I liked that Tim mentioned flattr on reddit today. I think flattr gets closer to the kinds of economic models we need. Sure, his take on DRM is rather relativistic, but DRM is not a violation of your privacy, DRM is a violation of the economy. I think that the core of the economic problem is that money encourages people to restrict the flow of information, even in the case of libre software or copyleft information. I don’t think money that is inherently based on scarcity can ever be an efficient medium of exchange for non-scarce resources. This is not to say such currencies exist yet, or that anyone is even building prototypes to fix the problem. I think if we somehow fixed this disparity, the people of the future might do one better than universal access to all knowledge, which still sounds like an overly optimistic dream to many.
