« Previous Image | Home | Next Image »
Information Wants to be Free
By colintheriot
Click to Enlarge
I’m not really what you’d call an ubergeek. I don’t “crack” “warez” or anything like that, but I find a few things really interesting about the whole Digg/HD-DVD thing. First, I really love the democratizing nature of the internet. This whole Web 2.0 thing makes it so that you really can’t bury information that people want. Second, I really love the vast array of creative ways people found to post the 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 code to get 4 pages of the same thing on Digg. That kind of massive spontaneous community response is just cool as hell.
On a more detailed tip, the title of the image comes from a statement by Stewart Brand at a hacker conference in 1984. The full quote is:
“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
Over a decade later, we have things like the HD-DVD encryption key cropping up proving the exact same point.
The manifestation of the argument now, is that pure digital information may as well be water. Water is free and abundant. You can get it almost anywhere. The only way you can charge for it is by putting it in a container or a delivery system and charging for that - the medium of exchange. It’s the same with movies and music. If I were smarter, I could make a more salient point, but I think it’s an amusing observation that in order to make information expensive, we need to make it harder to get at.
Buy this image on shirts, etc.:
|
||||||||
Try one of the featured shirts above, or click here to see all available products with this image. |
Topics:
issues, technology, pop culture, computer, geek, graphic |
Loading ...