I've been thinking about the whole filesharing thing a lot lately and one aspect I've come to realize is this weird value paradox. By that I don't just mean value in a monetary sense but literally how we've come to value and appreciate music when it becomes pure information. Before the advent of mp3s there was just music as a physical, tradeable commodity whether that be a cd,vinyl, etc. But with the creation of mp3s, music literally became pure information and reduced to binary code. Obviously without this transformation sites like oink and soulseek could've never existed. Eliminating the factor of time and space in terms of distribution and accumulation, filesharing sites were able to build up an unending amount of music/data and users were able to gorge themselves on an endless accumulation of it. The only physical constraints left were storage capacity, a pretty miniscule obstacle in comparison to storing actual physical objects in a space.

That fact has clearly had a massive effect on ideas of use value/exchange value. One of the things that really peeves me about filesharing naysayers is their implicit valorization of private property as an ineffable law. There's no preternatural reason why any objects should be bought or sold. That especially goes for 'intellectual property.' That term more than anything points to the constructedness of property in general. By abstracting itself from spatial concepts (i.e. landed property) into something as indefinable and mercurial as creative production, how could the whole idea of private property be anything but an ideological construct? What frustrates me about the indie community that shuns filesharing is how much this is lost on them. That's not to say taking Marxism 101 is required entry into indiedom. Clearly that's ridiculous. But what bothers me about all this is how symptomatic it is of the total lack of salience 'indie' as a term has these days. When people focus more of their attention on kids downloading illegally (god forbid!) and griping about its economic fallout; something is very very wrong.

And getting back to what I was saying earlier, the real problem with all that is how its basically trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Clearly, the logic of filesharing has torn the old notion of value to shreds. But the real paradox for me is this: to what end? Has mp3s made music more valuable or less? Wouldn't one expect, with the advent of filesharing, that the elimination of music as a commodity would make mp3s more valuable? Or at least in the Marxist sense, if we eliminate exchange value don't we get outside the grip of the commodity fetish into some realm of 'real value?' If anything though, mp3s have made music less valuable, not more. Being able to freely and endlessly gorge ourselves on music has muted our reception to it instead of making it more immediate. I suppose the troubling part about all this to me is the realization that we might need the commodity fetish after all to create value to begin with, whether that be for music or anything else. Without any constraints, whether that be fiscal or spatial, we value music less not more. But if that's the case, what are the consequences?