Just interesting, how digital and virtual goods without the cost of scaling would be planned in Parecon?
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I think digital goods would be treated the same way as any other good.
Let’s take digital music for example. The initial cost of producing it requires labor and equipment (inputs) that need to be taken into account. This would be priced during the participatory planning procedure like everything else.
Now, at this point most people would probably assume there’s an unlimited supply of the music, but that’s not really true. You still need to store the files on a server, keeping the server online requires electricity, possibly some labor to maintain it etc.
So, after the artist produces the digital good, it would still need to go through the participatory planning procedure to take into account the costs of storing the file.
I imagine there will be some differences depending on what type of good it is. For example, I imagine most people would view preservation of digital art as a public good… kind of like how museums preserve physical art, maybe we could treat the storage of digital art in a similar way. However, keep in mind that public goods also go through the participatory planning procedure so there’s no difference here in terms of digital vs physical.