Nick Carr points to a piece by Jaron Lanier in the New York Times, wherein the virtual-reality guru with the wacky dreads talks about how he has changed his mind about the whole “information wants to be free” thing and would just really like to get paid, thank you very much. Maybe the virtual-reality guru and experimental musician/filmmaker business isn’t paying off any more and Jaron needs the rent money.

In any case, (as Nick himself points out), what Jaron suggests is virtually impossible. In fact, his rant might as well be entitled “I Want To Put the Genie Back in the Bottle Please.” Information of all kinds has breached the wall and is hurtling in all directions, unable to be contained — or not for long anyway — or metered or subjected to a toll approach. That’s a fact. One hopes that Jaron hasn’t been advising the music industry (and he clearly hasn’t been talking with Rupert Murdoch).

On a related note, author Harlan Ellison has a similar rant about getting paid, which you can watch on YouTube. It seems that Warner Brothers wanted him to contribute to some kind of DVD — for nothing! Can you imagine the gall?

I think Harlan Ellison has written some amazing science fiction, and I am a huge fan, but after listening to his rant on YouTube, I get the impression that if he were a musician, he would charge you for singing Happy Birthday at your kid’s party. In fact, if you happened to pass by his apartment on your way somewhere and heard him singing in the shower, he would probably want to charge you for that too.

It’s ironic that Ellison’s rant is on YouTube, where it is free — and where I saw it and got at least a little value out of it. If it had been on a DVD somewhere, I would never have seen it. Does Harlan get any value from me seeing it on YouTube? He might someday, theoretically. But Harlan wants cash in his pockets right now. He doesn’t want to build a relationship with me as a reader, or any of that New Age crapola.

Tell you what, Harlan. I’ll keep my money to myself, and you keep your rants to yourself. And that goes for you too, Jaron.

As usual, I’ve accumulated a pile of things I want to blog about, and might eventually — but until then, here’s a few links:

• NowPublic.com has gotten financing from Brightspark and some angel investors, as was mentioned at mesh a couple of weeks ago — founder Michael Tippett was on a panel there about the future of journalism, and did a great job of holding his own with Om Malik — and Pete Cashmore at Mashable.com has a post about how NowPublic wants to take a slightly different route in “citizen journalism” or “participatory media” (my preferred term, and I think Mike’s too).
• Stuart MacDonald, who knows a thing or two about airlines from his days running Expedia, has a great post about how little attention is being paid to the auction of spectrum for in-flight Internet access, something you would think more people would be interested in. I know I would, if only I could actually afford to travel anywhere. Maybe we should call in-flight Internet Hi-Wi :-)
• Mark Cuban, the gazillionaire blogger and owner of the Dallas Mavericks (plus HD.net and some other stuff), has a post up about how journalism matters — although he says it needs to change (and I would agree). Carlo Longino of MobHappy and TechDirt.com, however, says on his personal blog that journalism is broken.
• Roelof Botha, the Web 2.0 guy at Sequoia Capital who spearheaded their investment in YouTube, talks to SiliconBeat.
• Another couple of journalism notes: Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz talks about the paper’s redesign and how it is being influenced by the web (Tim Porter’s take is here) and on a somewhat-related note, Globe and Mail editor-in-chief Ed Greenspon took some questions on the paper’s website, and had some interesting things to say.
• Jaron Lanier has written a long rant about the collectivist — and even flat-out communist — kind of “hive mind” he sees behind a lot of Web 2.0 such as Wikipedia, something that Andrew Keen got a lot of mileage out of, and a line others have parroted as well. Why we should take Jaron’s word for it just because he helped invent “virtual reality” way back when is beyond me. And Umair Haque of Bubblegeneration has a nice deconstruction of the piece.
• Last but certainly not least, the Pew Internet and American Life study is out and it has found that 50 million Americans are content creators.