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Better than free

In a world where digital convergence is accelerating and all media, all data are increasingly digital, copies are super abundant, therefore worthless/free. In that context, what has value? Kevin Kelly's been thinking about this. He explains that what's "scarce and valuable" is stuff that can't be copied. He talks about "eight generatives better than free" - e.g. immediacy, personlization, authenticity, findability...

These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse.

In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

jon posted this at 11:55 PM
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