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The professions, as many others have observed, have served as a kind of “class fortress,” excluding talented, motivated people in service of monopolistic self-preservation. (“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” is known in tech circles as the Shirky princip…

The problem, though, is that it is not clear how file sharing actually addresses financial improprieties or points the way to an arrangement that’s more equitable: unlike a label or studio, where a percentage of profits trickles back to creators, peer-to-peer sites and online locker services return…

“The basic divide at work here is between those capitalists that make money by selling access to content, and those that make money by controlling the content distribution networks,” explains sociologist Peter Frase. “For content sellers like the music business, extremely harsh intellectual pro…

Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women’s movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are…

In-depth reporting is an “ancillary benefit” of this process, an unprofitable enterprise subsidized in a decidedly roundabout fashion. But this model is now falling apart. The Internet, by unbundling the different functions of the newspaper and allowing readers to go direct, has certainly made thin…