As an individual navigating this reality, you have to make choices to survive. Sometimes you happily work for free if it's something you love and believe in. I'm not categorically saying that working for free is bad. I'm just looking at the broader implications of it, and also challenge this idea - and again, this is an argument made by certain people in the tech world - that amateurs are automatically more pure and will triumph over stodgy professionals.

Early on, America took one path and went down the advertising road, and in the UK they founded the BBC and developed a different kind of public broadcasting. There was a point where TV was so beholden to commercial interest that people - civil society - actually rose up and said, "This is ridiculous: we have our soap-selling soap operas, cigarette-sponsored news broadcast; we have our rigged quiz shows - let's put some checks and balances here."

Technology isn't simply addictive - it's addictive because it's a servant to business incentives. There are huge departments in these companies that are devoted to this and staffed by incredibly talented people who have skills that could be put to socially beneficial projects but who are now trying to find out how to make you click and how to maximize your time on a certain site, or encourage teenagers to "friend" more products and constantly engage with them.

And of course the things that get the most attention online tend to be similar to those that succeeded under the old model.

Art and culture are nonetheless vital, essential even, to what it means to be human, yet digital abundance has diminished our sense of their worth.

What we need to do is take that inchoate sense that something isn't right and give it a structural component and the sense that things can be another way.

I'd go to conference after conference and it would essentially be the talking points. Either pro or con. It's amazing how polarized the tech conversation is. There's also this neurological fixation, the incessant wondering what the Internet's doing to our brain: "Does it make us stupid, does it make us distracted?" And then the other guys say, "No, it's making us smarter than ever, and better than ever, and more connected." And it's like, where is the economic and social context? Why is that rarely considered?