Douglas Rushkoff, Web 2.0 Expo summit video, “Radical Abundance: How We Get Past ‘Free,’ ” ≈9:38:
And I think we’re mistaking what is free for what costs. Our work, our labour, is not “free.” Open source and crowdsourcing are not the same things, right? Open source is a bunch of people getting together to try to do something; crowdsourcing is a company figuring out how to get a bunch of people to do something for it….
But with this false notion of free in our heads, we end up living in a value system that insists that everything we do must be open-source and comments-on. Right? How dare you – you wrote up a blog post and you put comments off? [Mock gasp] Everything you write, everything you say, everything you think, everything you feel is supposed to be out there, supposed to be free. I mean, you try even putting a link to something with DRM on Boing Boing and you’ll get in trouble – because that goes against the philosophy. You shouldn’t “protect”; everything I do is yours! Not even just “yours,” everything I do is “the hive’s.”
This is what leads ultimately to copying, to a society of copying, to no originality, to this sort of DJing of culture…. And really, in the open-source movement, what did the open-source movement give us so far? Copies of things. Maybe better copies, but copies. We got a copy of Unix, a copy of Encyclopædia Britannica, copy of Netscape. You know, copy protection really means what? Protecting me from all these copies of things.
Where’s the Creative Commons law, where’s the Creative Commons licence that I could say “OK, you can have it for free, but at least you have to ask me for it”? “Free if you send me an E-mail”? I just want to give it to you rather than to it.
As a result of all this freedom, the abundance of creative material, the abundance of genuine creative output is declining. We are actually getting the scarce marketplace demanded by our legacy currency system…. The alternative is… the development of a digital culture that actually respects the labour of individuals. Right? My writing is my writing. It is not a medium for Google ads.