Or for consumers to take seriously as companies. And it’s one reason barter-based companies like Facebook and Google and many smaller ones are so hard for governments to regulate. Its revival lies at the heart of the digital economy. I’ll trade a dozen eggs for your chicken.īarter is trading that doesn’t involve money. We’re back in the history-book concept of barter. They didn’t have cash, yet they still had transactions.

One of the curiouser ironies of the digital industry is its core business model, which takes us back to the days of primitive societies. All it takes to be a consumer is to make an exchange, a transaction in the market-place. You’re just a “user” – a word the digital industry likes –or a “member.” To be a consumer you must buy things, don’t you, with money?Īctually, no. The biggest problem is this: when it comes to “free” digital goods and services, because you aren’t using your credit card or getting monthly bills you tend not to think of yourself as a “consumer” at all. (An old saying we could do with reviving in the digital era.) Something for nothing! But, as the old saying goes, when something seems too good to be true, it usually is. While you have to pay to rent books on Kindle, there are plenty of digital goods for which you pay nothing at all. While it looked as if Amazon had come up with a new way to enable you to buy books, what it had really done was re-create something from the 19 th century – the lending library where you have to pay. You can’t sell it, you can’t even give it away, because of course it isn’t really “yours.” You’ve really just borrowed it – or, rather, the right to read it. A Kindle book won’t fill your bookshelves, but there are other things you can’t do with it. Amazon suddenly started offering us digital books – no need to trek to the bookshop, just buy and download!īut “buy” needs to be in quotes.

Alice in Wonderland by Jane Carruth