Intellectual property hasn’t faded away instead it has become even more embedded in the fabric of the internet. Rather than overthrowing the corporate entertainment industry, the internet has led us to internalize that industry’s logic, precipitating what is often called the “creator economy.” A host of intermediaries providing payment management systems, distribution infrastructure, marketing support, and systematized artificial scarcity are emerging to help individuals commodify and monetize more of their online presence.
PAID IN FULL FREE
Free or not, content is still a commodity, inherently shaped by the platforms that circulate it and responsive to their incentives, monetary or otherwise.
We all “pray in swear words,” to borrow Barlow’s phrase, and emerging forms of art are conspicuously products, characterized by their sale prices and ownership status as much as aesthetic merit. Twenty years later, the opposite has happened: Everything is content.
“Free” content on centralizing platforms is monetized, but most of the money flows directly from advertisers to the platforms themselves. Reducing such work to ‘content’ is like praying in swear words.” Soon enough, he assured readers, the internet would allow us to supersede the concept of “content” altogether. That had become a core principle of the internet: Information wants to be free, as another early internet visionary, Stewart Brand, famously proclaimed at a conference in 1984.īarlow used a derogative term, set off in scare quotes, for whatever information remained vestigially proprietary: “content.” He declared that “art is a service, not a product,” and that “created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Computers had made information infinitely reproducible by disconnecting it from physical media he took this to mean that owning information had become obsolete.
“The conflict between the industrial age and the virtual age is now being fought in earnest,” he claimed, and the free proliferation of information was winning. In a 2000 piece for Wired, John Perry Barlow celebrated the rise of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing while ridiculing the entertainment industry’s effort to suppress those developments.
0 kommentar(er)
