Two years ago, John Oliver called Tom Wheeler a dingo.

The host of “Last Week Tonight” had set his sights on the then-raging net neutrality debate, acerbically calling out broadband providers like Comcast and Verizon for their throttling antics and intense Congressional lobbying. Midway through the segment, Oliver dryly pointed to President Obama’s appointment of former cable and wireless lobbyist Wheeler as the new head of the Federal Communications Commission — “the equivalent of needing a babysitter and hiring a dingo.”

“[Now] that they are overseeing their own oversight, it is hardly surprising that cable companies are basically monopolies,” said Oliver.

This claim — that the FCC has been captured by the very interests it is supposed to regulate — has been around for years. The path from a Commission seat to an aisle seat inside Comcast’s private jet and vice versa has been wide open for years: former FCC Chairman Michael Powell is now the president of the National Cable and Telecom Association, which counts Comcast as its largest member. Former FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker … left the agency to work for Comcast. The list goes on.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Apple just reported its quarterly earnings, and while iPhone sales jumped 12.7 percent from a year ago and Macs were up 17.6 percent, iPad sales dropped for the second quarter in a row — down 9.2 percent from a year ago. There’s basically insatiable demand for iPhones around the world, particularly in the BRIC countries, but people seem to have enough iPads. Just look at this sales chart from The Verge:

All these sales are cyclical, but that iPad trend is basically flat over time — and since all the leaks indicate Apple’s about to launch new iPhones with much bigger screens, the case for having an iPhone and and iPad is about to get a great deal murkier. Why would you buy a phone with a 5.5-inch screen and a tablet with a 7-inch screen? You can certainly make a case for Apple’s larger iPad Air, which I own and thoroughly enjoy, but the numbers don’t lie: all the action’s in the phone market. Here’s another chart from Jackdaw Research published at Business Insider:

Look at that iPhone line compared to the iPad line! It’s incredible — and the recent trend is incredibly surprising. Look at the early slopes: the iPad started off by growing just as fast as the iPhone, and it managed to completely disrupt the traditional laptop industry. Microsoft is still scrambling to catch up. But now iPad sales have plateaued. Why?

The iPad is getting squeezed on both sides

When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPad, he promised that it would better than phones and laptops at various things like browsing and email and watching videos. It was a good pitch in 2010 when the iPhone had a 3.5-inch screen, but in 2014 the argument needs some work. Being good at a bunch of consumer things like browsing and email is fine, but newer phones with big screens might be even better for those things, since they’re with you all the time. And being better at watching videos and playing games than laptops is fine, but laptops are much, much better at actually doing work. Bigger phones are starting to disrupt the low-end uses of the iPad, and the iPad isn’t flexible or powerful enough to continue disrupting the higher-end uses of laptops. Apple’s tablet is getting squeezed on both sides.

The Wall Street Journal put it succinctly in its report on Apple’s earnings:

One challenge for tablet computers, in general, is that they aren’t quite as portable as smartphones but also aren’t as useful as computers when it comes to doing office work.

When I reviewed the iPad Air last year, I proposed the College Freshman Test: if you were a college freshman, would you feel comfortable taking only an iPad to school instead of a MacBook Air? The answer right now appears to be no — and Apple seems to know it. The company just announced a major partnership with IBM to develop apps and services designed to push the iPad into big enterprise environments, and the company just aired a terrific new ad for MacBooks — the first MacBook ad in years.

And of course, none of this is to say anything about Android tablets, almost all of which have been dismal flops. Android phones generally have huge screens to begin with, and Android tablet apps are decidedly mediocre bunch, so they’re just not worth it. The only potential success is Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which is inexpensive and comes with a huge content library, but Amazon won’t release sales numbers for it, so it’s impossible to know.

Apple’s best move might be to take the iPad from big iPhone to small MacBook

The biggest knock against the iPad when it launched was that it was “just a big iPhone.” With bigger iPhones just a few months away, it appears that Apple’s best move might be to turn the iPad into a smaller MacBook.

Have you used Yo yet? I’m getting pretty into it. It’s a silly little app that literally just sends the word “Yo” to a friend’s phone. If you have audio alerts turned on, a hyperactive little man also yells Yo at you, which is adorable and terrible all at once.

Yo is surprisingly popular and growing fast; last week the company received another $1.5 million in venture capital after getting an initial $1m last month. The ultimate goal is to build out an entire Yo network to try and rethink how notifications work. It’s a particularly good example of the tech industry building a seemingly-ridiculous solution to a small problem that contains the germ of a much bigger idea within it. Yo might succeed or it might fail, but for the moment it’s pretty fun to play with.

the lasting legacy of Yo should be to make the NSA seem utterly and ridiculously wrong

But whatever happens, the lasting legacy of Yo should be to make the NSA’s position on collecting phone and email metadata seem utterly and ridiculously wrong.

Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the NSA is allowed to collect business records that might be relevant to a terrorist act. Under an expansive reading of this rule (are there any non-expansive Patriot Act readings?) the agency claims that it’s allowed to collect records of basically every call and email in America. Not what’s being said, but who’s talking to whom and when. This is known as metadata, or data about data, and collecting it is ultra-controversial: on one side the NSA claims that information about network traffic is just another Verizon or AT&T business record, and on the other privacy advocates have struggled to explain just how personal and revealing metadata can be.

But spend a couple minutes with Yo and you’ll get it.

There isn’t any other data — there’s just Yo

Yo represents the radical idea that literally any communication from people in your network is valuable to you — it reduces the actual content of the message to secondary status and lets you fill in the blanks. A Yo from my wife at 10am means something different than a Yo from a coworker at 10:15, which means something different than a Yo from a friend at 11. You can set Yo up to turn your air conditioner on and off. A Yo from Amazon might mean that a package has arrived; a Yo from Netflix might mean that the latest season of Scandal is now available to stream.

Written letters to emails to IMs to tweets to Snapchats to Yo: human communication has gotten shorter and more complex all at once. Yo explicitly highlights the value of metadata: who sent you a message and when. There isn’t any other data. There’s just Yo.

In this context, the NSA’s position that it should be allowed to collect the bulk metadata of millions of phone calls and emails is insanity. Just draw the thread out to Yo: if the NSA is allowed to collect metadata from Yo, it will straight-up be collecting the communications of millions of Americans, because there simply isn’t any other data to collect. When the NSA allows the FBI and CIA to conduct thousands of searches for the communications of Americans, the charade of getting a warrant to dive past the metadata will be rendered inane: you can talk to the judge, but all you’re gonna get is Yo.

you can talk to the judge, but all you’re gonna get is Yo

And when people are killed based on metadata, as ex-NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden has admitted, Yo will find itself behind the trigger of a gun.

There’s a lot of conversation in Washington about the NSA and bulk metadata collection; a handful of bills have appeared, and Obama has proposed ending the program if Congress authorizes the NSA to quickly collect similar data from phone companies. (Which may or may not actually accomplish anything, really.) A couple court cases have divided appeals courts and the issue might end up at the Supreme Court.

In short, everything’s up in the air. The issue feels wonky and the solutions are caught between the legitimate needs of law enforcement and the seemingly endless complexity of digital communications.

But it’s actually pretty easy to understand. Just download Yo and send a couple Yos to your friends. Ask yourself if the government should be allowed to collect that information without a warrant.

Yo.

The NFL and DirecTV have finally — finally! — wised up and decided to sell a package that lets anyone stream football games to their phones, tablets, and / or game consoles over the internet without requiring a full satellite TV package. You could get a code that allowed streaming last year if you pre-ordered the popular Madden NFL video game, but this year it’s just wide open.

This is a huge deal that’s the direct result of the NFL’s explosive popularity in the market: DirecTV’s exclusive rights to Sunday Ticket expire in 2015, and the company has hinted the rising cost of NFL exclusivity might be too high in the future — leading to rumors that Google is interested in streaming games on YouTube. DirecTV opening up an app like this is the first step towards locking people into a new online football experience before Google does it better.

Unfortunately, the demand for football is so insane that the new (terribly-named) NFLSUNDAYTICKET.TV service is super expensive: the basic package starts at $199 to stream games to phones and tablets, goes up to $239 to stream to the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, or Xbox One, and skyrockets to $329 if you want both mobile devices and consoles.

it’s stupid-expensive, but it’s still football, and football is wonderful

That is stupid-expensive, fairly illogical (who thinks about streaming to consoles only like that?) and really only makes sense if you’re an NFL executive hellbent on squeezing every last dime of profit out of the game before someone finally figures out that brain injury thing.

But it’s still football, and football is wonderful and better than soccer. And you can still get it legally over the internet now, instead of begging your brother-in-law for his DirecTV password or searching for illegal Russian streaming sites that almost certainly steal your identity. That’s progress. That’s capitalism reacting to exploding demand by ruthlessly windowing and segmenting a product into ever-more-annoying chunks until you just pay the highest price to stop dealing with it.

That’s America. Go Packers.

That headline is 100 percent pure clickbait, the finest in the world.

Let’s talk about why after you answer the following four questions, which I adapted from Boyd Multerer, Microsoft’s brilliant head of Xbox platform development. Be careful with your answers: you’re looking straight at the disruption currently upending the entire media industry.

What these questions demonstrate is the disquieting idea that art itself might be worth nothing — the prices we pay for it are entirely set by distribution and scarcity. When I wrote that Taylor Swift doesn't understand supply and demand, this is the issue I was trying to highlight. It's all well and good for Taylor Swift to think artists should charge for music, but even Taylor didn't make what Forbes estimated at $64 million in earnings last year selling records. "It's safe to say that, even in an album year, the bulk of Taylor Swift's earnings total comes from touring, merchandise sales and endorsements, not album or single sales," says Zack Greenburg, the Forbes senior editor who compiled the estimate.

Just think about the first two questions. The raw materials for an oil painting cost about $200, while an oil painting by Picasso costs $155 million. Simple subtraction should tell you that the art itself is worth $154.9998 million — that's how much value Picasso added to the raw materials.

Picasso adds virtually no value to pixels on a screen

But that can't possibly be true, because a print of the same painting only costs $60, and images of the same painting online cost $0. This is supply and demand at its most brutal: as the cost of copying falls and the supply heads towards infinity, the price you're willing to pay falls to $0. Picasso adds massive value to oil paints and canvas because it requires massive effort for him to make a single copy. Picasso adds a little value to paper and ink because it only requires a little effort for printers to make a lot of copies. And Picasso adds zero value to pixels on a screen because it requires zero effort for computers to make infinite copies.

This is a fundamental truth of media; trying to create artificial scarcity with technological solutions that prevent zero-effort copying causes so many problems that that Steve Jobs once wrote an angry open letter to the music industry demanding that it drop digital rights management technology from song files. Museums are trying to figure out how to get people to pay for GIFs, but there are entire artistic movements dedicated to stripping away copyright-protection tech from digital artwork and sharing it widely. The physical scarcity that built the media industry is gone, and it ain't coming back.

the price of media is falling to zero because it's not inherently scarce anymore — it's inherently ubiquitous

This isn't a particularly new idea; it's just a threatening one. If you're Sony Records or Paramount Pictures or whatever, digital media is an existential dilemma: the price of art itself is falling to zero because it's not inherently scarce anymore — in fact, it's inherently ubiquitous. That's why Transformers 4 is setting worldwide box office records even while romantic comedies are rapidly going extinct, and why aging rockers keep coming back for tours years after their expiration dates: all the money right now is in experiences and spectacle.

But there are other solutions to creating value when scarcity of distribution goes away online. The tech industry has been completely driven by the need to create value from something other than scarcity ever since smartphones took over the world and app distribution moved completely online — software used to be really expensive when it came on disks, but now the most popular price for apps on Apple's App Store and Google's Play store is $0. Unlike the music industry, the software industry knows CDs aren't coming back, and they're trying all sorts of things to deal with it:

• Multerer, who works on the Xbox, is of course fond of pointing out that games and interactivity create tons of value: he often describes American Idol as nothing more than a video game. "It is a two-hour cut-scene followed by one hour where everybody picks up their game controller (their phone) and votes, followed by a one-hour cut scene," he writes. "It is brilliantly designed so that you can't DVR it (skipping the commercials) without losing your ability to vote. The act of copying it lowers its value. The voting is a virtual scarcity."
• Ephemerality creates literal scarcity; things that go away have incredible value while they exist. That's why TV networks pay enormous amounts of money for the rights to broadcast sporting events like the World Cup and awards ceremonies like the Oscars: they force people to tune in and watch in real time, because once they're over their value falls to zero. And it's why ephemeral messaging apps like Snapchat are worth billions: the app makes messages from your friends feel valuable by simply deleting them after a few seconds.
• Communities also create value: a bunch of people talking about the same thing is great, and a bunch of people you know and trust talking about the same thing is incredibly valuable. Twitter pops up alerts letting you know when a lot of people are talking about the same thing; Facebook drives so much traffic when people start sharing things that it's changing journalism. It's spectacle on a five-inch screen, and you're checking your phone just to keep from missing out.

A little bit of scarcity in a market of infinite supply can create unstoppable demand

And these efforts to create new business models that don't rely on physical scarcity are making huge amounts of money. In-app purchases tied to game mechanics are so effective at getting people to pay for things that the FTC settled a lawsuit against Apple earlier this year over what it deemed to be confusing and unfair in-app billing practices; the agency just filed another against Amazon a few days ago over the same thing. (Apple also tattled on Google during its proceedings, of course.) A little bit of scarcity in a market defined by infinite supply can create unstoppable demand. Just ask anyone who's shelled out cash to keep playing Candy Crush Saga.

And then there's the journalism industry, which is currently in the middle of a frenetic period of investment and invention as it moves from the inherent scarcity of bundled physical distribution to the inherent abundance of disaggregated digital distribution on social networks. What's the biggest, most visible trend? Clickbait headlines.

You'll never guess what happens next

Clickbait headlines are so out of control that The Onion just launched an entire site to make fun of them. They irritate and annoy. But they're also super effective at driving traffic and attention, because they're basically just games. Upworthy's now-infamous "You'll never guess what happened next" headline construction is a one-question pop quiz; a call for the reader to actually guess what happened next, and then verify that guess by reading the article. It creates value because there's a chance you'll be rewarded with the smug satisfaction of being right. (And if even you're not, you still get to share that question on Facebook to trick your friends.) Clickbait irritates when the real answer doesn't live up to the wildest guesses of the reader; no one cares if what happened next is actually boring. The virtual scarcity of the game doesn't create any value.

So yes, that headline up top is super clickbaity. This post has a list in it. I even added a quiz to increase its interactivity so other people can't copy it as easily as I copied it from Boyd. (I hope he's proud of me.) All because I want you to stick around and think about what Picasso's masterpiece Le Rêve should really be worth when you look at it online.

Somebody should tell Taylor Swift what happens next.

The Wall Street Journal continued its series of interesting people writing op-eds about their industries with an essay from Christopher Nolan about the future of movies last night. More specifically, it’s about the future of movie theaters: Nolan, the director of Inception and the massively successful Dark Knight Batman films, thinks they have a bright future. “The theaters of the future will be bigger and more beautiful than ever before,” he writes. “And they will still enjoy exclusivity, as studios relearn the tremendous economic value of the staggered release of their products.”

On its face, this tracks right alongside Taylor Swift’s WSJ piece arguing that people will still pay for albums instead of streaming music: a superstar predicting that the medium that made them famous should and will survive in the face of massive technological change. The difference is that while Swift basically ignored the tectonic shifts that have rocked the music industry for the past decade to argue that people will pay for music, Nolan’s piece is about how similar shifts will actually force Hollywood and theater owners to create better physical experiences.

The switch from film prints to digital distribution will change what movies are shown in theaters

It’s hard to believe, but a significant number of movie theaters today still rely on huge reels of film to project movies. There are lots of reasons for this: digital projectors haven’t been as bright as film projectors, it’s expensive to constantly upgrade equipment as technical standards change, and Hollywood traditionalists are loathe to switch away from 35mm film. Nolan notes that Quentin Tarantino thinks that digital projection will be the “death of cinema,” with movies reduced to mere “content” that can be shown instantly on any screen at any time. “‘Content’ can be ported across phones, watches, gas-station pumps or any other screen,” writes Nolan. “The idea would be that movie theaters should acknowledge their place as just another of these ‘platforms,’ albeit with bigger screens and cupholders.” This is basically what anyone in the tech industry would say; this lack of respect for the art of cinema is one of the many reasons Hollywood and Silicon Valley don’t really get along.

this lack of respect for the art of cinema is one of the many reasons Hollywood and Silicon Valley don’t really get along

But the shift to digital makes fundamental economic sense, as it’ll virtually eliminate the costs of processing, storing, and shipping all those huge film reels around the world. And since theater owners who invest in digital projection won’t have to manage their investments in physical movie reels, they’ll be able to instantly change what movies are showing based on demand. “A movie’s Friday matinees would determine whether it even gets an evening screen, or whether the projector switches back to last week’s blockbuster,” says Nolan. “The process could even be automated based on ticket sales in the interests of ‘fairness.'” This is the movie theater as giant on-demand screen; Nolan notes that Quentin Tarantino calls it “television in public.”

digital distribution will be terrible for filmmakers who aren’t blowing up robots

This is actually a pretty radical idea, and it’s rooted in the most important change of the digital media age: the decoupling of content from physical media. If you were a theater owner 20 years ago, you had to make a series of risky investments every weekend that were entirely governed by the fact that movies and the film reels they came on were essentially the same thing. You had to predict how many people would want to come see the movies you were showing. You had to pay to lease and ship the reels from the studios. And you had to dedicate screens to showing those reels. If Pulp Fiction sold out on one screen but your showing of Natural Born Killers was empty, you were screwed that night: you only had one set of Pulp Fiction reels, so you had no way to serve any more customers.

Switch that over to digital, and suddenly, the inherent scarcity of film reels goes away. The theater owner can just grab another copy of Pulp Fiction, switch over the other theater to that film, and make everyone happy. The most popular movies win, since they’ll make the most money.

This sounds great for moviegoers and theater owners, since hot movies will be less apt to sell out, but it’s terrible for filmmakers who aren’t blowing up robots. “Instant reactivity always favors the familiar,” says Nolan. “Smaller, more unusual films would be shut out.” People will still venture to theaters for blockbusters, but they’ll watch everything else at home. That’s why romantic comedies are basically dead.

But this is where Nolan does something pretty amazing for a major Hollywood filmmaker: he says this is a good thing.

Movie theaters are already innovating like crazy

After laying out this “bleak future” for movies, Nolan argues that Hollywood and theater owners will have to create a better and more innovative theater experience in order to meet the consumer demand for shared experiences. “We moan about intrusive moviegoers, but most of us feel a pang of disappointment when we find ourselves in an empty theater,” he writes. “The public will lay down their money to those studios, theaters, and filmmakers who value the theatrical experience and create a new distinction from home entertainment that will enthrall — just as movies fought back with widescreen and multitrack sound when television first nipped at its heels.”

“The theatrical window is to the movie business what live concerts are to the music business.”

What Nolan is arguing for is the creation of scarcity in the form of experiences. “The theatrical window is to the movie business what live concerts are to the music business,” he says. “No one goes to a concert to be played an MP3 on a bare stage.”

That means theaters have to create experiences you simply couldn’t have at home, and Hollywood has to make movies that are obviously superior when you watch them in a theater. What’s interesting is that Nolan doesn’t point out that it’s already happening: 3DTV was a failure, but 3D movies are enormously popular. Gigantic IMAX-style screens are proliferating across the industry. AMC is ripping out seats in favor of full-on recliners. And theaters around the world are now showing “4DX” versions of movies like Iron Man 3 augmented with moving seats, water jets, fog machines, and strobe lights. The first 4DX theater in the US just opened last month in LA; more are sure to follow.

3DTV was a failure but 3D movies are enormously popular

All this will require new talent from Hollywood, says Nolan. “The cinema of the future will depend not just on grander presentation, but on the emergence of filmmakers inventive enough to command the focused attention of a crowd for hours.” This, too, is happening: Gravity is a great movie, but there’s something sad about watching it at home on a flat screen instead of in a theater in IMAX 3D. Transformers 4 might have the world’s most incoherent plot, but Michael Bay is a master at commanding his audience’s attention, which is why his robots had the biggest opening weekend in 2014 and the biggest opening weekend in China ever.

But TV is getting better than ever

The one thing Nolan misses in his piece is television — he glazes over it as a negative by predicting the demise of theaters will push storytelling innovation into the home, but he doesn’t point out that it’s already resulted in TV shows that can easily stand alongside the best feature films. Breaking Bad is essentially a 50-hour movie; it would never work in theaters. True Detective featured two major movie stars in what was essentially an eight-hour art flick about the unknowable mystery of narrative. Game of Thrones is just so much obviously better as a lengthy TV series than as a collection of movies that it’s startling. And Netflix series like Orange is the New Black and House of Cards are designed from the outset to be experienced from start to finish in a binge, so they’re constructed like long movies; House of Cards, in particular, seems to have opening credits for each episode mostly so viewers can go to the bathroom.

TV shows like Game of Thrones can easily stand alongside the best feature films

That sense of entitlement — Nolan saying “cinema’s rightful place [is] at the head of popular culture” — is both the opportunity and the danger for the movie industry. There’s more entertainment available to people than ever before, and it’s both better and easier to access than ever. If Hollywood is going to save the theater experience and create the spectacle and celebrity people love, it had better take all of its competition seriously.

The Wall Street Journal just published an amazing essay from Taylor Swift, in which she argues that the music industry is not dying, but in fact “just coming alive.”

Based on this piece, there are many reasons to believe that Taylor Swift has not been paying very much attention to the music industry.

Taylor Swift doesn't know how people value music

Taylor says that in her opinion, “the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace.” This means she thinks artists should make high upfront investments in their albums, and then set correspondingly high prices on them at retail. It’s a bet that music consumers will reward quality.

the vast majority of consumers actually reward convenience

This might make sense if you’re Taylor Swift and your enormous army of fans will pre-order anything you tell them to, but the most important lesson of the internet music revolution is that the vast majority of consumers actually reward convenience. That’s why the iPod was a huge hit even though digitally-compressed music sounded terrible at the time, and it’s why teenagers today get most of their music on YouTube, even though YouTube sounds worse still. It’s also why the album is dead: you can’t sell a handful of singles and some okayish filler songs to people for $10 or $15 or $25 anymore, because convenient internet music distribution has utterly destroyed the need to bundle everything together. You can just Google the singles and listen to them for free.

This isn’t news to the music industry: according to Nielsen numbers released just a few days ago, album sales just keep tanking. Only five records have sold over 500,000 copies so far in 2014, compared to 11 this time in 2013. (The notable exception is the Frozen soundtrack, which has sold 2.7 million copies so far; the next highest seller is Beyoncé’s self-titled album is at 702,000.) That’s why the industry has has increasingly moved to so-called 360 deals that place far less emphasis on an artist’s album sales in favor of taking a cut from touring, merchandise, and licensing. It’s also why subscription services like Spotify are probably the future of the industry, and why Apple just spent $3 billion to buy Beats mostly for its streaming service, not its headphones line.

I saw Beats co-founder and former Interscope Records chairman Jimmy Iovine speak in June just after he sold the company to Apple, and he bemoaned the fact that artists are churning out bad-sounding singles while touring instead of spending years in the studio crafting Led Zeppelin-like masterpieces. “It’s a simple problem,” he said, describing his efforts to find new revenue models with Beats and now at Apple. “The album is going away.” Cranking out singles while on the road makes perfect economic sense right now: touring is one of the few music industry activities that still makes money, and recording songs quickly reduces the upfront investment needed in a product that no longer generates a ton of revenue at retail. Here, just watch Jimmy say it himself.

Taylor Swift does not understand that the internet killed scarcity

Taylor makes a nice little argument in favor of paying for music. “Music is art,” she says, “and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is.”

This is an impressively-constructed syllogism. It is also deeply, deeply wrong.

the single hardest economic problem posed by the internet is the end of scarcity

The single hardest economic problem posed by the internet is the end of scarcity. Even just 10 years ago, most people experienced a one-to-one relationship between creative works and the physical objects they were delivered on: your music came on CDs, your movies came on DVDs, and your news came on printed magazines and newspapers. Since there’s a scarce number of these objects in the world, it’s easy to buy and sell them, because their prices will follow the laws of supply and demand: limited-edition vinyl records will be more expensive than regular CDs, because there are simply fewer of them. If you wanted a CD full of songs in 1995, you went to a store and paid for them, because there was essentially no other way to get those songs. Even if you wanted to steal the music, you had to pay some price: you needed to have a friend with the right CD, and you needed time and blank CDs to make a copy.

But on the internet, there’s no scarcity: there’s an endless amount of everything available to everyone. The laws of supply and demand don’t work terribly well when there’s infinite supply. Swift is right that “important, rare things are valuable,” but she’s failed to understand that the idea of rarity simply doesn’t exist in the digital marketplace.

This is such a huge idea that our perceptions of appropriate behavior in this market are still being hashed out, because our inherent sense of right and wrong is still tied to physical objects. Most people wouldn’t shoplift a Taylor Swift CD or a Transformers DVD from Best Buy, but I don’t know anyone who feels particularly guilty downloading pirated music or movies. We all know that bootleg DVD stands are doing something illegal, but the internet literally went black to protest SOPA, a law designed to crack down on digital bootleggers.

Taylor is right that music is art, and that art should be valuable, but figuring out how to value art in a world without scarcity is a problem unlike any other in human history. It’s why subscription music services like Spotify are the only way music makes money in countries that have rampant piracy, and it’s why Apple had to buy Beats to compete. The only real answer anyone’s got so far is advertising, which is probably why Taylor’s RED tour was sponsored by Keds and product placement is so rampant in music that the Chris Brown song “Forever” was literally an extended Doublemint gum jingle in disguise.

Taylor Swift is right about how valuable she is

But Taylor’s not all wrong: she points out that some artists “break through on an emotional level” and their fans “cherish every album they put out until they retire.” She points out that her fans had all seen her latest tour on YouTube already, and that she wanted to surprise them with special guest performers. “We want to be caught off guard, delighted, left in awe,” she writes.

being Taylor Swift is perhaps more valuable than Taylor Swift’s music

That’s exactly right. People will pay to go have experiences they treasure, and they’ll pay for spectacles like a Taylor Swift show. And they’ll pay to get a piece of someone they’ve connected with — that’s why there are hundreds of teen YouTube stars you’ve never heard of selling out shows around the world. “In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans — not the other way around,” writes Taylor. We’re in that future now; that’s where Justin Bieber came from. Here’s Iovine again, noting that people will pay for experiences, but not for simple access to music. “It’s not enough.”

But hitting that tipping point is almost impossible for the vast majority of artists working today, and their inability to actually sell music means they have to sell other things — and making all those other things means they’ll have less time and money to put into making their music. It’s a vicious cycle, and it means that being Taylor Swift is perhaps more valuable than Taylor Swift’s music.

After all, Taylor Swift is a scarce resource.

Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old when he was tasked to write the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress in 1776, rendering entire generations of Americans slackers by comparison ever since. Jefferson at 33 boldly captured the will of a people frustrated with their absentee king and declared the equality of all men to be a truth powerful enough to abolish an unjust system of government; the rest of us are mostly trying to figure out how to set up our ETrade accounts.

America.

there’s a chance we’ve been reading the Declaration wrong for over 200 years

But there’s a chance we’ve been reading the Declaration wrong for over 200 years. According to Danielle Allen, a professor of social science at the Institute of Advanced Study, the most common reproduction of the Declaration contains an extra period that changes the meaning of Jefferson’s original words. “It’s the difference between good government and bad government,” she says.

Here’s the version almost everyone knows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

And here’s the version where Allen says the period after “happiness” should actually be a comma:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It’s a very small difference, but Allen argues that it changes the construction of Jefferson’s argument significantly. In the popular version with the period, there are only two self-evident truths: all men are created equal, and they’re endowed with certain unalienable rights like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s the foundation, and everything after that is an argument in service of abolishing British rule and starting over. “A lot of people just stop reading after ‘pursuit of happiness,'” says Allen. “What do you lose if you stop reading?”

Change that period to a comma, though, and the list of self-evident truths suddenly grows much longer: all men are created equal; they’re endowed with certain unalienable rights; governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed; when government becomes destructive, it’s the right of the people to abolish it and create a new system most likely to bring them safety and happiness.

“When you read the whole sentence, all of those points are equally weighted,” says Allen. “It moves from the individual to the collective, from me to we. There’s a lot more responsibility we all have in building a government. It’s not just what do I get, or what’s in it for me. It highlights the obligation to participate at all levels.” Lose the comma, and we’re all just pursuing happiness without any regard for one another.

“It’s not just what do I get, or what’s in it for me. It highlights the obligation to participate at all levels.”

And there’s more: the notion that power of government comes from the consent of the governed wasn’t necessarily self-evident in 1776. England itself had only undergone the Glorious Revolution and adopted its Bill of Rights in 1689. Louis XIV ruled France as an absolute monarch until 1715; it took the French Revolution in 1789 to fully reject that idea. And Russian tsars ruled as absolute monarchs until the Russian revolution in 1905. The difference between a period and a comma is the difference between Jefferson simply arguing the case for American independence and Jefferson casting the American idea itself as a self-evident truth.

“Self-evident doesn’t mean obvious,” says Allen. The missing comma is required to create a syllogistic argument that starts with the basic premise of equality and builds into what she calls “the people’s right and responsibility to build a government that supports their flourishing.”

This is heavy stuff for a typo.

So what happened here? It’s hard to say; the original Declaration on display at the National Archives is so faded it’s impossible to simply read. But Allen says the period doesn’t appear on that version, on Jefferson’s rough draft on display at the Library of Congress, nor on any versions produced with approval of the Continental Congress in 1776. There’s also no period on the version copied into Congress’ official records at the time.

This is heavy stuff for a typo

But the period does appear on a famous copperplate engraving of the Declaration created in 1823 by William Stone. If you’ve seen a copy of the Declaration of Independence, you’ve almost certainly seen one created from Stone’s engraving, which took him three years to make. (It’s also on display at the National Archives.) In her paper on the subject, Allen says the original Declaration was so faded by the time Stone started working that he just made “an honest mistake.”

“Two other people tried to do engravings in the 1810s and they kind of made a hash of the punctuation,” she says. “The document in all probability was quite illegible.”

Two experts consulted by the New York Times agree that there’s no period on the original document, although it’s now so faded it’s nearly impossible to tell with the naked eye alone. But there’s hope this will get cleared up: after two years of lobbying from Allen, the National Archives told the Times that considering ways to safely re-examine the original document is a “top priority.”

It must be said that this would be an excellent opportunity to examine the back for a treasure map.