Jan 09
17
P2P – A Revolt Against Capitalism?
Robert Laughlin is a professor at Stanford, and he is also a Nobel Prize winner, so you would have to figure that he is a pretty smart guy.
He recently wrote a book called “The Crime Of Reason”. An excerpt appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald, and it gets right to the heart of one of the biggest problems that humanity faces – the problem of intellectual property.
Intellectual property paradoxically reflects on one hand the sophistication of our society in that it enables individuals to be rewarded for original ideas. However there are now huge numbers of ideas that are being patented that frankly have no right to be owned by an individual or a corporation. This is the argument that Laughlin makes and I agree totally with it.
When ideas are owned by people and by corporations, and particularly when strategies are developed to ensure that a whole field of endeavour is essentially cordoned off by the owner, what happens is that competition is stifled.
The stifling of competition goes totally against the whole concept of free markets that our governments advise us are the essence of democracy and are at the heart of capitalism.
How we are actually dealing with this problem is interesting but it is dangerous as well.
Historically new technologies that are disruptive (which are the ones that are important) have always tended to present problems for the incumbent industries affected. That is why they are disruptive.
So the incumbents typically tried to stop the new technologies. With the advent of professional venture capital that fed off of macro disruption, suddenly the game changed and the disruptors tended to have enough financial backing not to have to sell out to the legacy industrial players.
But now we have a new twist to the game. With the global financial meltdown people are starting to question whether capitalism is a healthy basis for society.
As Laughlin says, “Inventive people will invent. Rather, what's changing is the economics of reason – the traditions by which a person gains materially from creativity, the conflict between activities of the mind and property law and national security, the powerful incentives to create knowledge that doesn't last, the increasing expense of locating important knowledge in a vast tide of trash.
Right before our eyes, the Age of Reason is being pushed out of its ecological niche by the Knowledge Economy – a delightfully ironic term for a time of increasing knowledge scarcity.”
It is in this environment that P2P is so important. P2P represents not just an economic way to make information available to all, where the more popular the information, the more efficient the speed of distribution to the edge of the network, it also represents a way for information to be able to be shared anonymously.
In a P2P world essentially there are no secrets. P2P perhaps represents a move to a society where money has less relevance than information. Therefore it behoves any enterprise whose assets are digital in nature to find ways to integrate with P2P and to leverage its efficiencies rather than to try to stop it.