Digital objects (books in .pdf format, videos on Youtube, news on news sites, etc.) have a property that strictly physical objects (or analogue objects, if you like: paper books, concerts, newspapers and magazines bought from newsstands, etc.) do not.
While being produced, digital objects behave exactly the same as analogue objects: they are rival (or scarce) goods, in the sense that their production consumes finite resources that could be used to produce other goods. Even a Facebook post consumes time - a scarce resource that could otherwise be used - and electricity (also a scarce resource).
But once produced, digital objects are instantly transformed into non-rival goods. A .pdf book I can distribute to all my friends, for example: we'll all have a copy, without me losing anything.
It is precisely this property of digital objects - that they are non-rivalrous goods - that will fundamentally change the world we live in. Because the moment a good becomes non-rivalrous, the economy as we know it loses its meaning.
Economics, since Adam Smith, has been and continues to be the science of optimal distribution of scarce goods. In the 20th century, two instruments have competed for the position of optimal distributor: the free market and the planned economy. Eventually - and somewhat inevitably (at least according to some economists) - the free market won the race. Capitalism has proved to be a much more efficient distribution formula than planning. So efficient that absolute poverty is now disappearing.
But even though it is by far the most efficient mechanism for distributing scarce goods, capitalism has a limit it cannot overcome: only scarce goods can be efficiently distributed within the system it creates. Non-rival goods cannot be efficiently distributed through a capitalist system (or any other system dedicated exclusively to the distribution of rare goods).
We see this clearly enough even today, when the digitisation of nature is just beginning. So far, only word, sound and image have been digitised. And, not coincidentally, the traditional industries of word, sound and image (print media, music, film, physical books, etc.) are collapsing - or at least in massive decline - because they can no longer control the distribution of digital objects as they used to control the distribution of analogue objects.
The current wave of copyright enforcement is, in fact, reactive, designed solely to help traditional speech, sound and image industries temporarily survive the digitisation of speech, sound and image. But with or without the new legislation, in the medium term these industries are doomed to bankruptcy for the simple reason that digital objects are non-rival goods. The inevitable will happen anyway.
And what is true today only for the three industries mentioned above will become true for more and more industries as more and more classes of analogue objects are digitised - until, eventually, the old order based exclusively (or at least predominantly) on the distribution of scarce goods disappears (just as the old agrarian world disappeared with the advent of industrial capitalism).
Tomorrow's world will not be anti-capitalist, but post-capitalist. Just as today's world is not anti-agrarian, but post-agrarian. The change will come about simply by the emergence of new technologies capable of changing the nature of objects from analogue to digital objects, and by the widespread use of these new technologies.
In fact, a new technology for digitising nature already exists in the form of 3D printers. But the use of 3D printers is still in its infancy - and, on the other hand, compared to future technologies 3D printers stand in the same ratio as the first steam engine stands to today's super-efficient engines.
What is certain is that the trend towards the digitisation of nature is already visible and irreversible. And the more classes of analogue objects that can be digitised - and the more efficient digitisation becomes - the more we will enter a new world, the world of tomorrow, centred exclusively (or at least predominantly) on the production of non-rivalrous (because digital) goods. And today's economy, the most efficient of the old world economies, will be replaced by one of giving, of sharing - because non-rivalrous objects are most easily distributed that way.
Of course, in the world of tomorrow there will be communities that will remain faithful to economic exchange as it has been practised since the advent of capitalism until today. But they will be marginal and regarded more as anthropological curiosities, just as we regard the hunter-gatherer tribes that still exist among us today.
