The takeaway then is not that all prices will trend towards free, but instead that in the absence of traditional benchmarks pricing trends towards chaos. As traditional standards like Don Draper’s professionalism lose their appeal, we not only lose benchmarks for setting prices, but we also lose any frame of reference for determining when a monetary transaction should be expected in the first place.

I honestly don’t want to knock the hard work of executives who are struggling to survive in a terrible economy. But really. 20,000 products? Each one the result of hours, days, weeks, months of meetings and discussions and agonized decision making. Each one apparently accompanied by a breathless press release describing how it represents genuine innovation, not to mention fabulous design. And yes, some of the products will probably even be a welcome addition to our gadget-laden homes. But this as the face of modern day innovation? Oy.

The Net Delusion is most useful as a reminder of how fleet-footed, rather than leaden, many authoritarian regimes are in their cyber-policies. China is a veritable powerhouse of disinformation technology – not only building effective mobile, social networking and gaming platforms in which users trade off efficiency for surveillance, but also inducing the required netiquette on those services. The Fifty-Cent Party, for example, is an army of blog-commenters who get paid for every dissident blog they snow with patriotic, party-approved rebuttals. More subtly, China encourages blogging that highlights local corruption or poor services, while keeping a ceiling on more ambitious political critiques

“The forces of bottom-up anarchy have reached a similar impasse, and the authorities of the Internet have once again demonstrated their ability to fend off any genuine peer-to-peer activity,” he explained. “This is a tightly controlled network, and you know, that’s why I think the Chinese do have it right in that they understand, ‘Oh, we can control this thing. We just censor the fuck out of it.”

…

“If we want to have a true peer-to-peer network, we now understand what it might look like,” Rushkoff said. “If you want to have something real, we’ve got to build it from scratch.”

Recent polls show that only 13 percent of Americans approve of the job performance of their national legislature — which makes our elected representatives even less popular here at home than, say, Al Qaeda is in Pakistan. (Bin Laden and Co. scored an 18 percent approval rating not long ago.)