roundtable: Re: Is the problem content production or access to carriage?

roundtable: Re: Is the problem content production or access to carriage?

Re: Is the problem content production or access to carriage?

Brad Cox @ GMU/PSOL (bcox@gmu.edu)
Wed, 30 Mar 1994 23:26:03 -0500 

Date: Wed, 30 Mar 1994 23:26:03 -0500
Message-Id: <199403310426.AA21078@access1.digex.net>
To: Michael Chui <mchui@cs.indiana.edu>
From: bcox@gmu.edu (Brad Cox @ GMU/PSOL)
Subject: Re: Is the problem content production or access to carriage?

>Brad:
>        Oh, you're *that* Brad Cox!  :-)  I teach Objective-C in my
>Intro to C class.

Way to go!

>You write:
>>Your're right, they certainly are not simple today. That involves a
>>paradigm shift towards a true information capitalism (your term,
>>different meaning) in which individuals are enabled as capitalists in
>>the traditional positive sense of this term (repackagers and sellers
>>of their distributed tacit knowledge for a content-based fee), as
>>distinct from today's negative sense of huge centrally planned
>>bureaucracies broadcasting lowest common denominator spew.
>
>        Ah.  I actually didn't "get" your first message, because my
>comments were all meant to be in the context of non-profits, for
>which the incentive for content production would be whatever motivates
>people to engage in those non-profit activities.

Even non-profits have to make money. Everybody has to pay bills and 
meet payroll, profit and non profit alike. My proposal applies just as 
much to professors writing papers as it does to GM selling car designs 
or Grandma selling cookie recipes.

I can think of no other way of raising the appallingly low quality 
level on the internet (or Objective-C reuse libraries) to a level that 
ordinary citizens would even visit for free, let alone for a fee. Who 
needs a gigabit infrastructure or Software-IC compiler if there are no 
goods for the infrastructure to carry?

Our quality expectations on infotech infrastructures (reuse libraries 
and networks are both infrastructures) is badly skewed. They presently 
have the economics of garbage dumps (places you can find Good Stuff 
Free if you don't mind sorting garbage).

The only way I can see away from this is replacing us all with a new 
race of purely altruistic non-humans, or transforming the garbage dump 
into something like a farmers market, a place where people go to buy 
and sell high-quality fare to each other.

--
Brad Cox; bcox@gmu.edu; 703 968 8229 Voice 703 968 8798 Fax
George Mason Program on Social and Organizational Learning

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