The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.
The migration of the means of production back up to the web and the growth of social networking sites is generating a mass wave of consolidation and aggregation … We may be seeing a thousand flowers bloom at the level of content production, but control is in the hands of the few. And now, with Web 2.0 taking hold, we have software applications migrating to the Web. This is attractive for individuals since licenses are often free in exchange for precious demographic data that would otherwise be unavailable – hence no more need to pirate – and to corporations since annual leases can be more conveniently written off than outright purchases. But it also suggests that after three decades of the means of production drifting downward into our hands, they are beginning to slip away from us again. The meshworks are breeding new hierarchies.