Re: <nettime> Return to feudalism

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

Very true.

I recently witnessed something, and will try to explain in as 
non-technical terms as possible: the event was around distributed 
applications and in particular the presentation was about micropayments. 
The audience of 30-40 was rather tech-savvy - developers, entrepreneurs 
and assorted lurkers.

A system was described that can pay for the video stream in real time, 
as the stream is being pulled, in units of about 5-10 seconds of video. 
The payment mechanism is embedded in the network delivery fabric.

Nothing controversial so far.

The main advantage was announced: the price depends on the video quality 
(essentially, a bitrate) of each segment, so that if you get a 
particular segment at lower quality (because of network congestion), you 
pay less for that particular 10-second segment.

The question for the presenter came up, why would the content 
authors/owners agree to this, in other words why is the content value 
equated with the bitrate, why is the payload treated the same as the 
carrier?

The reaction of the audience was pretty much unanimous: this is a 
non-issue - of course that the value of a movie is equal to the bitrate 
at which it is consumed. The speaker didn't even understand the question 
- the counterargument was that Amazon AWS also charges per gigabyte, so 
what is odd about charging for movies per, basically, weight?

These are the people who are actively developing the systems which will 
deal with the content in the future. The state of mind is that the value 
created outside the tech domain - fiber, switches, routers, encoders, 
players - does not figure at all. The embedded payment systems may not 
even recognize a possibility of such value.

This is not new. It started in 2000s when EFF argued that "bits want to 
be free", there is no "content", and DRM is evil. This attitude 
effectively squeezed out pretty much all small publishers from the 
market, as only few huge monopolies could afford to effectively charge 
for the content (through lawsuits and switching to the expensive real 
time you-pay-we-stream-to-you model.)

The real question, after the long intro: was there ever a monetary value 
in the content beyond the cost of the physical carrier? Thick books are 
usually more expensive than thin ones. Paperback is cheaper than 
hardcover. Tickets for big theaters are more expensive than tickets for 
fringe rat-infested venues. What happens when the carrier becomes 
effectively free?

As with the disappearance of the labor, problem-solving with the 
technology seems to point to the same conclusion: problem-free society 
is a nightmare.



On 9/18/17, 17:06, John Hopkins wrote:
> Whomever, whatever controls the protocols, controls the device and
> reaps the rewards that the device brings. This is because the protocol
> is a proxy for the actualized projection of energy or the pathway that
> energy is mandated to follow
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