Your Ideas have Flown the Coop

“Information and entropy are not conserved, and are equally unsuited to being commodities.”
Norbert Wiener, “The Human Use of Human Beings”

In his book review “Priced to Sell” in this week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Outliers” and “Tipping Point”, reviews Chris Anderson’s “Free” . Gladwell roundly criticizes Anderson, characterizing him as a “technological utopian”. Evidently Anderson takes the position that the price of intellectual products must be reduced to zero (i.e Free). Gladwell is correct in arguing that Anderson is getting it all wrong, but he only manages a glancing blow at the challenges posed by the ubiquity, accessibility, and low cost afforded by the “new media”.

In his own way, Anderson is trying to deal with the observation that intellectual property rights are on the ropes under the new technological regime. The concept of intellectual property rights was founded on the model of tangible property rights that assigned legal ownership of land and material to individuals. When applied to intangible assets, some tortured logic is needed to draw the line between ideas that can be owned and those that are just “out there” in the ever-flowing stream of knowledge creation.

Prior to the electronic digital age, the principal means for controlling intellectual “property” fell to the publisher/gate-keepers who controlled the means by which ideas deemed by them as valuable  and/or  marketable, could be disseminated. The commercial alliance between publishers who controlled the means of dissemination and producers of ideas, is now being ripped apart.

The subject of ideas as property has long fascinated me as part of the puzzle of how humans continuously create new knowledge and how some new knowledge gains sway in certain circumstances. Rather than go into great detail regarding this process, I want to call to your attention to some very useful ideas put forth by Norbert Wiener in his book, “The Human Use of Human Beings” (1950). There is much to recommend in this book, but I want to direct attention specifically to Wiener’s discussion of the nature of information as a commodity (Chapter VII).

“There is no Maginot Line of the brain.”

The legalistic model of intellectual property rights is fast becoming untenable under the new technological regime. I believe that the new model will need to become one of “pay for performance”. This means that the producer of intellectual products becomes more like an hourly worker or the artisan. The idea creator gets paid for each performance and then moves on to the next performance. The ideas themselves, once created, have flown away to become part of the flow of human conversation. They become commingled and irrevocably transformed once they have entered the ever-flowing stream of knowledge creation.

In fact, as the Maginot Line between the “The Commons” and the multi-national corporation’s interests becomes increasingly fuzzy, this pay-for-performance model may pave the way to some new ways of looking at private ownership of “stuff” as well. (A complete reading of “The Human Use of Human Beings” will reward you with Norbert Wiener’s fascinating ideas about material “stuff” as information and message, as well.)