I used to go to bookstores and peruse the magazines, looking for publications I could query to write for. I hated it. I just hated it, and I hated myself for hating it, called myself names like coward-- but what I remember now is leaving the store and feeling physically sick, after having been swimming in a sea of random information. Just by itself that is a fairly dangerous and poisonous environment, but when you add in that all that information was supported by advertising, that is to say, the content existed primarily because someone thought they could sell something by strategically positioning that content next to their advertising, it became downright toxic. Swimming in late-stage all-needs-met-so-let's-invent-needs capitalist advertising of which you might not even be the target demographic. Always a surreal experience.
I hated that feeling.
It seemed all the more stupid and futile because when I was doing this, back in the early 2000s, it was already clear that I was willfully participating in an anachronism. I'd recognized that the Internet was going to change everything during my sophomore year of college, back in 1994, when a friend of mine had showed me that it was possible to download music over the Internet. Right then, I understood that all the rules were going to change. It wouldn't be long before everything was very, very different. (When I tell this story, I like to add that if I'd really understood just what this change portended, I would have immediately changed my major to C.S., and instead of Napster it would have been called Benster.)
So in the early days of what would be my sad, depressed, ineffectual freelance career, I was therefore struggling and perplexed by the issue that no one seemed to be willing to understand (or was it that they willfully refused to understand?), that in the digital age, for digital goods, there should no longer be such a thing as supply and demand, or not in the way we understood it in the past. When the marginal cost of another copy falls to zero--the ultimate fate of any digital good, no matter how large, because computers and networks just keep getting faster--then supply, in the traditional sense, becomes infinite. When infinite supply meets finite demand (and demand can only ever be finite), the correct price per copy simply has to be zero.
Of course, acknowledging that would be hugely disruptive to the current structure of our economic world.
And refusing to acknowledge that isn't preventing that disruption. It is only barely--just barely--keeping the old system afloat.