h+ Magazine

DOCTOROW: It’s not hard to think about a kind of nanotech future where virtually all objects are available on demand. In that kind of world, both the traditional Marxist and the traditional Keynesian analyses don’t make a lot of sense. These are predicated first and foremost on the regulation of scarce and valuable objects. In a “Kazaa World” where every time someone expresses a market signal about the value of a song by downloading a copy of it, instead of there being one fewer copies of that song, there’s now one more copy of that song, this is a really different economic proposition. And I talk about this as an alternative to the tragedy of the commons. This is a commons where the sheep shit grass. The more you graze the more you get.