If you weren't engaging in fetishism (in the old timey non-sexual sense, of anthropomorphizing an abstract concept and treating it like a person) you would just say "People want information for free" Which is obviously true and vacuous
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And, fun fact, the original version of "information wants to be free" was Stewart Brand *pairing* it with "information wants to be expensive"
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(Much like everyone forgets that von Clausewitz paired "War is diplomacy continued by other means" with "War is a fistfight continued by other means", i.e. war is fought for BOTH high-minded and petty reasons)
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But yeah, "information wants to be free" and its price trends down to zero if you just "let it" Just like wages want to be low, rent wants to rise and jobs want to have high turnover and be entry-level
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Information also wants to be expensive, it's fickle like that, the ways it expresses displeasure with being made free are just delayed You give information freedom by plastering it all over social media with no attribution/compensation, and it starts lying to you all the time
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Information wants to be free and it also wants to be worthless Those are the same market force People demanding *good* information and constructing a whole economy around gatekeeping, curation, etc is "information wanting to be expensive" That hasn't changed
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Good information is as costly as it ever was, the only shift is in who gets paid, and the people now getting paid the most are the assholes who have the least to do with it
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End of conversation
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Oh dang.
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Isn't the other half of that quote "...but it also wants to be expensive"?
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See, I always thought of "free" meaning "outside of control" and the aphorism as more a statement of the tendency for information to end up in more hands, akin to "nature abhors a vacuum."
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