Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 7 months agoWe live in a world where it costs essentially nothing to replicate a piece of information 7 billion times and distribute it everyone on earth.
A world where the pirate bay does that for the couple of grand that they get from some porn banner ads.
We live in a world where there is no reason for information to be scarce. The entire systems of copyright and patents and IP are hamfisted ways of creating artificial scarcity so that information retains value in a world where it could be ubiquitous.
I see what you are saying but it’s somewhat different that resource scarcity, there is no scarcity in the ability to transmit information, but there is still information scarcity.
However, what makes information still valuable is the difficulty of first discovery. It costs money to go on the ground in a war zone and find out what’s happening, and if nobody did it, we just wouldn’t know.
This doesn’t even factor in the costs of filtering through misinformation and disinformation.
However, what makes information still valuable is the difficulty of first discovery. It costs money to go on the ground in a war zone and find out what’s happening, and if nobody did it, we just wouldn’t know.
It’s actually valuable in a real world sense yes, but the point is that the mechanisms of capitalism say that if it’s completely unscarce its value should be $0. So the instant that piece of information is digitized and put on the internet, it’s value rapidly drops to $0.
We could easily afford to let information be replicated and distributed freely, except for this problem that it doesn’t fit neatly in the mechanisms of capitalism because we would stop rewarding first discovery.
So what did we do, did we come up with a new system that rewards first discovery but still allows information to flow freely?
No. We invented made up concepts like parents, copyrights, IP law, DRM, technological walled gardens, etc. and spend billions of dollars a year on them, all to create artificial scarcity just to hamfistedly mash an information economy into the rules of a material economy.
Okay give me this mythical system that rewards first discovery without those ‘made up concepts’
(By the way whatever you type next is a made up concept by your own definition just so we’re clear)
The point about made up concepts is to point out that there is nothing fundamental, foundational, or intrinsic about IP law. It’s just an arbitrary system that we made up that we can replace with a different arbitrary system.
It’s really not hard to imagine a system where a certain portion of the government budget is devoted to rewarding artists and inventors and then the number of streams / downloads / units sold / etc means that they get rewards from that pool of money. We spend billions on creating systems of artificial scarcity, you put all those people and all that money to work and you can come up with a feasible system that catches most edge cases.
Old knowledge is abundant, new is not. If takes effort to discover/create new knowledge. Patents and copyright are there to allow the inventor/creator an opportunity to monetize their invention.
Patents and copyright are there to allow the inventor/creator an opportunity to monetize their invention.
Yes, and they’re a dumb way of doing that because they are systems based on creating artificial scarcity where there is no actual need for it. The only need for creating scarcity is because capitalism requires things to be scarce for them to have value. Rather than looking at a system other than capitalism to reward creators, we spend billions of dollars and waste thousands of peoples lives dedicated to creating systems that enforce artificial scarcity.
How do you reward inventors then?
it’s not just inventors, there are so many other people. Even if food is free who is going to keep or ship it to someone who needs it?
I feel like most of the comments here are written by people who have never worked full time job and don’t know how hard it is. Most likely bunch of kids.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 7 months ago
If you have enough information you have noise, and hence less information. It actually does not work like electricity or any other physics phenomenon.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Is a library noise just cause there’s a lot of information in there? We’re talking about a user being able to reach out and copy and modify information, presumably from a curated source they trust.
Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Yeah but that doesn’t get rid of the fact that the information it self is still easily reproducible. What you are saying is that there still needs to be effort in curating information, but you aren’t saying that there is a cost of reproducing information.