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352 sats \ 6 replies \ @kr OP 23 Aug 2022 \ parent \ on: Alby Releases InSATgram: Upload images, earn sats bitcoin
The full quote from Stewart Brand is much more nuanced than that.
“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.”
I've been discussing this with people recently.
This framing helped me (and is consistent with Brand's POV): information wants to be free, but services don't (discovery, UX, etc).
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Steve Wozniak shared a related quote you might like from the same 1984 Hackers Conference…
“Information should be free but your time should not”
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Awesome, great read! (Also just ordered Hackers.)
Perhaps we can generalize further. If services = time, perhaps information = commodities.
Commodities want to be free, but time does not.
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i think i follow the analogy, but i think data or information are better words than commodity.
commodities makes sense if you view commodities as raw forms of information, but their traditional definition is for things like gold, oil, water, time, etc… things that are scarce.
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Fair, information/data is enough of its own thing.
I guess I was more so to our desire to make commodities as cheap as possible. It's not really possible to make certain commodities (gold, oil, etc), zero cost, but we certainly try to. It just so happens it's possible to make data free.
Also, I wouldn't consider time a commodity in the same way I would gold, oil, or copies of data.
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yeah that’s true, time doesn’t really belong in that category… it gets more expensive as people become wealthier.
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