Unquiet Desperation

value (noun): relative worth, merit, or importance: the value of a college education; the value of a queen in chess.

Looking back on the increase of digitally-available content in the last five years has caused me to reflect upon the concept of Value.

Debating the relative worth of anything is a tricky business: it is both subjective both on a personal level (the worth or importance of a friendship, a job, etc), and subjective on a societal level (the worth or importance of a book, a college education, etc).

What is the relative worth of a digital work?  What is the importance?   Does the fact that it is digital affect it’s value?  How does time figure into the equation? For instance, is Tee Morris’s Morevi or Scott Sigler’s Earthcore more valuable than Nathan Lowell’s Captain’s Share or J.C. Hutchins’ 7th Son: Deceit because the former are two of the first podcast novels?  Is NIN’s Ghosts albums more valuable than the CDs released before he went for releasing digital copies on the Internet?

How does obtaining digital works for free affect how we value the work?  For instance, is an album of songs that you purchase from iTunes as important to you as the albums you buy on CD or the free version you get direct from the artist?  Is the podiobook of Matt Selznick’s Brave Men Run as important to you as the hard copy you purchased?

Perhaps a more accurate way to measure the value of a digital work is to ask about the effect of loss. Which would trouble you more, the loss of Mur Lafferty’s podcasted or PDF version of Playing For Keeps, or the loss of the hard copy you bought?

Personal Value vs. Monetary Value

Digital content has zero material production cost, and because of that, it is possible to offer it for sale at a much lower cost than a physical production. Because it is digital, in general, you can also replace it easily, if not instantly. The same cannot be said for physical goods…even next-day shipping is not instant gratification for most Internet dwellers.

How does that instant gratification change the way we make purchases, and conversely, how does it change how we budget money? Do you, personally, have a budget for online, instant purchases? Or are digital products an impulse buy?  If so, what does that say about the product’s value to you?

Because we can purchase digital products instantly, and because they can be replaced easily, I think we value them less. The relative pain of replacing them if lost is so low that we do not think about the purchase critically in the terms of the relative value to us.  We function much more on the instinctual than the reasonable level when buying digital goods.  It can be summed up in two words. WANT. CLICK.

We have the potential to consume digital products like locusts consume crops.  And like the majority of impulse buys, the majority of those purchases (iPhone games, iTunes singles, etc) transition quickly from something shiny to kipple¹ in a matter of days, sometimes even hours.

Think back. What percentage of the digital content that you have downloaded have you kept? How much have you lost track of? How much do you back up, just in case of a hard drive crash?

Capitalism is, by it’s nature, driven by consumption. There is nothing wrong with that when we apply rational critical thinking to the process of purchasing an item. My question is: has the advent of digital content fundamentally changed they way we think about purchasing goods, and if so, is that change for the better?  Or, has this change made consumption a reflex, a non-thought? In both cases, what does that say about the bond we have with the content, what is it’s relative value to us when compared to a real-world physical product?

(Note:  I edited this post after the original release, due to a mistake…edits I had made did not take the first time for whatever reason. I apologize for any confusion this may cause.)

Responses to this post:

• Considering the Value of Digital Goods @ thecommandline.net
• Value, Worth, Merit and Intangible Goods @mattselznick.com

1. [coined by Philip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?]
   the collection of useless bits of trash we wallow in; all the paper and junk that is not recycled; decaying entropic trash[back]

Something you never thought you’d see:  Old English translated to leetspeak.

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You can find the Old English Beowulf here, sans leetness:  http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a4.1.html

(It’s Friday before a holiday…what did you expect? Productive work?)

In this episode of of the podcast, I talk a little bit about coming back from Los Angeles, the state of my various projects, and go into some details about the fiun had at Origins 2009 this year. Also, a bonus rant/ramble about why people like me are the Game Vendors’ Worst Nightmare:

Links for this show:

• Pinax
• Origins 2009
• War, Season 5 of Heaven
• Fluxx and Family Fluxx
• Are You The Traitor?
• Necessary Evil
• The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia

Names dropped: Kris Johnson, Jim Van Verth, Mur Lafferty, Ken Newquist, David Moore, Erin Moore, Natalie Metzger, Andy Steigle, John Cmar, Laura Burns

Download the show here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I’m not sure about you guys, but the world is wearying me more easily these days.

It might be the last two years of absurdly hard work on my part, it might be the move back home. It might be starting a new job.  it might be all of these things, but I feel like it goes deeper than that.

Sleep can recharge the body, but how does one recharge the soul?

That’s where the weariness lies, I think. Life fatigue — the spirit is weak.  The speed at which things happen, the constant barrage of media, of the tasks you MUST do, the sense of false urgency that surrounds us today.

I was out in L.A. when I realized that I spent so much time “reasoning” things out (read: whistling in the dark), trying to control situations around me, that in the end, I felt like it was all slipping through my fingers because you cannot hold on to so much. My wife calls it living in my head. Critical thinking is good, but sometimes it’s better to feel; to drink in life instead of breaking it down so you can digest it.

The soul doesn’t exist to consume the world. It’s meant to experience, revel in, and produce beauty.

I know that all of you reading this are busy people, so I ask you, how do you take care of your soul?

Phil Plait’s latest article flew past me on Twitter today, and I was speedy enough to catch it and give it a read.

Read this before continuing: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/24/from-distant-planets-to-the-deep-blue-sea/.

I happen to agree with him that even in times like these we need to fund scientific research, in fact, I’d point out that especially in times like these. When the economy is uncertain, it’s all too easy to gaze into the complexity of the problems that face us and want to run screaming into the arms of a comfortable superstition to make us feel better.¹

Good science brings hope. It’s good for the country’s morale. When we make progress, when we understand more about the world around us, we are made a better people. We have a goal, beyond trying to figure out just how to undo what the greed of a few has wrought.

I want to cry when I see how NASA has fared in the last 20 years, perhaps longer, because the boneheads in Congress lack the foresight to embrace science as a priority. My father worked for NASA, and I was lucky to be one of those kids exposed to the Wonder of space and science at an early age. I want my children to have the same, but these days, NASA gets more press when things go wrong than when things go right. That’s an injustice of the highest kind.  We take the Space Shuttle and other advances for granted, forgetting what marvels they are.

I could not agree more with Dr. Plait’s final statements:

It is not only possible, but I believe mandated, that all of us who love science and want to further the knowledge of humanity support each other’s endeavors. The public does in fact have a great interest in many fields of science, including space exploration, ocean exploration, biological exploration…

The key word there is exploration, and there’s enough Universe out there for everybody.

1. No, I’m not talking about Atheism or Religion here. I’m talking about the unreasonable ticks that arise in every one of us when faced with something out of our control.[back]