..
So, I’m trying to figure out what bothers me so much about my recent disagreement on facebook over piracy and intellectual property. I think it’s the fact that these content creators would rather people go without than that they get a free copy of their content – they acknowledge these people can’t pay for it but they think that means they shouldn’t have it.
In general digital assets and capitalism are not a great fit, as I’ve mentioned, because you end up with a finite resource chasing a infinite one. For a long time the cost of buying content was mostly the cost of the carrier the content came on – and now, of course, the majority of the profit generally goes to the publisher and not the individual.
I think part of what bothers me about this is these people can see the police abusing the homeless and stealing their tents and be like “this is fine”. They can know we have 40 years of oil left after which we are all going to starve to death and capitalism is blocking us from solving this and be like, “this is good”. It’s like how I can’t fathom how anyone could continue to support religion after how many times religion has been epicly wrong – I mean, we’ve got things like Galileo, sure, we’ve got encouraging abuse of gay people despite a long list of reasons why they shouldn’t which I think I’ve documented elsewhere. I can *totally* understand why places like China want to outlaw Christianiy – it’s destructive! At the same time, I can’t really embrace the idea of outlawing ideas because once you start that, where do you stop? It’s one of the slipperiest slopes there is and I don’t think anyone is ever going to be unbiased enough to make good decisions on the topic.
But, yes, there are many people who *love* the current system and want to perpetuate it – and I’m talking about people who are barely making ends meet. Just as there are many who are convinced Christianiy is the Only True Way and even that it’s totally reasonable to abuse other folks based on them not being Christian.
It’s depressing. I probably need to focus away from the large picture government etc for a while because it’s gotten too depressing.