Oddbean new post about | logout
 You know, we are so used to living in a world where if I live in this beach house, you can't, if I use this car, you cant.  If somebody brings 10 sandwiches to a conference of 10 people, and I stuff down all the sandwiches, I'm considered a major asshole.   But information doesn't work that way.  In stead of treating the ability of everybody being able to have the same thing at the same time as a threat, we need to treat it like an advantage.   The finite resource is not the information, but the people who use, manipulate it, and apply it to create value.   In the open source community, copying of code is rampant, yet the market value of those coders continues to go up.  Meanwhile, the cost of imposing information controls on people continues to grow exponentially.   At this point, you just can't do it without imposing a tyrannical police state.  Ourselves, and our society, can not move forward into the information age unless we drop this mentality that information things are the same as physical things.