On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Interpretation
Information is both valuable and increasingly accessible, creating a tension between its cost and its availability.
This quote by Stewart Brand highlights the dual nature of information in the modern age. On one side, information is regarded as highly valuable, capable of transforming lives when properly utilized. Conversely, technological advancements reduce the cost of sharing information, leading to a push for free access. This creates a conflict where the inherent value of information competes with the growing trend toward its free dissemination.
In practice
During a lecture on the role of technology in society, this quote can illustrate the paradox of information sharing.
The urgent finds you; you have to find the important. Importance is not fast. It is slow. It is not superficial. It is deep. And as a result, it's extremely powerful. When important matters go wrong, they undermine everything. When they go right, they sustain everything.
Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly
A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
Learning how to understand how technology evolves, using tools like a Technology Road Map, is what you need more than anything to ride on top of the tsunami instead of being crushed by it.
I think that in an Internet age, content is content. As long as you can stand up on the merits of what you're doing right at that moment and aren't just relying on your success in doing something else, it's all good; people will respect you.
The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.
Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.
If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%!
By 2009, computers will disappear. Displays will be written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and contact lenses.
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