History
The iconic phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand. who, in the late 1960s, founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing. The earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand told Steve Wozniak:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.Brand's conference remarks are transcribed in the Whole Earth Review (May 1985, p. 49) and a later form appears in his The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT:
Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.According to historian Adrian Johns, the slogan expresses a view that had already been articulated in the mid-20th century by Norbert Wiener, Michael Polanyi and Arnold Plant, who advocated the free communication of scientific knowledge, and specifically criticized the patent system.
At the 2008 RSA Conference, Brand's original slogan was complemented by a pessimistic expectation of bug infestation in programming:
Information Wants To Be Free, and Code Wants To Be Wrong.Read more about this topic: Information Wants To Be Free
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)