History is in my blood. Looking back at my ancestry, a host of historians lie buried within the soil of the world, yet their writing lives on, studied by scholars whose desire to know where we came from results in the shaping of our future.
The historian line seems to have skipped my generation, however, and I am instead a technology editor. I look to the future, and try to predict what is around the next corner. Experience, history in its own way, is slowly tuning my instincts to predict the Next Big Thing - and the next Big Flop. In 10 or 20 years I may be close to such soothsaying, but meanwhile I gather as much information as I can from the past to help me recognise trends and technology patterns, why they form, and where they lead us.
The success of Napster and the violent reaction by those with much to lose indicates that change is on its way.
Jason Norwood-Young, technology editor, ITWeb
With this in mind, I have been studying the Napster debacle closely. Take 30 million users; create an uncontrollable, distributed architecture that circumvents the current economic supply and demand paradigm; and throw in the world`s most powerful government`s legal system and the billion-dollar global music industry; and you are bound to have some interesting effects. The result is one small Internet start-up versus Capitalism.
Capitalism`s roots are important to understand if one wants to fathom the danger that an organisation such as Napster poses to this hegemony. Capitalism`s base is two-fold: firstly and foremost, it is based on the industrialisation era. I have a bar of gold. I sell it to you for money. I no longer have that bar of gold, but I can get something else of value from the money I have received. In essence, it is a modified barter system, similar to that which predominated the rural farming communities that existed before industrialisation.
The second base of capitalism is the trade of labour and ideas for money. This is a more complex system, as after a day`s work, I get the money, but I still have the ability of going to work tomorrow and getting more. Ayn Rand describes capitalism as "a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned." ("What is Capitalism?" by Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Newsletter, November and December 1965).
We are no longer in the industrial age. The information revolution is upon us. Many believe we have crossed the boundary into this new era while still keeping the capitalistic idyll intact. I would disagree with this viewpoint: we are in the midst of the transition, and capitalism still remains to be tested in this new environment. That is what the Napster case is doing - testing the viability of our old economic system in the new information paradigm.
Under threat
The reason why capitalism is under threat is due to its first base of power - trading commodities for money. Information is a commodity. It is worth money. But if I sell you information, I can still keep it for myself. In fact why should I sell it, since it costs me nothing to give away for free? With Napster, I get a song (which is just some of information stored on my computer) for free, and then I give it away for free. Bang goes capitalism.
This whole concept of share and share alike starts to sound like capitalism`s long-time nemesis, socialism and, dare I say it, communism. These socio-political systems are, however, also based on the industrialisation ethos. Marxism`s fall from grace is often attributed to the fact that Karl Marx`s own premises for a successful socialistic state were not met in Russia when the country turned to this system. The country was still a feudal system, and was not industrialised when the revolution occurred. There is no evidence that it will succeed with a different base to work from, and it is unlikely that any country will be willing to try it as a socio-political system after its failure anyway.
I will leave predictions of workable economic systems in an information age to the great thinkers of our time. However, the success of Napster and the violent reaction by those with much to lose indicates that change is on its way.
Other information-based societies are also challenging the long-held beliefs that capitalism is the perfect system for the current social environment. Linux - a success story that grows in power every day - is reminiscent of the community-based socialistic ideology. Developers around the world give their time for free to this project of gargantuan scale, creating an operating system on which to run our information society - for free. Another blow to our current hegemony is the Internet, which is also the enabler for both Napster and Linux`s distributed development and delivery environment.
The ethos behind these systems is captured in "The Hacker Ethic", proposed by Steven Levy in his book "Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution".
"Access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total," states the hacker ethic. Levy continues: "All information should be free. Mistrust authority - promote decentralisation. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better."
Knowledge is power, power is money, and yet the Internet is a massive source of information that is by and large freely available. This rocks the very foundation of capitalism. There is little wonder that many countries - the US and China in particular - are trying to tame this beast through law and taxation. Unfortunately for our traditional government structures, which rely on power and money to maintain their purpose on the planet - something that the Internet undermines -- Pandora`s box was opened long ago, and it is too late to put the lid back on.
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