Thursday, May 31, 2012

How Facebook Captured Capitalist 'Kumbaya'


Ridley, Matt. "How Facebook Captured Capitalist 'Kumbaya'." The Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2012.

From the opinion: "Human beings love sharing. We swap, collaborate, care, support, donate, volunteer and generally work for each other. We tend to admire sharing when it's done for free but frown upon it—or consider it a necessary evil—when it's done for profit. Some think that online, we're at the dawn of a golden age of free sharing, the wiki world, in which commerce will be replaced by mass communal sharing—what the futurist John Perry Barlow called "dot communism."… But as the float of Facebook shows, commerce still seems alive online. The law professor and economist Thomas Hazlett of George Mason University jokes, "There sure are a lot of billionaires in this new wiki economy."" Read more