In the Future

It funny where you learn things, I was driven to posing this final blog after reading this article on the popular internet comedy site cracked.com. The article in particular was about "forced artificial scarcity", the notion that in the future we will literally be paying for things we can get for free, in fact the author David Wong picks up that we have already begun behaving like this. For example bottled water, why do we pay for it? In Wong's opinion we pay for it because big corporations with their advertising tell us too, he draws comparison with the 2008 poisoned baby milk formula scandal, saying the reason people continued to use the formula even though it was poisonous is because they felt they had to. Now this might be a simplistic view but it still has some merits. Why else would we pay $3.00 for a powerade when water does the same job and its free? its also one way of identifying which consumer goods are fetish items, apple products for example rides the brand image to the death. 

This problem is something we should all be concerned about, however the point of this article which really caught my eye in terms of this paper is the implications forced artificial scarcity on web culture. The development of the web seems to be becoming more packaged, that is, companies are learning how to best assert themselves online and with the growth of such companies we are having to pay for services which previously would've been free. An example of this is music sharing, at the inception of web 2.0 music sharing was free and very loose, however as we've progressed people are starting to pay more and more money for the same products. This has less to do with intellectual property copyright laws and more to do with the fact that the marketplace for music online has grown exponentially since the napster days. iTunes, beatport and the like all offer what is considered the most high quality mp3's and once again draws on the consumer characteristic of wanting nice things. Most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference in quality between free downloads on rapidshare or limewire and the same tracks on iTunes, however the idea that you are getting a better product is actually more important to consumers than actually getting a good product.

Another interesting point of debate brought up in the article is the status of ebook's in libraries, Wong gives a very funny and logical account of the problem which is basically that with eBook's consumers no longer need the libraries or the publishers to create hard-copy's of the book, all they need is one copy of an eBook and literally everyone can get a copy of it. You get the same feeling from most intellectual properties, the ability to duplicate existing materials exists in so many ways it seems as if capitalism is collapsing on itself. If everyone can literally get all these things for free it seems that even more hardline copyright laws are required or that businesses need to convince the consumer that they need to pay for their product. 

Now I know that this is an article from a comedy website and understandably people would be fast to laugh off the issues raised. However hard I tried I could not separate what was a hilarious painting of the future from the underlying social implications Wong was trying to draw. It seems the internet is destined to become even more packaged, even more regulated in the future, and maybe in the future it won't be such a swell place?