Suppose that an inventor creates an antigravity device that allows cars to fly. The workings and construction of the device are such that it is cheap enough for everyone with a car to afford one. The inventor recognizes this and forgoes the monopolistic remuneration a patent would give him and instead takes several lucrative private and public grants to do further research.
Within about fifteen years nearly every car has been retrofitted with an antigravity device and there have been tens of millions of streamlined aircars already manufactured. An aircar's means of locomotion are much more elegant and efficient than the traditional powertrain and hydrocarbon combustion engine of a groundcar. Things are going great, and it seems that the technology has brought a new era of truly universal transportation. Since the marginal cost of an aircar is merely a fraction of a groundcar, nearly anyone can afford one.
Inspired by the visionary rhetoric of the inventor of the aircar, new air routes were created, administered by volunteer aircar consortia. Cars fly by computer and auto-negotiate air traffic to find the best route from departure to destination. Soon people are traveling globally at minimal cost.
Suppose that roads in this hypothetical world are all privately owned and tolled by the corporations that construct and maintain them. The road corporations have been set in their business models for decades and even centuries for some of them. Roads are obviously essential to anything more than an economy and a society of isolated villages, so the need for them has been pretty constant throughout history. As a consequence, the road corporations have been collecting revenue for years, and have been amassing wealth through their simple but reliable business model for years. None of them could have anticipated the advent of aircars, for they all had accepted long ago that the need for roads would continue forever. Some of them even started to believe in Biblical prophecy to that effect.
The Road Industry Association of America, or RIAA, was formed in great alarm soon after the advent of aircars. The purpose of this body was to petition the government for redress. Their arguments were as follows,
Roads have been around since before the beginning of history. We are the inheritors of that great legacy. Our member corporations take great pride in the quality and efficiency of their products. If our businesses fail, we will irrevocably lose an invaluable tradition. Our society cannot afford to lose the service we provide them, therefore you must force them to support our existence.
The government acquiesced to these plaintive demands and began passing laws requiring aircars to travel routes strictly above established roads and must touch down at every way station to pay the toll for the roads. Aircars were to travel at road speeds only and pretend as if they were traveling on a two-dimensional surface, and flight by computer was expressly prohibited. Some road corporations tried to be more cool with the younger drivers by building toll towers with credit card readers so that aircars wouldn't have to touchdown to pay the toll. Others were considering a subscription model, which consisted of installing a black box on every aircar that prevented the function of the vehicle if it was found to have subverted the new laws. In the end it seemed that the road industry just might be able to survive the technology that made them irrelevant after all, and they celebrated.
But this celebration was abrupt, for it was cruelly punctuated by a near universal transgression of the new laws. Drivers everywhere, not just the young, were not following protocol, but continued flying their aircars along the same air routes. To them the existence of roads was an historical curiosity, not something that would get in the way of their lives. No retrogressive industry could rightfully claim to contain the human spirit and profess to control its flight with fetters of ignorant greed.
In reaction to this, the RIAA resorted to more menial, less indirect means of confiscating their toll money. They amassed lawyers in an effort to harvest fines against any and all unluckily targeted drivers. They marshaled teams of actors, artists, graphic designers, and authors in the production of a new propaganda aimed at every demographic. The essence of this propaganda was to celebrate how invaluable roads have been and will ever be, and that all moral people will dutifully render tax at the road industry's beckon.
*****
While no allegory is perfect, especially those of my own design, I wish to illuminate this one with whatever of my thoughts upon the matter may radiate understanding. This allegory, like the real situation it endeavors to model is unfinished. To me, this is a point of optimism. Greedy companies may have demanded our allegiance, but greed eventually rots from the inside out.
The inventor is a metaphor for the human spirit--always striving to improve the human condition. Aircars are a metaphor for the new technology that makes records, tapes, and CDs irrelevant. Since the advent of the WWW I have been awaiting with some impatience the creation of the free universal library of human knowledge and art. For the first time ever technology makes this feasible, but its coming into being is much slower than it should be. The RIAA are played by themselves. Industries that have spanned eras somehow seem to think themselves entitled to existence. Backward thinking like this has helped form the philosophical basis of today's possessivist culture, where copyrights and patents are no longer contracts between creators and society, but "properties" to be had and sold and devices which indeterminately stifle the natural recycling process of art and culture. Standing on giants' shoulders is no longer an opportunity for every last artist who only has tenacity and talent to recommend them. It is a luxury for corporations so entangled in the damning legal contracts that encumber every last frame on the cartoonist's workbench. That is the legacy of the roads, the legacy of the RIAA.
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