"The Sharecroppers Are Revolting"
We’re in the midst of a fundamental generational shift in the way we think about property. Those of “us” on the fuddy-duddy side of the equation have been trying to understand what Ownership and Copyright will mean as technology progresses, but we may have been asking the wrong question all along.

I’ve written recently about something I call Digital Sharecropping – building on someone else’s framework, and how it’s about as safe as building on sand. Businesses that build their entire presence on Facebook are essentially trusting a third party to not evict them, or change the rules in a way that disturbs and disrupts. Those of you with ________.blogger.com or _________.typepad.com sites are Sharecropping. ________.wordpress.com and ___________.tumblr.com and ___________.cafepress.com and ___________.posterous.com and twitter.com/___________ and…

You get the point.

If you don’t own your site, you’re just Sharecropping.

But even those of us who “own” our URLs are really just renting them from registrars. Yes, as long as I pay the fee I can use occamsrazr.com and positiveposition.com and pigott.name for the rest of my life. I can even bequeath those domains. But it’s still rented.

So is the server I am hosted on, for that matter. And the DNS programs that point and route my traffic.

You can’t be on the internet and be completely self-sufficient. But you can “own” as much of the process as you want to, and enough to make you comfortable that you’re the master of your destiny, and won’t get booted off your patch of pixels.

The mistake we’ve made is assuming that everyone would want to.

Perpetual Renters

The New York Times recently had a brilliant piece examining how today’s college students view plagiarism.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

The piece makes a point. How respectful will people be of others words on a screen, when it’s on the same computer that was used to rip CDs and DVDs, and watch a torrent of something that was on pay-per-view?

Later, it poses the question about whether the incoming generation will even want to express themselves as individuals.

The Curse of Plenty

In some respects, renting can be low-stress living. There’s something to be said for logging in, leaving traces and walking away. No need for fancy formatting or themes, or the headache of upgrading your sites. The web pioneers with the earliest sites and blogs wouldn’t have needed them if there had been easier ways to express themselves.

Maybe we should have seen this coming before now. After all, Facebook – the poster-child for one-size-fits-all presentation – has exploded. MySpace, at the vanguard of customization and individuality, is struggling to redefine itself after nearly choking on digital glitter.

Many of us have been operating under the assumption that people would want a means of owning their work, and making a statement. And we’ve been wrong.

Maybe it’s the outgrowth of a lack of scarcity. When there is plenty for all, there’s a diminished desire to hoard. Books are tangible and take up space. Television shows were once temporal, available at a limited time that required you to synchronize. Now, everything that’s digital can live anywhere and anywhen — and when something can do that, there can be no scarcity.

“If there’s no scarcity, there’s no inherent value. So why should I pay for it?”

It’s twisted logic for me — but then again, it’s based on premises that I didn’t grow up with.