Jaron Lanier wrote about his book for the WSJ – World Wide Mush:
“The U.S. made a fateful decision in the late 20th century to routinely cede manufacturing and other physical-world labors to foreign competitors so that we could focus more on lucrative, comfortable intellectual activities like design, entertainment and the creation of other types of intellectual property. That formulation still works for certain products that remain within a system of proprietary control, like Apple’s iPhone.
Unfortunately, we were also making another decision at the same time: that the very idea of intellectual property impedes information flow and sharing. Over the last decade, many of us cheered as a lot of software, music and news became free, but we were shooting ourselves in the collective feet.
On the one hand we want to avoid physical work and instead benefit from intellectual property. On the other hand, we’re undermining intellectual property so that information can roam around for nothing, or more precisely as bait for advertisements. That’s a formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term.”
I wonder if WSJ paid Jaron for the article or is this just a free book commercial? And of course people who scale and monetize the hive, like Google who puts ads on the creative output without paying a cent, stand to extract wealth on the scale unknown in history, while the creative effort itself is worthless.