I thought about shadow libraries, archives of books shared without heed to licencing or remunerating authors or publishers, and I was struck with the idea that the reason that much of the world has lived in poverty and economic stagnation since 2009 is not the real-estate 'global financial crisis' of that time, but due to the rise of the internet. Over time, everything digital has become increasingly devalued and increasingly worthless. This applies particularly to text-based factual information. Encyclopedias were once expensive, rare, treasured, even bought as investments. Now these are nearly worthless, as is so much journalistic content. News media and quality journalism has been all but destroyed by free news found online.
The things of value are those things not digitised, or not yet digitised, but it seems that the trend for digitisation will continue, and with it the devaluation of that content. I wonder if the total amount of value online is constant? It would be interesting to know the ratios of valuable digital information (some digital items are, of course, sold) vs. cheap or free digital information. Of course, much data is also lost over time, also something of a tragedy.
The value of digital items is mostly lost by piracy or free acquisition in legal ways. There are, of course many digital items intended to be low value from the outset, such as automatically created content.
That which retains value is that which is not yet digital, or that, like paintings and sculpture, which cannot be digitised fully. AI perhaps represents a start of the digitisation of personality.
Of course, our personalities are sold as commodities by social media to construct an advertising profile, this is the business model of these giants, so they consider this information valuable. I remain unsure whether it is. I'm sceptical about targeted advertising, it seems to me something of a scam. Social media companies make money by charging others to advertise, not by selling anything of value. Those advertisers have little choice but accept the if the 'personalised advertising' theory whether it actually works or not. Before social media, ads were not personalised, yet advertising was a thriving business, and the concentrated attention of people on social media would, I posit, still drive a lot of commerce without any targeting.
