The struggle between amateurs and professionals is, fundamentally, a distraction. The tragedy for all of us is that we find ourselves in a world where the qualities that define professional work—stability, social purpose, autonomy, and intrinsic and extrinsic rewards—are scarce. “In part, the blame falls on the corporate elite,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote back in 1989, “which demands ever more bankers and lawyers, on the one hand, and low-paid helots on the other.” These low-paid helots are now unpaid interns and networked amateurs. The rub is that over the intervening years we have somehow deceived ourselves into believing that this state of insecurity and inequity is a form of liberation.

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 things more efficient—we can now download as many crossword puzzles as we desire, go to Craigslist to find an apartment, and visit the local blog or the foreign news aggregator to read about what’s happening in the world. But it has eliminated the cross-subsidies that kept journalism afloat and, by doing so, exposed a form of market failure.

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 known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

“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 property laws are desirable because they create the artificial scarcity on which their whole business model depends. Companies like Facebook and Google, in contrast, mostly make their money by controlling the platforms on which people distribute various kinds of media, and selling access to their user base to advertisers.” For the latter group, looser copyright laws don’t pose a threat to their profits but actually facilitate them; the more copying and sharing happen, the faster their revenues grow.

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 nothing to artists, though they can be incredibly lucrative for those who run them.28 The Pirate Bay, for example, is bedecked by advertising. The now-defunct Megaupload (parent company of Megavideo and Megaporn) made its flamboyant owner, “pirate king” Kim Dotcom, over $40 million in 2011 alone (wealth he famously flaunted all while comparing himself to Martin Luther King). Meanwhile, piracy has set a new, low baseline for artists’ negotiations. Where free culture enthusiasts justify their position by invoking the exploitation of artists under the old model, digital capitalists, looking to build profitable businesses by storing or streaming creative work produced by others, defend microscopic or nonexistent payments by arguing that the alternative is nothing at all.

Of course the advertisers themselves want nothing more than for all of us to encounter their offerings, to “engage” and “interact” with them. We have known for years that culture can be a commodity even when you don’t have to pay for it outright. Those who would protect the cultural commons must see that the challenge is not only copyright, but those who own the platforms and channels through which culture is increasingly shared. On their watch, the cultural commons has become little more than a radically discounted shopping mall, a consumers’ paradise of free entertainment propped up by advertising. What’s being hoarded now are the means of delivery, the channels through which the economic value of culture is realized. The commons can be commodified without being enclosed outright.

Cohen is highlighting a value that has long been central to any progressive movement: respect for labor. From this angle, it’s clear that “copyleft,” as the free culture position on copyright is sometimes called, is not “left” in the traditional sense. As Richard Stallman told me, he designed copyleft to ensure the freedom of users to redistribute and modify copies of software. Freedom to tinker is the paramount value it promotes, but a left worthy of the name has to balance that concern with the demand for equality, for parity of wealth and redistribution of power.

Copyleft, with its narrow emphasis on software freedom, even when broadened to underscore the freedom of speech implications of such a position, offers a limited political response to entrenched systems of economic privilege, and it does not advance limits on profitability or promote fair compensation. Free culture, with its emphasis on access, does not necessarily lead to a more just social order. To pay to watch an independent movie does not mean capitulating to the privatization of knowledge but rather recognizes the work that went into making it and provides some support so that the effort can continue.33

The commons are accessed asymmetrically, like the massive repositories of genomic data that have been made available online by scientists who hoped the repositories would become a “global resource, shared equally,” but which have been overwhelmingly used by private biotech firms in a handful of wealthy countries. The romance of the commons—the idea that a resource open to all will be accessed equitably and create a more just outcome, that differences evaporate online, openness ensures fairness, and the goods can be “free” to all without negative consequence—ignores the problem of inequality. In reality, differing circumstances, abilities, assets, and power render some better able to take advantage of a commons than others.

Marketers, understandably, have never wanted to underwrite an independent content industry, but in the wake of the quiz show scandal they had no choice. Because newspapers, television channels, and radio stations controlled access to audiences, advertisers were strong-armed into ponying up money that funded investigative journalism and educational programming. In the analog world, publishers and broadcasters bundled people into audiences, which they sold to advertisers. But in a digital world, advertisers can “buy the audience without the publication.” The sorts of people who read the New York Times, the Nation, or Cat Fancy can be reached outside of those channels, bought and sold elsewhere on the Web at a fraction of the price, with the revenue going into other pockets.

While it may look like we are getting something for nothing, advertising-financed culture is not free. We pay environmentally, we pay with our self-esteem, and we pay with our attention, privacy, and knowledge. But we also pay with our pocketbooks, and this is key. Advertising is, in essence, a private tax. Because promotional budgets are factored into the price we pay for goods, customers end up footing the bill. That means that, all together, we spend more than $700 billion a year on advertising, a tremendous waste of money on something that has virtually no social value and that most of us despise.

Advertising, after all, doesn’t feed or house us, or educate us, or enlighten us, or make our lives better or more beautiful. Instead, advertising makes our culture less spirited and fearless, more servile and uninspired. Surely all that money could be better spent producing something we actually care about.