*I admire Jaron for not toning it down.
http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2016/02/article_0001.html
(…)
"You say free culture is dangerous. Why?
"I actually helped make the argument that music should be free and would ultimately benefit culture and musicians, so it's not that I am unwilling to accept this new thing. I helped make it. And it does have some plus points. For one, people like feeling generous and it feels good to share and to be open. That is precious and we should find designs in society that celebrate that. But the way we are doing it means everybody becomes a servant of a tiny handful of large tech companies, and that's really pretty stupid. If an online service is free, you can bet it is feeding a scheme that makes money by subconsciously manipulating people. It is strange that so many are blind to this.
"One thing that bugs me is the way context is lost. You start discovering new music or new culture in very particular ways. Algorithms become your guide. If an algorithm calculates that you may like a piece of music, it will recommend it to you. That makes the algorithm the master of context for humanity. It tends to remove culture from its context, and context is everything. The structure of the Net itself has become the context instead of real people or the real world. That's a really big deal.
"One of the original ideas of mash-up culture is that you find a piece of music, someone else mashes it up, then it turns into a video, somebody else makes a parody of the video and it all turns into this giant flow of creativity. It is genuinely a cool thing that everybody can contribute. I don’t want to lose that but today, those who make the mash-up receive no benefit, it just serves Facebook or Google or some other giant corporation and becomes part of the incredible concentration of wealth we are seeing – and it dehumanizes the people involved along the way.
"When we were thinking up the Internet, I firmly believed that with a global information system in place, it would be impossible for people to deny things like climate change, but we are seeing the exact opposite. Our information systems allow people to live in little bubbles and to disconnect from reality in a way we didn’t foresee. This is very disappointing and is having a negative impact on art, politics, science, the economy, everything really…."
