NOTE: I have been posting excerpts from my book World After Capital. The last few excerpts have been about Universal Basic Income as a way of expanding Economic Freedom. Today’s section introduces the concept of Informational Freedom.

Informational Freedom

Can you read any book you want to? Can you listen to all the music that has ever been recorded? Do you have access to any web page at all you wish to consult? Can you easily see your own medical record? Other people’s medical records?

Historically questions like this would not have made much sense, as copying and distributing information was quite expensive. In the early days of writing, for instance, when humans literally copied text by hand, copies of books were rare, costly, and also subject to copy errors (unintentional or intentional). Few people in the world at that time had access to books, and even if some power had wanted to expand access, it would have been difficult to do so because of the immense cost involved.

In the age of digital information, when the marginal cost of making a copy and distributing it has shrunk to zero, all limitations on digital information are in a profound sense artificial. They involve adding cost back to the system in order to impose scarcity on something that is abundant. As an example, billions of dollars have been spent on trying to prevent people from copying digital music files and sharing them with their friends or the world at large [87].

Why are we spending money to make information less accessible? When information existed only in analog form, the cost of copying and distribution allowed us—to some degree required us—to build an economy and a society grounded on information scarcity. A music label, for instance, had to recruit talent, record in expensive studios, market the music (often by paying for radio airplay), and finally make and distribute physical records. Charging for the records allowed the label to cover its costs and turn a profit. Now individuals can produce music on their laptop and distribute it for free to the entire world, the fixed cost is dramatically lower and the marginal cost of a listen is zero. And with that the business model of charging per record, or per song, or per listen, and the extensive copyright protections required to sustain it no longer make sense. Despite the ridiculous fight put up by the music industry in the end we are winding up with listening that is either free (ad supported) or part of a subscription. In either case the marginal listen is free.

Despite this progress in music, we accept many other artificial restrictions on information access and distribution as a given because we, and a couple of generations before us, have grown up with them. This is the only system we know and much of our personal behavior, our public policies and our intellectual inquiries are shaped by what we and our recent ancestors have experienced. To transition into the Knowledge Age, however, we should jettison much of this baggage and strive for dramatically increased informational freedom. This is not unprecedented in human history. Prior to the advent of the printing press, stories and music were passed on largely in an oral tradition or through copying by hand. There were no restrictions on who could tell a story or perform a song.

Just to be clear: Information is not the same as knowledge. Information is a broader concept, including, for instance, the huge amounts of log files generated every day by computers around the world, much of which may never be analyzed. We don’t know in advance what information will turn out to be the basis for knowledge (i.e., information meant for other humans and which humans choose to maintain over time). Hence it makes sense to keep as much information as possible and make access to that information as broad as possible.

In this section we will explore various ways to expand informational freedom, the second important regulatory step to facilitate our transition to a Knowledge Age.