While I'm harping on this, I should say that the textbook definition of "commodity fetishism" absolutely and totally applies to the aphorism "information wants to be free" It's the exact equivalent of saying shit like "wages want to be low"
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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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Okay, so "labor wants to be compensated at marginal cost of production" That's literally what the neoclassical/neoliberal economists say
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They're both ways of speaking that attribute something like a law of physics to human behavior
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