Re: Information vs. material production (was: Re: [ox-en] Welcome)
- From: Marco Ermini <markoer markoer.org>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 15:15:11 +0100
On Sat, 22 Dec 2001 11:29:27 [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de> wrote:
[...]
Imagine a situation where the Evernet is reality. Where you're mobile
PDA is able to get the content that you want out of the air right at
the moment you need it. IMHO this vision is not that far BTW. At this
point at least your personal copy of an information good is only
represented by the presence or absence of a number of electrons in the
RAM of your PDA - dissolving when you switch of the current. In this
situation would you say, that the digital information is a feature of
the RAM? Sorry, that simply makes no sense to me - i.e. I see no point
where this view of things leads to anything useful.
You don't have to look just at the "manufacts" when you speak about "goods".
If every group of electrons was equal, I agree that they have no role in
estabilishing a "cost" for a "good" since they was not a "good". But you
choose what informations you would like to watch on your PDA and this
informations come after a work by some humans: they reached the news, they
typed it on a keyboard, they used a telecommunication service (which is
definitively a "good" since it may costs very much money) to transmit the
information to your PDA. In an era of overhelming and redundant informations
everywhere, a good group of electrons may be an effective good to pay for.
[...]
In Fordism standardization of a product drove prices down, because it
made it easier to mechanize the production. The silly machines were
not able to produce other things than standardized ones and to reduce
the amount of human labor you needed to mechanize and thus to
standardize. In our discussion the most interesting feature of modern
machines / robots is, however, that they *are* able to produce highly
customized / individual products.
And infact, we may be in a "Fordist" or "post-Fordist" era or whatever, the
things you pay for is human work. Software is a "good" with a cost, as a
burned CD or a car. A software may be "gratis" only when there are other
things you pay for, like business services, customizations, support etc.
And for competition driving prices down. Yes, it does in capitalism.
But if the prices are driven below the costs of the sellers, than the
sellers will be out of business soon. And the costs of the sellers are
determined mainly by the amount of the labor embodied in the product
s/he's selling.
And in fact there are many countries in which selling way above under cost is
forbidden (I think such laws exists in every country in some category of goods
or in others).
regards
--
Marco Ermini
http://www.markoer.org
Perche' perdere tempo ad imparare quando l'ignoranza e' istantanea? (Hobbes)
_______________________
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