"screenprint by Eduardo Paolozzi via { Sci-Fi-O-Rama } { The Local-Global Flip }, or, ""The Lanier Effect""A Conversation with Jaron Lanier [8.29.11] A bit silly to post a thing like this, here, but… it needs to be thought about, re-posted, figured out.  People have to understand that there's no such thing as ""free,"" that  when they buy into a system in which they upload their videos to YouTube  without expecting to make anything (unless they're very lucky to become  a token Horatio Alger story) at the end of the day, or when they  contribute to services like Google+, or Facebook, or other social  networks, what's happening is they're working for the benefit of someone  else's fortune by creating data that can be used to grant or deny  access based on pay to these third parties, the tawdry third parties… … There's a sense of, if you're adding to the network, do you expect  anything back from it? And since we've been hypnotized in the last  eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything  for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our  own contributions aren't worth money… … …we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get  back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the  world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was  initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle  class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of  less and less."
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