Dylan Tweney has posted an excellent interview with Cory Doctorow on the release of “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.” His thoughts on “the tragedy of the commons” and how the situation is reversed in the digital age are especially interesting.
If it’s valuable, it needs to be managed, because the supply of it will dwindle. You need to avert the tragedy of the commons [the notion that self-interested individuals, such as sheepherders, will always use as much of a common resource as possible, such as a grassy pasture, until that resource is totally depleted]. Today, with things that can be represented digitally, we have the opposite. In the Napster universe, everyone who downloads a file makes a copy of it available. This isn’t a tragedy of the commons, this is a commons where the sheep s*** grass — where the more you graze, the more commons you get.
He goes on:
The other side of it is this notion that you never really run out of scarcity. There are always limits on your time and attention, there are only so many people who can fit in a restaurant, only so many people who can converse at once. When you are beset on all sides by entertainment, figuring out which bits are worthwhile requires a level of attention that quickly burns all your idle cycles. When everyone watched Jackie Gleason on Thursdays at 9:30, it was a lot easier — television watching required a lot less effort than whipping out your TiVo and figuring out which shows you want to prerecord.
Interesting. If the scarcity side is the demand side, not the supply side, then the corporations’ problem is to increase demand. Which they are doing by engineering food to hit the subconscious reptile brain pleasure centers with overabundance of fat, sugar, and what have you. Just f’rinstance. Seems like a reversal of the stick-skinny body ideal would be good for big (agri)business.