Photo courtesy of Civixen

For the keynote address this morning at VIDFEST, Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson elaborated on his “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business” article which was recently published in Wired (interesting side note, Chris is also publishing a book on the same topic that will be – you guessed it – FREE!). The point he brought up which I’d like to discuss is the statement that “waste is good.”

You could almost feel the audience tense up with apprehension, given our newfound propensity for conservation and saving this little planet. He explained by drawing an example from nature: biology “wastes” all of the time in a continual effort to improve the efficacy of species. Evolution is accomplished through gene mutations – most of which are horribly unsuccessful – until the right chord is struck and the species adapts and becomes more fit for survival. This process of natural selection was likened to both YouTube and the future of the virtual marketplace as a whole: in this new “free” economy, where we can download and upload as much as we please, parade ourselves on stage with unlimited bandwidth and forge entire online worlds without cost, most of the content is complete and utter trash. But like the process of mutations in nature, this trash is a necessary step in order to find the most efficient model for the future of digital and the economy of free.

I immediately thought of how this model could serve to dumb down culture permanently, as in “The Rise of the Idiots,” which is aptly profiled in the British television comedy Nathan Barley (and feature film Idiocracy.) I wonder if we aren’t inviting the evolution of idiocracy by encouraging internet users to produce junk, to exploit every available pocket while leaving a trail of shit in their wake in the process? If people weren’t watching and eating up every second of it, then I wouldn’t be so alarmist. But the public is watching, and they are responding. And that’s alarming.

How do we preserve intelligent, rational thought within this popular media format, which emphasizes fast, quick and mindless content? Won’t this “waste is good” and the subsequent user-generated trash (over 99% of the content is bum, by Anderson’s own mark) condition a vulnerable public into further lowering their standards, eventually resulting in a culture that is nearly devoid of creativity and objective thinking?