical things as it was to early digital things. Not because physical or digital goods have some spirit and agenda of wanting to be free, but because nobody had laid claim to it and turned it into a commodity and passed laws that governed their ownership. When land was enclosed in ~1200 that wasn't because it was so scarce, but because it was 'economically wasted' and 'operated inefficiently'. That's also the reason why digital spaces are being claimed, regardless of whether they're scarce or not.
bin_bash 4y ago
This is Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory in a nutshell https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/

Barrin92 4y ago

transportation and storage costs of digital goods might be very cheap (although not entirely free) but the biggest cost for digital goods is the same it often is for physical goods and services, which is human labour. Meatspace doesn't inherently differ from digital space. things in meatspace, like say land, didn't always have prices on them. That's a legal invention, the enclosure of the commons, and whether that was a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate but it certainly wasn't a fact of nature. The process of transferring something to private ownership used to be as foreign to physical things as it was to early digital things. Not because physical or digital goods have some spirit and agenda of wanting to be free, but because nobody had laid claim to it and turned it into a commodity and passed laws that governed their ownership. When land was enclosed in ~1200 that wasn't because it was so scarce, but because it was 'economically wasted' and 'operated inefficiently'. That's also the reason why digital spaces are being claimed, regardless of whether they're scarce or not.

bin_bash 4y ago

This is Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory in a nutshell https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/