The Logic of Luxury
There’s a new digital world in the making. Its essential condition will be that of abundance, and its functional logic will be that of luxury.
The transition to the new world and its new logical order has been underway for five years. It started from the big popularity bang of Napster, and has advanced ever since with irresistible force. P2P has been the driving technology behind the transition, but ISPs, computer and communication gear manufacturers plus gadget manufacturers have all been deeply involved in the process and keep contributing to its momentum.
The signs of approaching luxury
While approaching full-blown luxury we will pass through various intermediate states of having-it-better-than-before. As it all happens in a framework of evolving technologies, there will be some obvious and objective technological indicators for our progress. On the hardware side we will get every year that much more bang for our buck: more processing power, more mass memory, more bandwidth, more gadget features and functionality. On the software side we will get every year more advanced p2p clients capable of utilizing the increasing power of the new hardware and at the same time introducing whatever new social or security features are needed to keep the show going. And on the social side we will see more and more people getting the idea of luxury and joining the fun.
Luxury is overwhelming diversity
The content aspect of luxury includes the easy availability of popular and trendy items but more generally it means easy availability of
everything from the most branded and promoted to the most obscure and eccentric. There is no technical or practical need to exclude anything. With plentiful mass storage and plentiful bandwidth we can easily archive and keep globally available every recorded and published work that has ever found its way onto the digital domain. There is room for everything from professional masterpieces to silly amateur works, and we can easily arrange so that anybody is free to discover and enjoy anything they ever wish from this big pool of recorded creation.
Lovers as guardians of content
In the conditions of luxury the content is best protected and promoted by its lovers. The true lovers or fans of a specific artist, band, genre or label are the most dedicated and well-informed people to protect the quality, integrity and availability of the associated content. These are the people who not only want to have every official release and every worthy bootleg – they also want to promote the artist and her releases wherever possible, and they have the best knowledge and motivation to do it. In technical terms a small group of dedicated fans scattered around the globe is all that is needed to provide an earthquake-proof archival and a 24/7 high-speed delivery service covering the complete works of an artist plus whatever related information and other material is available.
Popularity and money
The notion of popularity will remain meaningful also in abundant content conditions, but it will no more be linked to the ideas of availability and pricing. There will still be hit movies, hit songs and high profile artists but their popularity will result much less from commercial promotion and much more from non-commercial peer interaction. Measured popularity can still be used as a basis for splitting the payouts from collective compensation pools (if such are applied) but for common p2p users that will be mostly invisible and irrelevant. The movements of money will happen outside the p2p infrastructure and its content economy, so the average user can eat whatever she wishes as much as she wishes without having to worry about the bill.
That’s what luxury is. We can’t afford it for the entire world population in sport cars or diamonds but we can and will afford it with digitized art, entertainment and information. We’re already halfway there.
- tg
