I agree with Stephen’s comment. Taking a slightly different tangent with this point, does this (and Harry’s example of GIMP from class) touch on a distinction that Professor Moglen was speaking of in class? Assuming anarchist functional goods are made better and anarchist aesthetic goods are distributed more efficiently (which I think is right), why aren’t anarchist functional goods distributed more efficiently as well?

At this point I think they’re not. I can only speak from personal experience, but I never knew that there were functionally better options to photoshop (GIMP) or cheatguides (mycheats). I am struggling to understand why this is. In truth, I’ve never searched for these alternatives and I’m sure that with a few simple Google searches I’m sure I would have found these superior options. But I think there is something to an information/advertising/branding difference between anarchist and capitalist products in alerting people to what the alternatives are. Perhaps with some priming or habituation to the internet, people will understand that better functional options are available on the internet (which in turn will make these options distributed more efficiently), but at least from my experience, it doesn’t seem we’re there yet. So, am I making a proper distinction between these two types of goods? I can’t think of a legitimate reason why online, superior anarchist functional goods should not be distributed better than capitalist produced goods, except for that capitalist products have an advertising budget that gets information, and cost, passed to the consumer. Am I conceiving of this difference correctly and is that why Prof. Moglen distinguishes the benefits of anarchist functional and aesthetic products?

-- BrendanMulligan - 22 Oct 2009