I partly agree with every point that Jaron Lanier makes in the Smithsonian article… with the emphasis on partly. But there is one place where I stand, politically, in opposition to Lanier’s implicit stance: that whole “information wants to be free” thing.

I asked him if there was a single development that gave rise to his defection. “I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.) “Instead, it was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’ “And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.”

In a nutshell, either Jaron just wants to express his dissatisfaction with people taking cultural stuff for free, or he thinks he can convince people that it’s the ethical thing to do to stop all this P2P sharing. I think P2P sharing is a natural and friendly act that should be honored, and that the digitization, availability, and replicability of cultural wealth represents the onset of a crisis in late capitalism that simply won’t get resolved without broad systemic reform.

Free culture tends to devalue and demean creative types as we're pushed down into the shit end of the Long Tail

“Free culture,” as some call it, is not economically kind to artists, musicians, writers, and creative folks in general. Almost all cultural product today is digital, infinitely replicable and instantly available to everyone with web access. This tends to devalue and demean creative types as we’re pushed down into the shit end of the Long Tail alongside the vast, relatively unskilled hordes who are happy to provide their own content, thank you very much, and to grab up our stuff for free. The creative middle class is effectively being removed from the supply chain. It’s being disintermediated.

Despite my immediate self interests, I stand on the side of those who want information to be free, who oppose the creation of false scarcity. Back in the early days of new media — I met Jaron back in 1987 or ‘88 — we contemplated ideas like Free Culture as future probabilities instead of new (complicated and convoluted) realities. We were both younger then, and perhaps more resilient. I can’t speak for him, but I think it’s fair to say that there was a broad feeling amongst those of us at play in the fields of the arising tech revolution that if the anarchic shockwaves of shifting social relations brought about by — among other things — the digitization of cultural stuff and the resultant ease with which that stuff could be copied unto infinity and accessed from anywhere hit us, then we would happily surf those crazy waves of change.

The other part of that deal, as many of us perceived it, was that everything else had to change too. We knew that the end of scarcity in the digital realm would be “heightening the contradictions” (as they say) in the industrial capitalist model. We assumed that either capitalism would rise to the challenge by finding ways to support those disintermediated or displaced by technical change — or it would be forcibly altered or dissipated in the forward rush of boundary defying technologies.

Culture workers are not removed from the equation, but they are devalued

We’re now experiencing the change we once contemplated. While there’s certainly a surfeit of free culture, there’s also this middle terrain best represented by iTunes. By offering convenience and legitimacy (and by being extremely well advertised) those old school turnstiles are resurrected and money is exchanged. In this distribution model, culture workers are not removed from the equation, but they are devalued. This only serves to cloud the discussion by offering the almost entirely false premise that creative professionals can still make a reasonable livelihood off of their digitized stuff.

The big question is whether there is an economic place in the world for the cultural professionals — for the musician, the writer, etcetera. It seems to me that there is, down there with the hobbyists at the shit end of the Long Tail. In Chris Anderson’s glib happyland, everybody gets to bring his or her game to a nearly infinite market. In reality, that Long Tail is populated almost entirely by people who either don’t need to — or simply don’t — make anything like a reasonable livelihood from their efforts.

That Long Tail is populated almost entirely by people who either don't need to make anything like a reasonable livelihood from their efforts

Why should this matter to you? Well, aside from the fact that everybody’s salable skill will eventually get disintermediated, automated, or both, it shouldn’t. There is no intrinsic entitlement to a middle class life for creative workers — or for anyone — written into the cosmos.

On the other hand, there’s no intrinsic entitlement to free access to the products of cultural creativity written into the cosmos either. All of these tendencies come about (or don’t) as the result of where the technology takes us, within the context of the type of society in which those technologies grow, and with the additional and important possible directional thrust that might occur as we negotiate what’s fair and, if warranted, actually make those societies change. And this finally is where the shouting over the P2P exchange of digital stuff versus the interests of the creator to gather a livelihood needs a contextual shift.