Shirky: The Web and How Complex Societies Collapse
Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 5:21 pm
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/th ... ss-models/
Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. ... When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”