Kelly suggests what could be Better than Free

 Cyber seer Kevin Kelly has written a guide for the writer/artist/professional/corporation baffled about how to make a living when it’s oh so easy to make knock-offs.

His advice in Better than Free is forget what used to make you valuable and cultivate eight new ways to create experiences, relationships or artifacts that can’t be easily duplicated. These are generalizations rather than tailor-made prescriptions, and the transformation won’t be easy even for those who accept his logic. Kelly writes:

“Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution . . .  Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model . . .money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits. “

Thanks to Tim Bishop for pointing me to Kelly’s essay.