It's as if we're all at the dawn of a realisation, inspired by the fact that all of us, from peasant to billionaire, use the same Google, that it's neither necessary nor right for everyone to own one of everything. 

An internet-born philosophy currently all the rage in California encourages a simpler, pared-down lifestyle by helping people to reduce their possessions to 100 things — and, naturally, to share their list of 100 things with the world via the internet. The challenge was devised by David Bruno, a computer executive who framed it as a response to consumerism and the recession, along with his unease about the unwanted junk filling his home. Bruno, who is described on the web as an "anti-consumerist entrepreneur", began owning some 400 personal "things" and is now down below 100, although "furniture", "books" and "underwear" all count in his philosophy as one possession each. 

This new all-purpose sharing world heralded and largely powered by the internet is a happy coincidence of a number of cultural, economic, technological and other trends. Its ethical underpinnings undoubtedly lie in the internet's own history, emerging as it did from academia and government rather than commerce. From its beginnings in the early 1970s in the university research community, the internet promoted a tradition of open publication on ideas, data, results, comments — and jokes. Robert E. Kahn, one of the fathers of the internet, specifically proposed that there should be no global control of the network at the operations level.

But since then, and with the worldwide web having become the hub of much of the world's business of all kinds, plenty of that original collaborative ethic has stuck — principally in the form of the "economics of free" or "freeconomics". This is the new business paradigm whereby, if your business is supplying not shoes or bricks or carrots, but anything that consists essentially of digits — whether that be music, research, film, news or any part of the incalculably vast knowledge economy — you have no choice but to start supplying all or part of it free-to-user. 

The economics of free has overturned traditional notions of copyright. In music, for instance, an increasing number of performers no longer regard their recordings as a viable asset to protect and sell. For one thing, it's practically impossible any longer to prevent it from being duplicated a million times and shared illegally. The new sharing culture has ensured that companies like the Swedish Pirate Bay, while its founders may have been found guilty and sentenced to jail time for breaking copyright law, is widely regarded as being morally on the side of the angels. What some would call theft has become cool. Sweden is also host to the near-notorious Wiki-leaks website, which supplies (free) secrets to anyone who passes.

Music is one of the many commodities which, in the digital age, no longer has an appreciable physical substance. "Bits" are the modern iteration of idea. And ideas, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out 200 years ago, can only be "owned" if they are kept private or secret, which rather defeats their point. So performers are increasingly relying, and ultimately may rely entirely for their income, on tangibles — live performances, merchandise and so on — and find themselves in the odd position of being more likely to succeed and become famous if they ignore their own copyrights.