Clay Shirky produces consistently incisive thinking about social software and social uses of technology. His latest essay, The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed is no exception. It considers why peer to peer encryption has not been more widespread, and likens the effect of the RIAA’s legal campaign against alleged file sharers to prohibition in the United States

“The music industry’s attempts to force digital data to behave like physical objects has had two profound effects, neither of them about music. The first is the progressive development of decentralized network models, loosely bundled together under the rubric of peer-to-peer … [a]nd the second effect, of course, is the long-predicted and oft-delayed spread of encryption.”