This is a thoughtful and valuable response to Goldhaber. If it is going to use the analytic distinction between functional and non-functional bitstreams, it would benefit from applying also the distinction between producing and distributing digital goods, which is also part of the idea I presented. Because the anarchic, or non-propertarian modes of distribution through sharing are orders of magnitude more efficient than previous forms of physical goods distribution, as you indicate there are forms of communication now possible for small cultural producers to compete effectively against industrialized producers of music, video, and journalism. That doesn't mean these distribution systems are unrelated to the attention economy, however. Some depend on advertising revenue gained by monetizing attention or viewership, or are forms of personal promotion based on attention conscription. (Twitter is a very interesting phenomenon to consider in this respect.)

On the production side, however, it seems to me that the argument would benefit more from some effort to quantify its conclusions. There are naturally bugs in software, and some number of people required to catch them. But the numbers involved are unstated, unestimated, not even speculated about. It turns out, for example out that maintaining OpenSSL (a client of mine) has involved the attention of seven people, two of whom were producing more than 90% of the work. There are now, after Heartbleed, something approaching eight people doing twice as much work overall. They are providing better security for tens of thousands of commercial products (one company, HP, found more than 6,000 of its products and services alone dependent on OpenSSL, for example), and hundreds of millions of websites, still using approximately one billionth of the human population. That's because the provision of software, for the very reasons you suggest, is much more efficient than the distribution of culture.

I think, therefore, that the essay's conclusions depend on assumptions about scale that should be made explicit, and perhaps considered against the available facts.