The DeCSS decision was a victory of producers over consumers. But so were DVDs in the first place.

"We are, as an energy source, easily renewable and completely recyclable...All they needed to control this new battery was something to occupy our mind." — Morpheus, in The Matrix

It's all about controlling consumption by cartelizing production. The recording and broadcasting industries work the same way. Consumers can't win, because it's all conceived on producers' terms, by which every consumer's only job is to consume, and to pay for the privilege. Any behavior outside that scope verges on the criminal. Want to share music? Write your own DVD decoder? Nope. Don't mess with the program.

What we call "consumerism" is really producerism. The "consumer economy" is a producer-controlled system in which consumers are nothing more than energy sources that metabolize "content" into cash. This is the absolutely corrupted result of the absolute power held by producers over consumers since producers won the Industrial Revolution.

Now we are in the midst of another revolution — one in which markets overthrow the abstracted substitutes installed for their own convenience by producers and in force for so long that their pathologies are normative — and worse, lawful. Nobody in the industrialized world remembers the real markets that preceded that world's creation.

Real markets rely on balanced relationships between producers and consumers; but those two terms by definition distort the power relationships between the two sides. They are antique. There are other labels, all more accurate and useful: supply and demand, selling and buying, vendor and customer. In real markets, producers don't create products, provide services and arrive at prices entirely on their own power. Liberated from market models built around military, sports and wild animal metaphors, they are free to drop their security obsessions and start talking like human beings again — with customers and everybody else. The survivors will have to anyway, because the only sane way to create and discover value is by talking to each other about what's good for what and how much it's all worth.

We (programmers, actually) built the Net to function as a modern version of the real-world marketplace. It is with this in mind that I offer a couple prepositions for those producerist suppliers who still think they can control demand: Think of business as something you do with and for people. Not to them.

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