Sharing digital work grows its value rather than depleting it, unlike scarcity economics

The RA documentary closes on ‘data love’: when you share something digital (code, a pattern, knowledge), the original is not diminished and value in the network grows - ‘if you share something it grows in value much like love.’ This is offered as an alternative to capitalist scarcity logic (a copy shared is a sale lost) and is linked to Mark Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’ - the difficulty of imagining an economy outside capitalism. For live-coding communities it means sharing code, tools, and performances is not naive charity but a rational strategy that grows collective capability and the tools’ quality, while each sharer keeps what they shared.

Examples

McLean shares TidalCycles publicly; members share patterns; the shared vocabulary and tools improve for everyone, and no sharer loses their copy. Contrast a scarce product where every copy given away is revenue lost.

Assessment

Contrast ‘data love’ with scarcity economics using a concrete live-coding example, and name one risk to data love as a sustainable community practice.