Alexander Dolgin

"We like to think of ourselves as an information society, but our ideas about the value of information goods are paradoxically vague, and we ignore the degree to which this interferes with our ability to live and grow as individuals. Value is measured by money—there is no other tool available—but money does a poor job of indicating the value of the symbolic, and this holds us back. This was the conclusion I arrived at in the first volume, which served to prepare the way for the discussion in this [second] volume of how to adapt money so it can successfully weigh the symbolic, meaning the ability to appraise texts defined as broadly as possible."

"...bad content is like weeds. If it is not identified and rooted out, it overruns and suffocates what is truly worth growing. When content appears on digital shelves without… markers of quality, creators are pushed to chase attention rather than deliver real value. As a result, “junk food” crowds the shelves. Consumers find it harder to reach genuine quality... A vicious cycle takes hold: quality becomes harder to find, taste deteriorates, demand for quality declines, producing it becomes less profitable, and the downward spiral continues."

"I want to clarify an important point about adverse selection: despite the fact that the participants in information markets seriously suffer because of adverse selection, and despite the fact George Akerlof’s analysis of the problem, formulated half a century ago, won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001, understanding of the issue is not widespread or available to the general public. Neither consumers nor professional market participants are able to locate the root of evil. The disease has multiple painful symptoms, but without a diagnosis, industry players study them separately and fail to identify a systematic approach to treatment. … As soon as people realize this, an antidote—an assessment of quality—will immediately be found..."

"The principle is similar to the logic behind Google’s PageRank, except that here it is applied to people rather than web pages. The result is something the internet has never had: a ranking of quality, not popularity. It cannot be gamed with bots because donations cost real money, and it gets smarter as more people use it."

"Ratings and recommendations are the two supporting "wings" of content navigation: Ratings identify hierarchies of quality; recommendations show what is right for a specific person..."

"Symbolic statuses are the key to social tension, which is supposedly kindled by economic inequality. But doesn’t the symbolic sphere have anything to do with it? Should we ignore the symbolic just because we don’t have enough information about disparities in the distribution of cultural, human, and social capital? These disparities go undetected by both the Gini coefficient and by sociology, and it will be interesting to see what we can discover by measuring the non-utilitarian economy."

"Suppose that my present self wants to eat cake, while my future self wants me to be slender and fit. In achieving its goal, the first self harms the second and produces something I call negative “inter-externalities” (external effects such as harmful emissions that occur within the individual)."

"...distribution of activities in the utilitarian and non-utilitarian markets is another self-correcting process based on Adam Smith’s mechanism, but with two hands instead of one: the classical invisible hand is complemented by a second hand that is invisible in the very same way. The first hand governs the utilitarian economy through prices expressed in money, while the second coordinates the symbolic sphere through non-price signals… Both hands operate according to the same principle: they are invisible, but they control their spheres using tools that are visible..."

"Altruism is motivated by two norms. One of them concerns helping those who are weaker than ourselves and in need, while the other applies in relations between equals when we give to those we want to be able to rely on in the future. But there is also a third and less prosaic type of relationship in which the relationship is not oriented top-down or horizontally, but on the level and upward; this is reciprocal giving. (i.e., giving a gift to the original gift-giver)."

"Everyone says that subscriptions bring in more revenue than one-time donations. This opinion is the result of inert thinking… we are on the verge of changes that will be dictated by content industries’ need for new sources of income, changes in labor markets, and other circumstances. … there simply isn’t enough money in the content industries—much less than those who want and are able to create content for their own and our benefit will need in order to do so. And there’s no rule that says a one-time payment has to be less than the cost of a subscription."

"Don’t think I am defending advertising. I am simply pointing out that it was a necessary step in the monetization of digital content. We haven’t progressed past this stage yet. In fact, we will never pass it in the sense that advertising will not go away; in parallel, creators are already using a second model—monetizing their content through subscriptions—that will see exponential growth. The third stage is one-time donations."

"As human activity moves to the internet, businesses increasingly crowd online spaces. The $2 trillion brought in by “digital B2C”, including $500 billion from advertising, provides a livelihood for at most a few tens of millions of people—less than 1% of the planet’s working-age population. That $2 trillion in revenue accounts for 1/20 of the non-utilitarian economy, which reflects neither the labor potential of this sphere, nor the time it supplies and absorbs, nor its significance in people’s lives. Therefore, the transition to paid content (by subscription and by donation) is inevitable, and the trends we see in blogging, music, and other segments are what await the B2C internet as a whole."