"Information economy," revisited

I had some freaky results when trying to log into someone else's FTP server today, but, thankfully, I didn't have to sort it out myself. (You know who you are: Thanks again!) The issue turned out to be related to the site's setup and the hosting company's firewall more so than the FTP server itself.

But at the time I didn't know that. So I did what I normally do in such situations, which is to ping the Office Alpha Admin. Unusually (for him), he had no idea what the symptoms meant. So when I did have the answer in hand, I fired off the explanation to him, in case it was useful enough to squirrel away in his big administrator's bag of tricks. A small recompense for all the times that he has come through for me.

To me, the term "information economy" has a different meaning from the phrase hyped half to death during the decade previous. Regardless of whether or not we work in I/T, it functions all around us, just on the level of village (rather than global) marketplace. As it has done for millennia. I've worked in "villages" large enough to allow the most skilled to cheat layoffs by functioning, more or less, as a stockbroker (or maybe black market trader) in information. But in villages of all sizes, the trade is definitely based on barter rather than cash.

Which is maybe why I normally have so little patience for rumor-mongerers (on one end of the spectrum) and the self-appointed gatekeepers (on the other end). One floods the market with pinchbeck goods; the other hoards valuable information and artificially drives up costs to serve its own ends. Neither adds value, only friction. Because that's one market you want function as efficiently as possible for all who choose to deal.