What will money be?

A summary of:
Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Allen Lane: London.
Part 2, Chapters 4-8: What Will Money Be?

As Lanier rightly points out, things are only valuable inasmuch as they are scarce. We have made it increasingly easy to trade creative products - like music, films, etc. - thus reducing their value. When we download an album for free, we are devaluing musical creation on the whole. The great crime is not so much in the stealing of £10, but rather in contributing to the devaluation of creative production, and thereby, the devaluation of humanity. (An analogy is in the way we spend a great deal more money in prosecuting and incarcerating thiefs than the value of the stuff the thief stole, because in doing so we are asserting our social contract.) Lanier warns that if we continue to develop technology in a way that cheapens creative products, "...we will usher in a dark age in which everything human is devalued" (82).

What are we willing to pay for if not our creative human outputs? Are art, music and literature not among the most highly valued relics of history? Somehow we've tacitly accepted the notion that "if [something] can be delivered for free, it must be delivered for free" (99). The result is that "human creativity and understanding, especially one's own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless" (99).

Consider this: "If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty" (83). Unfortunately, the people who lose in this equation are "the middle class of intellectual and cultural creation" (93).

So we need to devise new ways of "bring[ing] money and capitalism into an era of technological abundance without impoverishing almost everyone" (100). Perhaps the way of doing so is to cultivate scarcity of cultural expressions by maintaining only 1 copy of that item which people can pay to access (101). This genius idea from Ted Nelson will reward quality and longevity, rather than reward fads, as artists who create something that people access over many years will make more money than those who create something that people like for 5 minutes and then discard. (The opposition to this idea is that it would favor the intellectual over the peasant (101). But I don't see how this necessarily precludes a peasant from making a profound contribution and profiting from it as much as the elite.)

The message is that we must "agree that it is worth paying for one another's elevated cultural and creative expressions" (105). Lanier argues that we should redraft the social contract, agreeing to pay a tax to access these creative expressions, and in turn we "gain the ability to earn money from our creativity, expression, and perspective" (106). In short, we will be liberated to be more human!