The stimulation of demand through advertising and marketing has been driving Western economies since the Second World War, and it works just as well for intangible as tangible goods. So while I agree with your criticism, I don't think you should limit it to the "creative industries" - I think it applies to any industry that would vanish in a puff of smoke without its advertising department.
The "creative class" isn't the class of creative people - it's the class of people whose jobs depend on the production of intangible goods such as stories, music and software. That's why video store employees (remember them?) and software engineers are members of the class but shoe store employees and hardware engineers aren't. It's a well-recognised labour category in the UK, but apparently not in the U.S., according to this excellent article about the creative industries:
In Britain, where the pioneering work on the concept has been done, the category covers design, advertising, theatre, dance, music, visual arts, creative writing, crafts, plus museums and galleries. On the ministerial level it also includes leisure, entertainment, tourism and heritage industries, and sports. The situation in the UK, in particular, is quite different because throughout the 1990s to the present, “creative industry” has been a government-established, recognized, and practiced category for government policy and administration. In the United States, in contrast, the terms “creative industries” and “culture industries” are rarely used outside academic circles. The term “creative economy” does appear in some policy discussions and documents on a local and sometimes regional level. . . . . In other cases, the terms “information economy,” and “intellectual property” are the common framing concepts and cover the effort to control and efficiently commodify creative material, especially in its intangible forms.
If you really have no patience for philosophy, try Game Theory for Applied Economists by Robert Gibbons instead.
John Maynard Smith's Evolution and the Theory of Games is accessible and indispensable.
Less technical works that explore the implications of the theory in fascinating ways include The Evolution of Cooperation (the book that first got me interested in the subject) and The Complexity of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, and anything by Brian Skyrms.
This has happened, and continues to happen, to activists around the world. Michael Anti, the Chinese journalist, was one high-profile case. There's a Facebook fan page about him, but he's no longer allowed to have a Facebook account.
Or, if you don't like Google, use DuckDuckGo, which uses HTTPS by default with no need for a browser extension.
I think something like TPB model is there to stay, if necessary they'll just move it to be a TOR onion site, still centralized but anonymous.
On that point, it's interesting to see clients like MediaGet and Frostwire 5 incorporating search into the client. If one of the sites they rely on gets shut down, not only could the clients switch to another site at the next upgrade, they could potentially switch to another way of contacting the site (eg through Tor, as you suggested) without the users needing to be any the wiser.
Going distributed is THE way of stopping people from shutting you down.
But ironically, what BitTorrent got right (and it pains me to admit this, because I'm a big fan of pure P2P solutions) was centralising the hard parts - search and peer location - and distributing the easy part - content distribution.
Another area where BitTorrent struck the right balance between pure P2P and pure centralisation was in content curation. Gnutella made it incredibly easy to share a file, but the result was a ton of low-quality, badly-labelled, nearly-identical files. BitTorrent made it just hard enough that only a few, relatively dedicated people would create torrents, and everyone else would just redistribute them. I don't think that was a conscious design decision, but it happened to hit the sweet spot.
Your boss will ask you "How much does it cost to adopt v6?" And then he'll buy those v4 addresses.
I agree, at the moment that's what will happen - and arguably that's the rational response, at the level of the firm if not at the level of the net as a whole. But in the longer term I believe a market for IPv4 addresses will have two consequences:
1. Organisations that are currently sitting on more address space than they need will start to use it more efficiently so they can sell or lease the surplus. That will ease the address space shortage.
2. New organisations, which don't face a large upgrade cost if they choose IPv6, will buy a few IPv4 addresses for public-facing assets such as websites and mailservers that absolutely have to be reachable by IPv4-only customers. Everything else will be done with IPv6. Then a few years down the line, someone within each organisation will ask, "What share of our revenue comes through the IPv4 site, and how much is that site costing us?" Organisations on the margin will start to drop IPv4 support, creating extra pressure for the remaining IPv4-only organisations to upgrade.
Does this mean that companies will start selling IP addresses for increasing amounts of money?
I hope so - nothing's going to spur IPv6 adoption like having a dollar cost per IPv4 address that you can show to your boss.
should I buy a block of 100 as an investment now?
If you can get away with it, fuck yes! At this stage in the game it's probably only lawyer-plated companies like Microsoft that can force this past IANA, but once the market opens up, jump in.
In the longer term, however, Freedom Boxes might also be useful for resisting wiretapping. In a post to the liberation tech mailing list (sorry, I can't link to the actual post since the archives are subscriber-only), Eben Moglen gave the following explanation:
On the question, how can personal servers deal with network non-neutralities, the answer is by tunneling among themselves. So Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice live in different places, maybe different countries, and have different upstream connectivity providers. If Bob's Freedom Box notices that he can't connect to port X at address Y, the box opens a tunnel to Carol's box, through the encrypted "route" they share, and asks Carol's box to proxy the traffic. If Carol's can't do it, maybe Ted's can. Alice's freedom box, which is located inside a country with a national firewall, uses Bob, Carol, Ted, and a hundred more of her friends abroad to lift her over the national firewall many times a day.
Clearly the same approach could be used to avoid surveillance as well as filtering. Now, of course, that still assumes your ISP allows you to have some kind of connectivity to some of your friends - NAT could be a major issue here, as other commenters have noted.
* The following torrent sites were studied: Mininova in December 2008, The Pirate Bay in November 2009, and The Pirate Bay again in April 2010.
* Roughly 3,000 user accounts uploaded torrent files to the sites.
* 100 user accounts uploaded 67% of the torrent files, and those torrents accounted for 75% of the downloads.
* Fake content uploaders (antipiracy agencies and malware) accounted for 30% of the torrent files and 25% of the downloads. Many of those accounts could be traced to a small number of IP addresses.
* Profit-driven uploaders (who use free content to advertise private trackers and/or commercial content) accounted for 30% of the torrent files and 40% of the downloads. This is where advertising comes into the picture: people aren't getting paid for the ads shown on torrent sites, they're uploading content as a form of advertising.
* Altruistic uploaders (who release copyrighted content with no profit motive) accounted for 11.5% of the torrent files and 11.5% of the downloads.
(Yes, I realise the figures don't quite add up - I guess there's some rounding in there.)
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."