The ArtLab

I had dinner last month in San Francisco with a cultural rebel, a young Internet activist friend of mine with fashionably subversive views about media. We dined South of Market, and after we'd polished off a bottle of Burgundy, I could tell he wanted to shock me.

"You know, I'm against intellectual property. My generation is never going to pay for content again," he said, raising his empty wine glass and smiling at me. "Big media is bad media. Your world is finished."

Whereas in the '60s, the divisive generational issues were free love and marijuana and Vietnam, today the great culture war between the young (him) and the old (me) is the economic and cultural value of traditional intellectual content. Members of my analog generation remain comfortable paying for their newspapers, books, movies and music. But many of his digital generation, having grown up on the cornucopian commons of free online content and semi-legal piracy, have been unwilling to spend money subsidizing what they consider to be obsolete large media companies.

"So how should journalists or creative artists be paid?" I asked.

And that, of course, is the crux of the problem. If hardly anyone younger than 50 has been paying for content on the Internet, and online advertising is failing to subsidize content (even YouTube is still struggling to make money), how does any media company - big or small, good or evil - survive?

But here is where he really surprised me. Rather than dance around my question, he actually had an answer, a solution that really shocked me and would, no doubt, shock most Americans with faith in the efficacy of the free market.

"The government is the solution," he said. "Media must be nationalized. We need the government to invest in high-quality journalism and in online culture."

Unfortunately, the young activist isn't alone in turning to Washington, D.C., to subsidize free media. More and more Internet radicals now see a government takeover as the solution to the economic crisis of traditional media. Take, for example, Free Press, a Washington group that promotes network neutrality and recently has come out in favor of large-scale government subsidization of online journalism. Indeed, at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City two weeks ago, I debated Josh Silver, president of Free Press, who called for an enormous government investment in a BBC-style American public broadcasting company.