-- StephenClarke - 22 Oct 2009

Capitalism has the wonderful inherent function of offering great monetary rewards to those people who can satisfy the demands of the most people for the lowest price (WalMart? , BestBuy? , Blue Nile, Amazon). Capitalism is not necessarily in conflict with anarchic production. Sometimes people share (as in the case of coders and game strategy writers) and sometimes people do not share or at least not effectively (as evidenced by the lack of sufficient advertising for these superior anarchic functional goods). To the extent that people do not willingly share (which hopefully is a smaller and smaller extent as people learn to harness the power of sharing), capitalism can hopefully step in to offer monetary rewards for people to perform the functions that are most in demand.

-- StevenWu - 22 Oct 2009

I agree with Stephen’s comment. Taking a slightly different tangent with this point, does this (and Harry’s example of GIMP from class) touch on a distinction that Professor Moglen was speaking of in class? Assuming anarchist functional goods are made better and anarchist aesthetic goods are distributed more efficiently (which I think is right), why aren’t anarchist functional goods distributed more efficiently as well?

At this point I think they’re not. I can only speak from personal experience, but I never knew that there were functionally better options to photoshop (GIMP) or cheatguides (mycheats). I am struggling to understand why this is. In truth, I’ve never searched for these alternatives and I’m sure that with a few simple Google searches I’m sure I would have found these superior options. But I think there is something to an information/advertising/branding difference between anarchist and capitalist products in alerting people to what the alternatives are. Perhaps with some priming or habituation to the internet, people will understand that better functional options are available on the internet (which in turn will make these options distributed more efficiently), but at least from my experience, it doesn’t seem we’re there yet. So, am I making a proper distinction between these two types of goods? I can’t think of a legitimate reason why online, superior anarchist functional goods should not be distributed better than capitalist produced goods, except for that capitalist products have an advertising budget that gets information, and cost, passed to the consumer. Am I conceiving of this difference correctly and is that why Prof. Moglen distinguishes the benefits of anarchist functional and aesthetic products?

-- BrendanMulligan - 22 Oct 2009

Whenever a person walks into a Gamestop and purchases a new video game, the clerk will ask them if they want to purchase a strategy guide, which provides helpful tips and tricks regarding how to play the game. There is, however, no reason to ever purchase a proprietary strategy guide because multiple websites enable gamers to come together and create free strategy guides. Though creating a guide is a long tedious process if done through proprietary means, a community can create one efficiently even for an immense game.

One can speculate about why a person would bother logging onto a website and taking the time to post answers to imaginary problems, which he has paid $60 to have the privilege of solving in a fictional world. The psychological motivations behind such behavior may be many and varied, but they are largely irrelevant. This sort of behavior is now a fact of life.

-- StephenClarke - 22 Oct 2009