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neither of which can be quantified. 

It\'s this simple: the new meaning of the word \"content,\" is plain wrong. In fact, it is intentionally wrong. It\'s a usage that only arose when the institutions that had fattened on their ability to bottle and distribute the genius of human expression began to realize that their containers were melting away, along with their reason to be in business. They started calling it content at exactly the time it ceased to be. Previously they had sold books and records and films, all nouns to be sure. They didn\'t know what to call the mysterious ghosts of thought that were attached to them.

Thus, when not applied to something you can put in a bucket (of whatever size), \"content\" actually represents a plot to make you think that meaning is a thing. It isn\'t. The only reason they want you to think that it is because they know how to own things, how to give them a value based on weight or quantity, and, more to the point, how to make them artificially scarce in order to increase their value. 

That, and the fact that after a good 25 years of advance warning, they still haven\'t done much about the Economy of Ideas besides trying to stop it from happening.

As I get older, I become less and less interested in saying \"I told you so.\" But in this case, I find it hard to resist. Back during the Internet equivalent of the Pleistocene. I wrote a piece for an ancestor of Wired magazine called Wired magazine that was titled, variously, \"The Economy of Ideas\" or \"Wine without Bottles.\" In this essay, I argued that it would be deucedly difficult to continue to apply the Adam Smithian economic principles regarding the relationship between scarcity and value to any products that could be reproduced and distributed infinitely at zero cost. 

I proposed, moreover, that, to the extent that anything might be scarce in such an economy, it would be attention, and that invisibility would be a bad strategy for increasing attention. That, in other words, familiarity might convey more value to information that scarcity would.

I did my best to tell the folks in what is now called \"The Content Industry\" - the institutions that once arose for the useful purpose of conveying creative expression from one mind to many - that this would be a good time to change their economic model. I proposed that copyright had worked largely because it had been difficult, as a practical matter, to make a book or a record or motion picture film spool. 

It was my theory that as soon as all human expression could be reduced into ones and zeros, people would begin to realize what this \"stuff\" really was and come up with an economic paradigm for rewarding its sources that didn\'t seem as futile as claiming to own the wind. Organizations would adapt. The law would change. The notion of \"intellectual property,\" itself only about 35 years old, would be chucked immediately onto the magnificent ash-heap of Civilization\'s idiotic experiments. 

Of course, as we now know, I was wrong. Really wrong. 

As is my almost pathological inclination, I extended them too much credit. I imputed to institutions the same capacities for adaptability and recognition of the obvious that I assume for humans. But institutions, having the legal system a fundamental part of their genetic code, are not so readily ductile. 

This is particularly true in America, where some combination of certainty and control is the actual \"deity\" before whose altar we worship, and where we have a regular practice of spawning large and inhuman collective organisms that are a kind of meta-parasite. These critters - let\'s call them publicly-held corporations - may be made out of humans, but they are not human. Given human folly, that characteristic might be semi-ok if they were actually as cold-bloodedly expedient as I once fancied them - yielding only to the will of the markets and the raw self-interest of their shareholders. But
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