Re: AUT: The Hi-Tech Gift Economy

[billbartlett@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bill Bartlett)]

At 1:48 AM 21/10/98, rc&am wrote:

>an interesting and provocative analysis.

[...]

>THE 'NEW ECONOMY' IS A MIXED ECONOMY

I loved it. It was once the other way, I guess: the emerging
commodity-based economy co-existing with the mainly use-value economy in a
symbiotic way.

The commodity economy was more adapted to the ecology of scarcity and
prevailed, it is logical that the commodity economy is just as ill-suited
to a habitat of abundance.

Capitalism is unlikely to just fade away gracefully though. Not as long as
it can artificially maintain the environment of scarcity that it needs. But
the big question that the article raises for me is just what is going to be
the upshot of trying to create a greater artificial scarcity of information
so as to bring into being this new information-as-commodity economy.

Can such a thing be done - choke off the free flow of information that is??

It reminds me of some of the last desperate acts of the feudal princes as
they tried to rein in and control the capitalist economy. They tried to
licence and restrict production and trade in all sorts of ways that was
just not compatible with capitalist realities. The old and the new
co-existed for hundreds of years, but eventually the capitalist class just
had to cast off the suffocating shackles.




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