Data Is the New Commodity

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is partly true. People make huge mistakes in thinking this is the whole story and in deciding what to do with it, but it does accord somewhat with observable human behavior.
If circumstances require that you spend all your time just obtaining basic life support, it might be hard for you to discover a talent for piano playing or medicine. The whole purpose behind civilization is to spread the cost among greater numbers of people so that individuals have more opportunity for specializing in things they do best. Thus, we all together have more and make more to have.
Doing all this requires a common set of assumptions about what we have to do to keep the advantages. Civilization is defined as the collection of rules and customs necessary to live in close proximity to the market without killing each other. You can’t build very much on a cultural base of “every man for himself.” Civilization is nothing without a morality of some sort that calls men to aspire to higher ideals than the self. There has to be a sense of shared identity.
A civilization is about to die when the morality wears out under the constant onslaught of plutocrat abuse. A natural result of most civilizing influences is someone realizing they can pretend to have everyone’s needs in view when they are simply in it for themselves at a much higher level. When rulers forget the morality of governing itself, they can only push it just so far before things fall apart. The cost of the common identity becomes entirely unsustainable.
Ours is coming apart; I’m hardly the only one to see that. While it’s possible to find leverage to steer somewhat the process of replacement, for the most part, this thing will take its own course as the net result of millions not thinking about it at all. Though I’ve given our successor civilization the nickname of the Network Civilization, I seriously doubt that will stick. If you read enough history, you’ll realize the consensus of calling ours Western Civilization took hold rather late in the game. It waits on the self-awareness of future generations to decide what they’ll call their civilization, if they use such categories at all.
A certain amount of content always passes from predecessor to successor. Despite it’s utter unfitness for the job in terms of efficiency, it seems some brand of English language will continue to dominate the future. That is, it will be the basis for shared communications in the larger Network, regardless of native language.
The fundamental glue of the future is what it was in the past: Transfer of goods and ideas between people. In the past, the pace of change in society was directly related to speed of information or ideas. The degree and type of variation in clothing fashion, for example, depended on people in one place seeing something eye-catching wrapped around people in another place. The reasons for deciding to adopt something will vary widely; honestly, the folks who seize upon such a thing seldom know why they like it. In a broad sense, it hardly matters. What matters is how quickly and widely the idea travels.
Such frivolous changes also come with more substantive changes in cultural assumptions and expectations. Revolutions are born of traveling ideas. Perception is reality in the sense people act on what they believe is true. Rumors are as good as factual revelations if the story ignites enough common fury. What most people never consider is how various forms of entertainment are generally more powerful than mere ideas. They may be aware of it instinctively, but even with the efforts of writers to point out how sometimes the art form itself is the message, the calculus is typically wrong. That is, those in the best position to take advantage of it usually lose control of it because they miss the point.
We’ve already proved beyond all doubt that freely sharing digital entertainment media actually increases the sales of the original product. Were this not true, AM radio would never have taken off, mutated to FM and so forth. Elvis Presley and the Beatles would have remained small time local acts. Since the plutocrats in charge of the system for entertainment distribution don’t get this, they are losing control to artists who chafe under the virtual slavery of the system.
This is the cutting edge of the Network Civilization in the sense of mass effect. Academics and artists were aware of this long ago, having worked in this direction all along, but behind the scenes. Several theologians and philosophers have pointed out how the religious establishment is often the last to notice. So while Kirkbride jealously guards their copyright on the New King James translation of the Bible, the mass of a new generation is ignoring them in favor of the likes of the NET Bible.
If most of the bright entrepreneurial minds remain captive to the current system, they will miss the biggest and brightest opportunities coming. The current model for funding information offered on the Net is utterly backward, guaranteeing they will not participate in the future. People who desire influence will have to understand that the Net is the roadway and that your trade goods travel over that road. Information is not the trade good, but the pavement. If people willingly run out and fork over money for DVDs containing entertainment they already saw and heard on the Net, enough that the producers still make a good living, then the people locking up the less entertaining data are missing something in their conceptual model of human behavior.
Open Access is the future. The commoditization of Net access, and then the hardware and software for accessing it, signals where this is going. Data is the new commodity, not some highly valuable product. The potential is there, but not enough bright minds are willing to explore what really could work. This is why the West is dying, because it cannot move beyond the old model of economics. It will be replaced as surely as day follows night.
The old morality no longer offers any benefit; the gatekeepers have abused their position and are now the enemy of life itself. The perception of what is moral has already changed. On this point, at least, the new morality is quite in accord with God’s revelation. You cannot stop this thing.