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.
As we shall see, information is the basis of value under modern capitalism – far more than we think. And yet technologies under that same economic system now paradoxically tend towards destroying the scarcity of information, and therefore its value.
It’s unlikely Brand was aware of it in 1984, but Marx said something similar about the tendency of information towards extreme supply more than a century earlier:
Forces of production and social relations – two diferent sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.
More than three decades after Brand stated his elegant observation we now know he was right – its plummeting cost shows information does want to be free. But by the middle of this century it will be increasingly clear that this also extends to labour, energy and resources too. This is the basis for a diferent set of social parameters underpinned by changes we can already observe around us: a world beyond jobs, profit and even scarcity.
The Three Disruptions
49