No, opensource and copyleftism = closed society. There is not only the problem of how such projects always lead to closed cabals making all the decisions undemocratically, as you see in Wikipedia and Creative Commons or the Second Life Architectural Working Group. It's that all of these projects promoting OS and free content basically amount to a cult of a limited number of evangelists who reap the harvest of volunteer labour, and suck the value out of it at the end of the day. The millions of people who blog for free or create websites for free or code for free or maintain forums or photo sites for free which Google and others can harvest for ad revenue that is only dribbled back in “revenue sharing schemes” is emblematic of this loss of value, except for the oligarchs at the very top.

I think A.J. Keen, in “The Cult of the Amateur” makes the case for this concept by detailing how all these MySpace band pages and other examples of how “giving away content leads to sales” in fact are bankrupt — the concept works for only a tiny minority, even they aren't earning a living wage, and the rest are getting pennies or nothing on a very long tail. Nobody is really *honestly* researching the actual revenue produced from this model. Second Life actually gives you a chance to do this in a petri dish. You give away the software on the 3D platform essentially for free, and then add a cost only if you have to have dedicated server space. But in principle, anyone can use the tools and create content and sell it. The reality is that only a tiny percentage of people are able to do this and obtain a living wage for all kinds of factors — the real cost of server storage in the end which they need to get *attention* — it's like trying to get your ad on the TechCrunch web site and paying for that instead of putting an AdSense link on Joe's Tech Blog. *Attention* is the hidden balloon payment in the free culture movement.

The fabled $10,000 user guide is exactly what I mean about the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of this OS movement. “Your information wants to be free, mine is only available for a consulting fee, however.” Creating a free product just to be able to say you did and be cultic and ideological about freeness, then harvest scads of volunteer patches, and then resell it as a guide or a consulting fee because the stuff is so wonky and hard to use.

I think it's irresponsible to “deal only with the current article I'm reading” in a context where the author is shilling concepts merely to flog his overall agenda, which is not one encouraging freedom and diversity of social systems and property systems.

Your statements about the Catholic Church suffering its loss of power due to the printing press might as well be said about the Protestant churches — same phenomenon. What is the Church of England these days? Shirky wasn't at all talking only about the political force of the church and simply never makes that distinction. Over and over again, in all his writings, he whacks at the Catholic Church as a powerful entity that was rightly challenged and broken up and celebrates its demise — but it's warped, as it didn't suffer the demise he imagined and he completely leaves out the role of all the autocratic governments or kingdoms that operated at the very same time, as if they didn't even exist. We never hear about the effect of the printing press on the kingdoms and royalties of Europe. I just think it's a facile meme, and one that springs from a cultural loathing of the Judeo-Christian religion and spiritual institutions with power (by contrast, he becomes positively ecstatic about the militaristic Shinto religion and its endurance). One can be happy for the Enlightenment and the end to oppressive religious power over the individual, without discarding the role of religious institutions in society. The Ottoman Empire and its religious base; the current powers of Saudi Arabia or Iran never excite the interest and glee of Shirky about, oh, bloggers that erode their powers.

Oh, I'm definitely going to repeat terms in a negative, derogatory manner as often as I need to. This is a serious war, a clash of civilizations, and one that has to be fought. It doesn't merely “look like” I'm attacking, I *am* attacking and *that's ok*. It's more than right and proper in a democracy to express one's “disdain for hard leftist ideas” especially when they threaten the entire fabic of the liberal society, making it possible for powers to come in that take away freedoms. That's a five-alarm fire, and I really should have more company in protesting the pernicious affect of these collectivist ideologies of the technocommunists on freedoms for everyone. I wonder what it would take for you to begin protesting. These are matters of principle. These aren't political planks of the left or right like “let's allow abortion” or “let's not allow SUVs”. These are fundamental issues that make it possible to have a democracy at all.

Copyleftism that destoys the ability of a society to have the political institution of the fourth estate is an emergency and every negative, derogatory, ad hominem attack you can muster on such a situation is absolutely justified. This curious aversion to robust democratic speech is an affectation of certain liberal bloggers; I don't know where you imagine the First Amendment will take place and be given real effect if not in blogs?!

Users don't show their willingness to pay because they aren't given that option because copyleftist tekkies constantly badger executives into thinking they can't have a paywall. Jaron Lanier is absolutely right: the Internet is free because engineers made it that way, not just technically, but socially. We don't need social engineering to come from copyleftist coders, they need to get out of the way of the viable Web 3.0 or Web 3D. Their destructiveness was overcome by entrepreneurs like ebay or amazon on 1.0; their destructiveness was overcome by entrepreneurs like World of Warcraft or Second Life on 2.0 — and that trend has to be encouraged, not discouraged with withering false analogies to “Compuserve” and “AOL” as evil walled gardens that stop “learning”. You have to stop sucking value out of platforms because people need to be paid.

Your rant about bundling strikes me as just the typical unexamined view about telecoms, which the copyleftists are always out to destroy as well. How do you really justify calling yourself a “centrist/moderate”? On what issues? For example “net neutrality” support is an issue that puts you squarely on the copy-left, not in the center/moderate.

No, I don't accept the Pandora's box concept that Shirky inflicts on us because I think his claims are untested and overblown and because his ideology has always been to hasten these results he claims to find now, so he has no credibility. In true Bolshevik fashion, he works it like this, “I am a sharp analyst, I am merely sharply analyzing the existing situation, it's not that this situation is even inevitable, it's that I'm describing it as it is now.” Well, baloney. I explain dozens of ways in which he isn't describing, but in fact trying to hasten and bring the death of culture into being, so reality will fit his copyleftist theories. It's not like I'm some sort of ostrich with my head in the sand unable to realize “newspapers are dying,” it's that I ask reasonable questions to get the facts. Are they really dying? If they move online and get a successful business model, why would that be death? If that model involves micropayments, why would that be death? Shirky doesn't like micropayments because he doesn't like commerce, capitalism, and selling intellectual propety — period. He is very extreme on these manners and supports a model that amounts to stone soup – everybody is supposed to bring a free turnip. He can get away with this by having his own livlihood secured and by relying on a posse of commentators that also have their livlihood secured. When big IT companies and the ecology of IT consulting begins to suffer the fate of newspapers, when the university begins to suffer the fate of newspapers, as they will inevitably, as the money from wealth will not be there to sustain them, then we might hear him adjust his views.

Sure, you can stop giving away the New York Times for free. There are all kinds of things that you can do to encourage premium content in a gradual transition, and the very first one you could do is to charge $9.95 a month for the ability to leave comments on news stories. That would adjust the ridiculous oversupply of comments now coming in that editors and readers can't possibly respond to — some articles are allowed to have thousands of comments. I'm all for freedom of speech and people should comment all they like on blogs. But attention is a scarce commodity. The right to have my comments read is a right that I and othes would pay for, and it would help winnow out all the plethora of people just spouting out. It would help create a community of intellectuals ready to pay to read and write, which they should. The prospect isn't to make comments ads, i.e. whoever pays the most gets to put in advertising spam, the point is to put some standard payment in that reflects the value provided: attention.

I hardly think everything would become “completely totalitarian” by putting in DRM where it is needed. This is one of those dystopian rants of tekkies who bitch because they can't copy a song from an i-pod to a laptop or something.

Thanks for reading. Here are my thoughts re: your comments:

Open source and copyleftism: if nothing else, both of these movements do serve a purpose: they serve to force proprietary source and copyright advocates to raise their game and deliver higher quality. If something that's free (note: free to purchase but, in many cases, there are still costs involved in both movements, i.e. the fabled $10,000 Linux user guide) is “pretty close” in terms of the desired level of quality and features and it's not too painful to use, many people will opt for the free solution. If you're not going to compete on price, you're going to have to compete on quality, features, ease of use, etc.

Perhaps I do need to review Shirky's thoughts on property, etc. further, but I try to deal with the current article that I'm reading.

I would say that you are correct that the Protestant Church, enabled by the printing press (and greater literacy), did not destroy the Catholic religion. The Catholic Church, however, has nowhere near the political power that it did, relatively speaking, in the pre- printed press days. You can argue that Shirky was only talking about the political force of the church as the de facto leadership behind an empire. If he was extending that idea to encompass the entire Church, then yes, that's incorrect.

I haven't read (or heard of) Jaron Lanier, so I can't comment on his writing. However, when you repeat terms that you use in a negative, derogatory manner numerous times throughout your writing, citing the same individuals numerous times, it looks like you're merely on the attack rather than trying to debate constructively. That's my interpretation. You obviously have a disdain (or dislike) for leftist ideas and philosophy. That's your prerogative. Not everyone shares the same ideas. Myself, I'm more of a centrist/moderate, but I don't restrict myself to those ideological labels.

I disagree with you on a different point: users as a whole have not shown a universal preference for paying (or not paying for content) but enough of them have shown a lack of desire for NOT paying to make the established media machines worried. And when you consider the bundling of content that has occurred for decades, where good content is forced to endure association with mediocre or poor quality content (e.g. cable television channel lineups, music albums, magazine and newspaper articles) and, more importantly, the buyer is forced to buy the whole package and tolerate the weaker content in order to get the good stuff, then the reaction to having free access to content is somewhat understandable. And, to be fair, it’s not really the fault of the individual artists or content creators that this happened: it came from the production and distribution companies.

Don’t get me wrong: there are many, many costs involved in the processes of creating, producing, and distributing content and profit certainly isn’t evil (it’s a necessity for most enterprises). I pay for content. I also take advantage of free content where and when I can if it aligns with the subject matter or media that I like.

However, there’s an underlying message in Shirky’s (and other people’s) work that I’m not sure that you accept: Pandora’s box is opened and there’s no going back. Digital content can be copied, is copied, and will continue to be copied indefinitely. Is that wrong? In some ways, yes. But it can’t be stopped now without incurring a huge number of changes that will cause even more problems than we currently have. Things would have to become rather totalitarian to completely change digital technology to prevent unauthorized copying, don’t you think? Is it really worth it to do that?

Of course Shirky is anti-Catholic, and that's important to the study of his views on newspapers because if he's wrong about sweeping historical realities like “the Catholic Church” and “the printing press” he's too extreme in his analysis of analogous phenomena today. His premise, repeated ad nauseam with malicious glee in all his writings, is that the printing press killed the vast power of the Catholic Church. It's a facile view, because he conflates the Church and its spiritual power with the secular power that Rome also held in the Middle Ages, and decides if the latter is undermined, it destroys the entire edifice. It doesn't.

The Catholic Church and the culture is spawned lives today, for the very same reasons that it was undermined in the Middle Ages — because of the printing press. Shirky's notions are not orthogonal even though history is (and he always exempts himself). He imagines that if Luther and Gutenberg undermined the Church, that's all that happened, as if pamphlets from many other Protestant groups then undermined Luther and so on. If Shirky were correct, the Catholic Church would have utterly collapsed and nothing would have stopped Lutherism from becoming the prevailing power. It's just too radical and linear, and I fail to see why we have to genuflect to Shirky's take on it when it's so manifestly exaggerated.

And please explain to me why, say Jaron Lanier, for example, can attack these same authors, across the board, and use the term “digital Maosism” to describe their collectivism, and nobody blinks an eye. Nobody lectures him on how he could be more effective, or how he has lost his audience, by attacking the authors' collectivism and their digital Maoism. Yet when I do the same thing, and use the term “technocommunism” or “bolshevik,” suddenly, it's “tiresome” and “a turnoff”. Why is that?

The reason is because Lanier or for that matter Andrew Keen, is one of the boys in Silicon Valley, famous for being gurus on technology and the Internet. I'm not famous, not a tekkie, and not a guru. And the reason Lanier can say “digital Maoism” but I can't say “technocommunism” is because the left somehow grasped from the Beatles' song that Maoism wasn't cool, and it remains an exoticism for them, but “communism” still seems like a cool ideology that maybe just hasn't been implemented correctly.

Shirky's claim that advertisers or liberal news institutions like the New York Times somehow helped justify the war in Iraq or cover it up is demonstrably false, as the Times has amply addressed this question many times, and you are right, advertisers aren't that sinister. Shirky can only conceive of these motivations out of his leftist ideology, from whence they spring fullblown, as they do for Amy Goodman or any other leftist icon. They always imagine that evil capitalism has to start wars to obtain markets, blah blah and work their facile memes on top of those old Marxist platitudes.

It isn't that users as a whole have a lack of willingness to pay for content. They sure do pay for it when they have the chance, and ask for more. I totally agree with Lanier that the Internet is the way it is because tekkies made it that way, deliberately, and I would add, they did so out of a collectivist ideology which can and should be repudiated. They themselves spread the culture of the amateur that relies on freebies to degrade the border between professional and vanity publishing.