itneverhappened

You’ve probably seen this poster already, but it’s a good introduction to this post.

This Monkeyfilter post, which links to this article about copyright, got me thinking. People have been referring to our time as “the information age” for a while now, and for good reason: with computers, information has become infinitely more available and easily accessible. The advent of mass production, which made material redundant and information thereby relatively more valuable, likely had a hand in this increasing amount of available information. The market has been saturated with types of information –anything easily reachable through an internet search, for example– and their value has dropped accordingly. But other types of information –e.g. the data on what people are searching for– remain scarce and thus valuable.

My question is, what does all this mean for good old materialism and consumerism? Obviously much of the importance of information in commerce is driven, ultimately, by our material economy. But as that economy evolves away from the purely material to an integration of the material with the immaterial, what does this mean for our society?

There have been some interesting takes on the driving force behind consumerism, and I’m no expert, but one interesting explanation is that our consumption is driven by the simultaneous desires of separation from the mass of consumers and conformation to its ideals. We want to be one of the crowd and to fit in, but the crowd, at least on a superficial level, adores individualism. (I haven’t read it, but I think the book _Rebel Sell_ deals with this topic) Of course these are not the only reasons we buy things, we also buy things because they appeal to us for other reasons, or we can’t function without them (e.g. gasoline).

Copyright has long served as a bridge between the material and the immaterial realms of property, but as new kinds of information become valuable and others descend into oversaturation, the banks the bridge is connecting start to shift or become less definite. The route to the golden city of the Common Good, if it was indeed going the right direction in the first place, gets sidetracked, and kids get sued.

I have no doubt that corporations will still be able to keep us salivating to the bell of their product as long as needed, but industries have been rising and sinking for a while around the fault lines of information that is becoming redunant. But will this redundancy someday eclipse consumption itself? Consumption is a relatively new phenomenon… will we someday start investing our time and energy into something besides keeping up and differentiating ourselves from the Joneses? I think that in the coming years, copyright law, and further our conception of property itself, may be fundamentally altered in ways that transcend our current political ideologies like capitalism or communism.