I just watched Mr. Rushkoff's brief talk about "getting past free" posted on the P2P blog [1]. His fixation on currency creeps me out. The FLOSS methodology exists outside of markets and money (while still being able to interact with them) and this is why it increases human freedom. Rather than being constrained to the current conventional concepts of political economy which focus on exchange value, we now have the opportunity to re-consider the advantages of the commons and use value. He completely ignores this in his talk and advocates for more variations of exchange value. Yesterday I came across an article on how the internet is being co-opted by corporations [2]. This is nothing new to anyone here, but the interesting part was about the Lauderdale Paradox where I learned of James Maitland and his book "An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its Increase" (1804). In stark contrast to Rushkoff, Maitland makes it clear that public wealth is diminished when we attach exchange values to things. Rushkoff also talks a bit about the lack of creativity in FLOSS and finds the remix culture to be somehow lacking. At this point in time I believe that all new ideas are always just variations on what currently exists (i.e. creativity is a vague term of idolatry for the act of making specific connections between existing ideas), so his criticism here seems pointless to me. He almost seems to be saying that sharing ideas freely is actually harmful to society. As someone who deeply appreciates being empowered by open access to highly technical knowledge this attitude makes no sense to me. -Karl [1] http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/video-of-the-day-douglas-rushkoff-of-getting- past-free-through-radical-abundance/2012/01/28 [2] http://monthlyreview.org/2011/03/01/the-internets-unholy-marriage-to- capitalism