I got a library card
What digital ownership means for the information economy
Having finished my contract at my job, I set off last week for the local library to get a library card. The library was a short walk through my neighborhood and looked to be a nice enough place for kids to check-out books, adults to use the computer, or teachers to grade assignments (all of which I saw while I was there.) The incentive to register for a library card was so that I could use the app “Libby” to download books and audiobooks to my phone or reader.
It’s a really nice idea, there was a large selection of books to “check-out” for 2 weeks, to avoid having to go back and forth to the physical library to return the physical books, it’s like I have a little digital library on my phone.
I requested a hold for an economics book I’ve been meaning to read, and turned on notifications for when it would be “returned” in two weeks, in a similar vein to regular books owned by a library. This system works OK - but if I would have liked to have it sooner (as I now have more time on my hands).
I suspect the reason that there are limits to the number of copies in circulation (digitally) is due to the library purchasing finite copies. If the supply of copies were to be open and free, there would be no reward system for the work done by authors and publishers.
This is something that ownership of digital assets (and crypto!) can help fix.
In general actors in the information economy can make money a few ways. Through a paywall (effectively the same as paying for a copy of a book), a subscription, or advertisements. Paywalls and subscription based services here restrict access to the information. This is a bad thing for a well informed public. Pretty straightforward.
Ads, on the other hand, can alter the content of creators significantly by exacerbating (think of Fox News), moderating (Spotify sells ads to listeners of Joe Rogan’s podcast), or censoring (twitter and certain previous presidents) information. Again, this is bad for a well informed public.
Here, and I go into this in the twitter thread, we can let crypto step in and give us back ownership of our digital assets. This is kind of a tricky thing to think of, since if something is “digital” what does ownership mean? As opposed to a physical asset, this is straightforward. I own this pair of shoes so I feel like I can wear them, use them to kill a bug, or throw them out if I like. But for digital assets, bear with me.
I don’t technically “own” this blog. Substack, which hosts all the content and email functionality on its servers, owns it and I’m just someone who tells it what to say. If I bought my own server, wrote own code to create the website interface, bought a domain, and paid for the electricity to continually run the server then I would fully own the blog and all of its parts. Crypto on the other hand steps in and helps run the other parts of the system, providing ownership of just the content to me. And it pays for the other parts of the process through micropayments. Typically transactions on the blockchain involve a “gas fee” or the transaction cost to keep track of the ownership of assets, and pay for the upkeep of the asset (so the servers, electricity, etc.)
For us in the information economy, each post, article, book or piece of research would act as “rental” similar to how we used to go to a movie rental store (for those of us old enough to remember!) I’m imagining that each time I read an article, or a part of an article, I would be charged a fraction of a cent paid to the author. Fully automated and existing on the blockchain.
There are a few potential rebuttals to this idea I’d like to address :
What if I don’t want to pay for access to information?
I’m hoping that transaction costs are so small that it is negligible. And it doesn’t have to be linear. Say I have ~5000 weekly views on my posts (meaning I’ve grown my current audience by a factor of 100). The first 1000 readers could be charged a cent to ensure I made enough for lunch that day, and then if I do end up getting to 5000 on that post it could automatically change to half a cent per view and give a reimbursement to the first 1000 readers. I net $25 dollars for 5000 views but $10 on 1000 (hence nonlinear.) This changes the scalability argument. It’s no longer the feast or famine concept like readers of the Black Swan might be familiar with, either I make it huge or I don’t make it at all due historically to barriers of entry for publishing costs. Today it costs nothing to post or read on Substack, and certainly I’d gladly pay half a cent to read each of my subscriptions on Substack (but I’m not at the point of paying $10 a month for each one like some authors are charging for access to paywalled posts. To net out on this I would have to read 2000 articles per month or 67 articles per day which is impossible.)
What if I don’t want to be bothered with micro-transactions and the thought of paying for it each time?
Decision fatigue is a real thing: people can get overwhelming having to make a lot of decisions in a short amount of time. This is one reason why moving is such a pain. You have to decide where the couch goes, remember if you put the plates in this box or that one, and what we are ordering for lunch all at the same time. But you know what takes the decision out of the question? Infrastructure. Much like I have no idea how much money I have on my EZ-Pass toll road account- I don’t need to. The price of using a toll road isn’t very much and it automatically refills when I get low. Something similar could be set up for a Meta-mask account which plugs into your browser, taking a bit out at a time as you browse the web.
Would this hurt the ad industry?
Absolutely, and this is a good thing :) As a society we can find more productive uses for workers at Google and Facebook than optimizing algorithms to sell more ads. And the viewer wins by seeing less ads! Could you imagine watching an NBA basketball game without pausing every 120 seconds for 60 seconds of ads? It would be incredible- the live event is owned by the NBA which receives micropayments on the millions of views it gets per unit of time.
Would this create more of an incentive for clickbait?
Maybe. Of course the goal for any piece of text is to be read, but when setting up such a system we should think carefully of how we want to reward each piece of information. For example, something educational like Substack or Stackoverflow might have a better payout system than something for entertainment like a piece on ESPN or Vox. In other words, I’d suggest trying to price information based on its relative value. Likewise I’d assume academic journals, which will not be read en mass but nevertheless serve a very important purpose for the advancement of knowledge, would be the highest reward system. Misinformation here will still exist as it does under the current system, but hopefully by removing bias and opening up of paywalls will make for better content and increase knowledge of “truth.”
In any case, what this system aims to accomplish is attributing value to those who provide it. Think of the amazing value produced by open source organizations like GitHub or Khan Academy, compared to the extreme rents that Facebook extracts from making us all angry at our relatives. Here, I don’t blame the company, but the system it operates it and the incentives it takes advantage of. Historically our system has been set up the way it has because that was what was possible given the technology at the time. But now that technology is changing, we have the opportunity to change the system, hopefully for the better.