Information Does Not Want To Be Free
He was referring to the power of networks - the wealth of networks. Human networks amplified by the Internet. What networks do is that they take the traditional “distribution” roles associated with information - production, marketing, promotion - and push those to the edges, the nodes, as opposed to a centralized source. And they do so in more transparent, non-hierarchical manner.In centralized systems, production, marketing, promotion and distribution are viewed as costs, expenses, and something to be tightly controlled and managed. That’s what traditional media companies do. In the networked world they are opportunities, but they are pretty much uncontrollable. In that way they are authentic. And this is precisely the tension about which Brand spoke, for this represents maybe the final breakdown of the traditional media content producer/distributor/consumer buckets.
Those separate pieces now become one, they blend into one another. They aren’t centralized core competencies anymore. This is represented by the idea that there are no more consumers now, there are only “users”. As a result, this transformation alters fundamentally the whole media value chain. This is potentially disruptive to many companies.
Information (content) does not want to be free. Instead, information just wants to be distributed friction-free. That’s a big difference, and also the massive opportunity that should be at the center right now.
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