No, the article was on Cracked.
The argument being made is that while you may be able to not buy bottled water or transplant ebooks, eventually you will be rendered digitally redundant, and what happens then?
This was one of my gripes with Richard Morgan's otherwise excellent books. They can stack you, they can copy you (otherwise multiple sleeving wouldn't be possible), and yet there's still any kind of demand for individual labor? (His last book sort of tackled it.) Get one ideal worker and sleeve them in a bunch of synths.
That won't happen. That's like saying "WHAT IF WE WERE FORCED TO USE BATTERIES FOR EVERYTHING?" This is why we also have government able to regulate things like tap water. The government, in theory, exists solely for our benefit. Why would it want to get rid of tap water and force us to pay x20000 more for water? It wouldn't, because we'd tell it that we don't want to. And you can always circumvent ebook DRM by taking a picture of the screen, whether a screen-shot or not. If you don't want it that badly, then you obviously don't care enough to complain, so there's no problem.
"Don't care enough to complain" is very dangerous line of thinking ... ; You can justify anything with it... and if you look at history and especially at totalitarian regimes for just a moment, then i guess all these oppressed people just didn't care for their freedom all that much? :coughs: Any amount of unhappyness and even outright rebellion hits a brickwall if the government or whatever instituation is the culprit has an adequate amount of "control".
In the case of DRM... why do you think company execs are having wet dreams about unique IDs on CPU's (which we already have - Intel anyways) coupled with a mandatory registration of your real life ID as a requirement to access the internet?
Funny you should mention sex, I'd almost argue that this would go against the biological imperative. Granted I'll admit my knowledge on the subject is layman's but if you go for the idea that we strive to succeed to ensure we reproduce and pass our genes. If you remove the ability to achieve and stand apart from your other competition that goes against what's hard wired into your crotch.
But who says we have removed the ability to achieve? I can think of many ways you can achieve in a world where property has no monetary value.
1) Physical beauty - A good looking woman is still a good looking woman in a world without money, people will still value the way she looks. Women who aren't as beautiful will still wish they were as good looking.
2) Physical abilities - This one goes hand in hand with the above. It will be a while before we don't value a good football player or dancer.
3) Artistic ability - You might not pay for their work but that doesn't mean that you don't value the artist whose mp3s you download.
And that's just off the top of my head. The value of something becomes less due to the difficulty in producing it and more down the beauty of the item. In your example of the motorbike what would make your bike valuable is not the cost of the bike but how you riced it up. 
Exactly... furthermore... i would even argue that it is monetary value that dilutes and distorts actual achievement. We only use it as value measurement because it's easy and convenient... but that leaves the fact that it is in no way accurate. The tragedy of the status quo is that we have become so used to valuing everything with money that we started to value other people by their monetary value as well... or worse, even our own achievements.
Why is money value not accurate? Because it's a binary equation. A "yes" "no" question. Can it be valued in money OR not. One should easily see how simply by valuing everything with money... you are easily overlooking or at least depreciating everything else that might matter: You know, like, environment, human rights, family, Happiness, healthcare, nutrition... or some weak worthless concepts known as "moral values" and "integrity".
For anyone interested in the symbolic and diabolic nature of "money" and the effect the "binary" choice it presents us with has on your society i would highly recommend "Niklas Luhmann: Social Systems".
The irony of it all being that the basis of "economical rational thought"... the model of the "homo oeconomicus" is statistically proven rather the exception than the rule.
