“Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.” ‘The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT’, ISBN 0140097015, published by Viking Penguin, 1987 p.202

Altri interventi di Brand

“The final iteration for me was in sundry talks I gave in the two years after the Media Lab book came out. In those I frequently said, and even put up on an overhead, the following (this one happened to be a national Computer Security conference): “Information wants to be free (because of the new ease of copying and reshaping and casual distribution), AND information wants to be expensive (it’s the prime economic event in an information age)… and technology is constantly making the tension worse. If you cling blindly to the expensive part of the paradox, you miss all the action going on in the free part. The pressure of the paradox forces information to explore incessantly. Smart marketers and inventors quietly follow-and I might add, so do smart computer security people.”

“Since then I’ve added nothing to the meme, and it’s been living high wide and handsome on its own. I see in a WIRED, April 97, that Jon Katz opines on p. 186: “The single dominant ethic in this [digital] community is that information wants to be free”.”

Però mi sembra un articolo un po’ inconcludente nel senso che per quanto dica cose corrette, rimane un “e quindi?” alla fine. Ok, bisogna trovare informazione che possa essere davvero utile per poterla vendere.

Fantastico, ma era – seppure in minor modo – già una necessità delle testate prima di internet. Non sta dicendo niente di nuovo.

http://blog.longnow.org/2009/02/26/information-wants-to-be-expensive/

Che cita questa frase di Brand nell’ambito della situazione attuale dell’economia americana.

d

“From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism”

http://snipurl.com/9114d [www_amazon_com]

Mooooolto bello!

“Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” [X]”