Wrong! The commons means knowledge takes control. For example, physics assures us that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so it is only the lack of knowledge production that makes energy finite or scarce. And I am not referring to perpetual motion machines, rather to more efficiency and automation of extraction of energy through greater innovation due to faster propagation of knowledge.
[snip] The technical term "the commons" denotes a social organization that consisted of individualized production and no political system to coerce cooperative behavior. The concept of social control via political economy didn't exist yet. When it emerged the commons were enclosed and converted into private property and the population was reduced to bondage. [snip]
If a similar organization can be restored for mass society via adroit use of technical means to defeat those who would protect rent seeking and usury with coercive force I'm all for it.
[snip]
However there is probably a way to balance the conflict between the individual and the collective and maximize what we experience as "free will" and this way is through greater understanding of the world around us and how it functions according to materialistic definitions. I think perhaps that this is what we are both after?
You need to quote the rest of the key point:
I am quite flabbergast that Eric S. Raymond (self-professed to have 150 - 170IQ, the creator of the "open source" movement) could get the logic so wrong on the coming Knowledge Age.
In
his critique of Jeremy Rifkin's book,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society,
he misses the key generative model of open source, which is that the source is always changing. The enslavement of knowledge by capital is due to the transactional cost of the propagation of creations. As we lower that friction, knowledge takes over.
And he apparently fails to comprehend
capital can't buy knowledge because
thought isn't fungible, and this becomes more evident as the diversity of innovation becomes more fine-grained.
The claim that the material input costs will be significant relative to the marginal cost of distributing more copies of intellectual property is wrong because the only costs in material production that can't be reduced asymptotically to 0 at economy-of-scale and automation are the knowledge inputs. Thus knowledge is infinitely more valuable than material production at the asymptote. The only reason that capital has been able to enslave the knowledge portion of the cost in the material cost is due to inability of fine-grain, autonomous knowledge to control the creative outputs of material production. The 3D printer changes this because the printer will be in every person's home. The commodity value
relative to knowledge value of raw material inputs will fall asymptotically to 0
[snip]
The point is that due to networks effects on knowledge propagation, material costs will decline towards 0 relative to the value society will assign to the knowledge.
Knowledge was only enslaved because knowledge did not have the control over creation. Industrialization had control over the knowledge.
Computer changed that for software. The home 3D printer changes it for everything else.
This polarity is reversing (inverting) as we speak.
You will a massive change to the world.
This is why most of you don't understand that structure you think is relevant is no longer relevant.
What is the optimum system?
*Decentralized political economy and mix of individualized artisan quality production and automation to replace consumerism and authoritarian top down control of collectivized production.
Careful. I agree but not sure if you were leaning Marxist. It won't be done for free. The Marxist slant is very wrong. Eric Raymond explained that very well and I didn't disagree.