> Modern economies are increasingly based around information. Information "wants to be free"—as the saying goes—but free things are bad for capitalism, because capitalism is about competition and making profits.
Tons of companies are based on providing information. Even if the information is public, sorting it and providing it efficiently has real value (such as google). Others do their own private research and re-sell it. Capitalists use and contribute to open source software. This statement is absurd.
> In time, technology is likely to drive many things to "zero marginal cost." Energy, for example, won't be subject to market forces. We'll just have a solar panel on the roof and each kilowatt hour will essentially be free.
In this "energy is free" economy, who will be building and providing me with my free solar panels, and then installing and maintaining the electrical system in my home or business? What happens when it's cloudy?
This whole article is like a undergraduate philosophy student who thinks he or she has the silver bullet for humanity, if only people would listen!
It's also using the word free in two different senses. Basically in the phrase "wants to be free" that's "free as in freedom, not as in beer." The meaning is that it's difficult to restrict the flow of information and you cannot reverse it. But then the author is claiming that information is free as in it doesn't cost anything. Then he's using the word information in two different ways, confusing "information economy" with data and then invoking some sort of magical osmosis by which an information economy doesn't involve money. Unpacking the chain of reasoning involved just in that single sentence, I see the following assumptions and arguments:
we have an "information economy"
information wants to be free
it doesn't cost anything to produce information
an information economy is one that doesn't cost any money to run
money is important to capitalism
without money capitalism doesn't work
since our economy doesn't require money to run, capitalism isn't working
Haha I always laugh at people who quote "information wants to be free" out of context. In the original speech in which the phrase was coined, the very next sentence was "information wants to be expensive".
Once you have made the capital investment for your solar panel, the electricity it generates is basically free. In economics terms, the marginal cost of an extra kW/h consumed is zero. This is different from the current economy where each marginal kW/h of electricity consumed costs the same price.
It's perhaps a bit of an oversimplification for OP to say "Energy won't be subject to market forces", since there will still be a market for solar panels. But the more that solar energy production is decentralized and commoditized, the less there will be a market for the generated energy itself.
> Modern economies are increasingly based around information. Information "wants to be free"—as the saying goes—but free things are bad for capitalism, because capitalism is about competition and making profits.
Tons of companies are based on providing information. Even if the information is public, sorting it and providing it efficiently has real value (such as google). Others do their own private research and re-sell it. Capitalists use and contribute to open source software. This statement is absurd.
> In time, technology is likely to drive many things to "zero marginal cost." Energy, for example, won't be subject to market forces. We'll just have a solar panel on the roof and each kilowatt hour will essentially be free.
In this "energy is free" economy, who will be building and providing me with my free solar panels, and then installing and maintaining the electrical system in my home or business? What happens when it's cloudy?
This whole article is like a undergraduate philosophy student who thinks he or she has the silver bullet for humanity, if only people would listen!