There are dozens of diaries discussing one or another opinion about the closing of newspapers: causes and effects, diarists hate the newspaper or not, they say the newspaper was shit or not. Opinions about the value of newsprint v. television v. internet are critical components of defining a new economy. But this diarist maintains that the central cause for the failure of newspapers and other media is that the networks by which information is delivered and replicated demands new forms of economy - because the basis of the political economy does not apply in this newly constructed network. Outside of normative controls there is little to stop replication and distribution of content. Nor should there be.
There are many forms of security to protect private ownership of content, but the very notion of private ownership is not yet compatible with digital technology, and should never be. The networked world is an opportunity to abandon commodification of electronic content, and extend the philosophy of the open source movement to the creation of digital content. Certainly - the content I am creating here is open - I do not own it once it is committed to the net. But neither the access to, storage or distribution of even this content is truly free - it just appears to be unless you are one of the x% who advertise or make a contribution, aka join.
Stating the obvious, no? The 30% drop in worldwide music revenue, the collapse of newspaper's revenue streams - and the disappearance of 'independent' or objective journalists are all related to the same cause. The economic model in which content is a commodity is obsolete.
We should call the networks and their components (nodes, servers, databases, programs and etc.) extensions of the human brain (the content of which is represented as sounds, images and language), much in the manner that Marshall McLuhan talked about cars extending human locomotion through adaptation to machines. Multiple, interconnected networks are the nervous system upon which the creation of the web was possible. The web itself will evolve to more extensive interfaces and connections that begin as extensions of individual and affinity groups - people creating visual and aural streams, clusters of content that are reproducable and repeatable artifacts loaded to devices connected by networks - in short, the networks and nodes thereof facilitate content exchanged on the networks as memory, and the tools that we use to recall these memories are a new kind of universal and human cerebral interface. The networks themselves are machine representations of neural fibers - so that the global network and its content (memory) is itself a mass mind.
The idea of intellectual property can only define something as property when it is represented as a commodity, and not as a mere idea. Art as commodity relies on either its temporality (buy a ticket to see live theatre) or its existence as a physical object. While digital files are a kind of artifact, the ability to replicate the object in its entirety renders it a new kind of artifact that cannot be a commodity. (Sidetrack: Content and Art can be used interchangeably in this discussion - this is not an essay about what is Art - it could be your grandmother's diaper. Once the image or text is online, it is content, and as content/art, it is no longer a commodity.)
Exchange mechanisms that arose historically naturally apply to the purchase of physical objects (books, tapes, CDs), but they cannot manage these new kinds of mass mind objects - which in substance are not different from a computer program's objects. The nature of such objects lends itself to the open source movement, which recognizes that ownership, in the traditional sense, and commodification, are not a reasonable mechanism to promote the kind of rhizomatous development and universal access made possible by networks.
Ownership and the concept of intellectual property itself might be, then, replaced by a new kind of economy, an economy based on sharing and using across a network according to a logical set of rules regarding the type and use of the networks and components that are the mass mind, rather than the economy wherein a person owns a thing as a artifact of intellectual property. Our political economy is currently insufficient to manage such a system.
Sidetrack: in an similar way, our political economy is insufficient to manage the use and 'ownership' of outer space. The impending militarization of space is the result of extending the principle of ownership to a thing that cannot be owned. Same for air, for watersheds, for the oceans - all of these natural networks, if you will, that are in fact shared are still treated as though one could possess them.
Returning to the topic: Technologists continue to try to defeat the ability to replicate digital objects, which goal runs counter to the very nature of such an object - which is its ability to be copied and disseminated, and counter to the nature of electronic networks and the digital streams that provide virtually instant access to the objects. Currently, security mechanisms prevent access to clusters of protected objects, but not their replication once accessed. Security remains a useful mechanism to control access, and access itself may remain a cost point in the new economy. But privacy and ownership are modaliti that will rapidly be redefined as the sensory apparatus of homo sapiens is externalized on electronic networks whose nature is to be univeral and omnipresent.
Perhaps efforts to inhibit copying will be successful, some kind of poison pill or self-destruction code that wraps all copies to make them essentially protected clones; in which case historical proprietary norms will again apply - but that is a caveat and and preface another argument, there is no inherent or intrinsic value of electronic art.. The value of electronic content is simply established by social agreement, by control of access, and by security, and by enforcement of copyright. Minus a set of new system-wide tools to monitor all activity on and related to the mass neworks for the purpose of securing access and preventing cloning - the exchange of copyrighted information is essentially governed by normative controls.
But who do the rules apply to? And who interacts with and participates in the mass mind? Evolving economic models currently only apply to those who can 1) access the networks and 2) those who operate the networks and distribute manufactured content.
In the nineties, the networks that form the foundation of today's web were called the Information SuperHighway. The highway metaphor continues to be useful - how are highways paid for?
This small essay cannot define the extensive mechanisms that will be required to define the institutions and legal mechanisms that will make up a new system, but an entirely new system must evolve. The political economy to support such a system does not exist and cannot arise out of traditional forms of ownership - in broad strokes, public ownership of the means of distribution is in order. Else the majority of humanity will be excluded - and as has happened with education and health care - small elites will consume the benefit of such systems for themselves and their immediate social group. Networks, like air and water, belong to everyone. Manufacturers and distributors of content may still control access to objects by means of security, but universal access to and replication of content is naturally and organically part of the continually emerging mass mind.
The institutions that distribute wealth from the use tax that supports the networks generally need two components: first, democracy of content - both in terms of ability to participate and ability to make a living based on ability to create content - this is the American Idol approach - the House of Representatives of content, (minus the ability to vote endlessly (one person one vote)); and second, the creation of academies of artists (something on the Soviet model without the repression ;) a sort of Court of content that distributes wealth through Grants and Awarda, on the model of the National Endowment of the Arts.