I am quite flabbergast that Eric S. Raymond (self-professed to have 150 - 170IQ, the creator of the "open source" movement) could get the logic so wrong on the coming Knowledge Age.
In
his critique of Jeremy Rifkin's book,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society,
he misses the key generative model of open source, which is that the source is always changing. The enslavement of knowledge by capital is due to the transactional cost of the propagation of creations. As we lower that friction, knowledge takes over.
And he apparently fails to comprehend
capital can't buy knowledge because
thought isn't fungible, and this becomes more evident as the diversity of innovation becomes more fine-grained.
The claim that the material input costs will be significant relative to the marginal cost of distributing more copies of intellectual property is wrong because the only costs in material production that can't be reduced asymptotically to 0 at economy-of-scale and automation are the knowledge inputs. Thus knowledge is infinitely more valuable than material production at the asymptote. The only reason that capital has been able to enslave the knowledge portion of the cost in the material cost is due to inability of fine-grain, autonomous knowledge to control the creative outputs of material production. The 3D printer changes this because the printer will be in every person's home. The commodity value
relative to knowledge value of raw material inputs will fall asymptotically to 0.
What Eric misses is that many types of intellectual creations and creative processes can be incrementally fluid and shared, including music, video production, medical processes, etc.. People can take the designs of others and refine them. This is precisely open source. It is not that we won't possibly use fungible money (micro payments perhaps) to pay each other for creations, but that money won't be in control of the startup costs. Individuals will choose what they want to work spontaneously. This destroys the power of stored capital to enslave knowledge.
We will still use this money to buy those non-creative things that drop near to 0 in price, such as raw materials and food.
This is what I was trying to explain to Eric a long time ago, but it just flew right over his (and his readers') cuckoo head(s) so he banned me.
Note this doesn't mean I am agreeing with Rifkin's Marxist conclusions about the end of private property rights.
All the indicia of cod-Marxism are present. False identification of capitalism with vertical integration and industrial centralization: check.
Vertical integration enslaves knowledge and will fall away. Capital will increasingly become knowledge instead of stored fungible claims on labor.
Writing about human supercooperative behavior as though it falsifies classical and neoclassical economics
Supercooperative doesn't have to mean Communism. It can mean more finely-grained, autonomy of work. Eric is conflating here, even though Rifkin was also apparently erroneously introducing Marxism. They both got it wrong.
the concept of “the commons” is not a magic wand that banishes questions about self-determination, power relationships, and the perils of majoritarianism. Nor is it a universal solvent against actual scarcity problems
Wrong! The commons means knowledge takes control. For example, physics assures us that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so it is only the lack of knowledge production that makes energy finite or scarce. And I am not referring to perpetual motion machines, rather to more efficiency and automation of extraction of energy through greater innovation due to faster propagation of knowledge.
Nobody ever says that “the commons” requires behavior that individuals themselves would not freely choose, and if anyone ever tried to do so they would be driven out with scorn.
Correct. Rifkin doesn't understand fine-grained, autonomy is the key element of the commons.
>So @esr, how do you align the long tail of maintenance into the sunk v marginal cost framework?
Er, simply by observing that it is neither of those things and can’t be jammed into that framework.
He makes it clear that he didn't even consider that the lower transactional propagation cost of digital distribution of editable creations increases the frequency, granularity, and autonomy of those maintenance edits. He apparently doesn't remember that Metcalfe's or Reed's Law says that as the number of those editing nodes increases, then the
value of the knowledge network increases squared.
When people speak of “capitalism” and “free markets” as being separable ideas, and I inquire into that, I generally find that they’re identifying capitalism with the way free-market economies behave in the presence of high communication and transaction costs – big firms with lots of vertical integration, deskilled employees treated like cogs in Taylorized processes, and elaborate hierarchical management structures designed to manage the largest possible lumps of capital to collect economies of scale.
Economies mostly stop looking like that as the costs of transaction and communication drop and technological leverage increases revenue per employee. But it’s still capitalism because specialists in capital accumulation drive most of the productive activity.
Ah he was so close to getting the point, then he screwed it up on the last sentence. Yes Eric, but what capital are they accumulating? Stored capital or knowledge capital. He just hasn't quite had the epiphany yet on how the relative value of stored capital can plummet.
Oil is food, Oil is materials, Oil is Energy, Oil is what backs USD
Oil is what you can't print. Oil is your Tax.
You can't seem to agree that knowledge will 1000X more valuable than those raw materials.
You have entirely missed the point of my post here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg6065144#msg6065144So I think we will stop the discussion now. I don't have more time.
Let them raise the price of oil to $1 million per liter. Our knowledge value will rise proportionally. Then I (and others) will be earning $1 trillion per day.
It is the value-added to raw inputs that is relevant. With mass production, the value-added of knowledge was amortized over the capital cost of the factory and millions of xerox copies.
Now the creations will change 1000s of variants per day or minute. The value-added is unfathomable.
It is the speed of the propagation of creation of product innovation that destroys (devalues) their control.
Poll
