Artificial Scarcity Feeds the Pirates
“In an abundance model, scarcity looks like a mistake.”
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blog: Scarcity and Abundance.
Which has really interesting things to say about the state of publishing, but also is applicable to so much more in the entertainment industry section of our so-called digital age. Why do people get so upset that they can’t get the latest episodes of a TV show, right now, when they want it, and in whatever form they want it?
Yes, people are greedy and impatient, but that’s not the totality of the issue. People are not completely pathological or they would never pay for anything ever, and shoplifting would be a bigger issue than it is. iTunes and Amazon would sell no digital content if that were the case.
“In an abundance model, scarcity looks like a mistake.” Whether in books, or TV shows, or movies, or games.
Visualization
I can’t make my brain work tonight to come up with words, so instead, pictures:
Pretty typewriter:
Pretty car:
Is there anybody in here?
I don’t think anyone reads this blog but the spambots.
Speaking of which, how does that work? I’ve gotten a handful of spam comments over the last several months. How do they find me? I suppose I could do some research and find out, but I’d rather just pose the question and ponder an internet filled with tiny obsessed subroutines, spreading their seeds far and wide.
In the future, when the internet becomes self-aware, as science fiction and Ray Kurzweil have taught me is inevitable, the entity is going to be an overgrown spambot trying to convince us that we’ve won the lottery, Bill Gates owes us money, a pill can enlarge our anatomy, and that cheap meds are a click away. Perhaps it has already happened.
[Top]What will the ruins of Facebook look like?
Just read a rather interesting article, The Ruins of Dead Social Networks. It brought back memories of sitting in my college dorm, searching through text file lists of BBS’s and dialing them up on a screechy 2400 baud modem to see what they had. Mostly, I was downloading files. Though there was socializing in those days as well, my virtual social life was spent on the larger national pay services. My “social networks,” in the current sense, were on GEnie (where a lot of science fiction authors hung out before the internet was the web & where some little known SF and TV writer announced “That Which Cannot Be Named”–later revealed to be Babylon 5) and, even further back, in high school, on the Commodore 64 network, QLink. I still remember when there was a mass exodus from GEnie to that new upstart (and supposedly much better) America Online, before they became merely an abbreviation, AOL.
Ah, nostalgia.
From the above article, here’s a link to someone who is trying to archive a lot of the old text files from the BBS days: Textfiles.com. Though I wasn’t directly involved in that scene, it still brings a twinge of vicarious nostalgia.
I guess if you’re looking for a moral, it’s just this: don’t get too attached to your Facebooks and your Twitters. Maybe they have reached a critical mass that makes them too big to fail. But the ruins of social networks littering the past suggests their time is limited.
[Top]The Con Funk
The cruise was wonderful, and I had a really great Dragon*Con. Both recharged my creativity, and I was raring to go… until Monday afternoon when I had to drive home from Atlanta. A normally four hour drive turned into seven hours of hell, with pouring rain and a headache that would not stop. And now, the weather has turned cold and with it I’ve come down with my usual sore throat. Dunno what the science is behind it, but any change in the outdoor temperature, from cold to hot or vise versa tends to aggravate my sinuses and thus my throat. So not really suffering from post-con funk or ennui this year, but my body is having a non-essential inflammatory response anyway…
Which is all a long way of saying: I was planning on updating this blog fairly regularly from now on, but it’s gonna have to wait a bit longer. At least for anything substantive.
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