Information wants to be expensive
I’d been working on a post about SOPA, but Franklin Veaux’s post (the quote in my last entry) says just about everything I was trying to get at. (And upon review, I’d probably be repeating myself from a post last year, anyway.) SOPA is a terrible law, yet the fundamental tension that the old “information wants to be free” quote references won’t go away. The full quote, from Stewart Brand, actually goes like this:
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.
It’s interesting how the “information wants to be expensive” part of that axiom is largely forgotten these days, isn’t it?
