[IP] : Re Robert Reich: In Our Horrifying Future, Very Few People Will Have Work or Make Money

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *John Gilmore* <gnu@toad.com>
Date: Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Subject: Re Robert Reich: In Our Horrifying Future, Very Few People Will
Have Work or Make Money
To: dave@farber.net
Cc: ip <ip@listbox.com>


Reich had to explicitly tell us it's "Horrifying", because the
headline "In Our Future, Very Few People Will Have Work or Make Money"
is not actually scary.  It describes a post-scarcity world that
humankind has climbed toward for thousands of years.

Reich's gloomy science fiction isn't as much fun to read as Cory
Doctorow's.  Cory has covered the same topics in multiple novels,
including Makers, where the main characters are rural nerds at the
heart of a new economy of 3d-printable designs, and in Down and Out in
the Magic Kingdom, in which work is extinct, a reputation system
informs social relationships, and clans of hobbyists take
responsibility for major attractions like Disneyland to keep them
running and improving despite nobody getting paid.

Cory is no economist, but economists write a lot of fiction too.

Oh, and Cory's walking his talk.  He's making a good living by writing
novels and giving them away for free over the Internet.  Why?
"Because my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity."  Here's Makers:

  http://craphound.com/makers/download/

and here's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom:

  http://craphound.com/down/download/

You'll get a brief rant and a CC-licensed, DRM-free, thought-
provoking, AND entertaining ebook in your favorite format.

        John Gilmore

PS: I'm not just speaking from fictional experience.  Years ago I
thought about how to make a living in a post-scarcity economy, then
debugged my ideas in real life.  In 1989 I cofounded a company that
wrote free software, gave the software away for free copying under the
GNU General Public License, and sold live human support for it, to the
small fraction of users who wanted support.  What others called
piracy, we called distribution!  We also quipped that we made free
software affordable.  Every big company we cold-called to sell support
to WAS ALREADY USING OUR SOFTWARE.  Many of them depended deeply on it
and were happy to hire us to make it do exactly what they wanted it
to.  We saved Sony a year in developing the PlayStation, for example.
We kept Cisco products coming out ahead of competitors by making sure
they didn't get slowed down by toolchain bugs.  We were profitable
immediately and stayed that way, since we had no money to lose: we
started it with $15,000 and grew for 6 years before taking outside
investment.  After 10 years, Red Hat bought our company for a billion
dollars' worth of stock, adopted our business model, and ran with it.
They now have more than $1B in annual sales, net income of $180M, and
a $14B market capitalization.  To make a good living when copying
inventions is cheap and easy, create inventions -- not copies.  Or as
Chuck D said, "Anybody can make a copy of my last album.  Only I can
make a copy of my NEXT album."



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