News Nominations

For a brief period in history, we have lived in an era of paid content. How did this happen, why did it happen — and most of all: why will this soon end?

Noam Chomsky has estimated that humans first created language about 75,000 years ago. For most of the last 75 millenia, language was simply spoken. Therefore, messages were usually communicated directly, or they were passed by messengers. As such, they were always colored by interpretation — the recipient of a message would have to trust that the messenger was passing on a “true” representation of facts. In contrast, paintings — such as the cave paintings in Lascaux — are in a sense “direct” messages from their “authors”.

Later, messages in a codified written language were also made freely available — for example: the “Code of Hammurabi”.

This principle of freely available information continued throughout most of history — my hunch is that for most of history, civilizations were by and large isolated from one another, and they primarily came in contact with one another primarily either through individual travelers, mostly messengers and traders, or through warfare in which soldiers fought basically as slaves in order for megalomaniacal rulers to subdue more people.

It is in this colonial tradition that most of what we refer to as “news” was probably first created. The advantage of a written account of battles or similar current conditions in far off countries is that it enabled rulers to get a direct account from far away, just as viewing the Lascaux cave painting today also gives us a direct representation from a time in the distant past.

Therefore, for several thousand years, people were trained (and paid) to create such written accounts and to deliver them to rulers and wealthy merchants to keep them up-to-date. This is, however, an anomaly… which came to a more or less abrupt end with the invention of the Internet and other technologies used in coordination with the Internet — such as computers, digital cameras, telephones, etc. — that are so easy to use that they can be used by virtually anyone. Today, no one needs so much as a high school education in order to use a wide array of information & communications technology.

Yet you may also notice that no one needs so much as a high school education to use a hammer, and still we pay carpenters for their work — so even if all of the so-called technological costs have been reduced to almost zero, creating content is still work and therefore content creators should get paid, right? Wrong.

To explain why that is, it helps to consider why humans created language in the first place: to communicate ideas. People want to share ideas… — and for that matter: not only people.

The vast majority life forms have evolved to become beings with an innate desire to communicate. We all want others to pay attention to us, and therefore we go to great expense to receive an audience for the information we want to share. Today, billions and billions of people are competing for my attention… and with that amount of competition, profits tend towards zero extremely fast — for all practical purposes: immediately.

Many years ago, Esther Dyson wrote a very insightful article about how information markets work. She made a very good point: that content producers will not be able to earn much money by creating content that is virtually freely available. She also made another point: That to earn money from content, it would be necessary to restrict access to other goods or services which are essentially complements to the freely available content. That worked for a time, but my hunch is that it has waned drastically — people no longer need packages or bundles which are part free, part paid. Basically: there is no longer any market for content producers to sell content.

Instead, today there is only a market for content selection… — and this is also completely natural. The reason why birds sing, the reason why flowers bloom, the reason why apples grow on trees is to scream out “select me!” The bird wants to find another bird and yet not a cat. Flowers want to attract a bee and yet not a deer. The apple want us to eat it and yet not have its seeds end up in landfill. Evolution is all about this kind of natural selection (which is — I think — a different natural selection than the kind of natural selection Charles Darwin described).

If it is true that to a hammer everything looks like a nail, then it is nonetheless also true that life forms which will survive in the long run will be more intelligent than hammers.

Humans are social animals, and therefore we developed language to function socially. We use language to select ideas — and words are our natural units of exchange. In order to attain my audience, you will need to use my words.

News Nominations Post Forum