Privileged Customers Only The future
is upon us. The age of communication is here, and information is Whatever's in the box is downloadable, pure, sweet, information - a stream of ones and zeros that's yours to keep (to the extent to which information is ever really yours to keep - which is to say that copyright will prevent you from modifying it, making copies for your friends, making copies for yourself, or generally doing with it any of the sorts of things you would expect to be able to do with something you actually owned). Plus, you get to find out what's in the box. Here is your big chance. Buy information. Be a smart consumer. On the cutting edge. Yes,
yes, yes! Tell me more!
The whole "information economy" thing's a pretty crazy idea when you think about it. The idea that information's a commodity, when it is inherently infintely reproducible at costs that fast approach zero makes no sense at all. Unless of course you own sixty percent of the software industry or a couple of hundred record labels, or the table of contents for public-domain government documents, and are really concerned with making sure that no one can enjoy, use, or share any of these things without giving you some money. Otherwise, you should probably go pirate some software and make some tapes for your friends right now. | ||||
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the most valuable commodity in our digital economy. Not information in the old-fashioned
sense that had to do with finding something out, but information in the modern,
hip, Bill Gates data stream sense. Information is any exciting collection
of bits and bytes.