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Looks like Chad and Steve are pretty happy about selling YouTube. They also talk a lot about how grateful they are to "the community," which is nice because gratitude is all that the contributors are going to get. They don't share in the $1.65 billion. Nick Carr nails it:
Web 2.0's economic system has turned out to be, in effect if not intent, a system of exploitation rather than a system of emancipation. By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few. Carr notes that Larry Lessig is disappointed in YouTube, not for taking the money but for its defects in the realm of sharing content.
But Lessig isn't really interested in describing the world as it is. His eyes are on a further goal. He wants to redefine "Web 2.0" in order to promote a particular ideology, the ideology of digital communalism in which private property becomes common property and the individual interest is subsumed into the public interest - in which we become the web and the web becomes us. And:
Like Mao, Lessig and his comrades are not only on the wrong side of human nature and the wrong side of culture; they're also on the wrong side of history. They fooled themselves into believing that Web 2.0 was introducing a new economic system - a system of "social production" - that would serve as the foundation of a democratic, utopian model of culture creation. They were wrong. Obviously, I am with Carr - viz, my earlier comment on FOSS.
posted by James DeLong @ 11:51 AM | Media: Video, Music...
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