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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I mean, I have no qualms about biting the bullet with #4 and I am someone who would almost certainly be dead of a childhood illness in that world. Humanity does not deserve those things that would not have been produced without the current legal incentive structure.

I find this belief very strange. What do we get out of biting this bullet? The internet and copying mechanisms are a result of huge international schemes and standards. None of this is natural and none of it is beyond social convention. The internet started as a government program, there isn't and never was some kind of anarchic internet. Don't get me wrong, I am consistently an advocate of liberty but we're talking about something that only exists under several abstractions of major organizations and the thing you're giving up is the engine producing more content than has ever existed before every year, the vast majority of which is even already free. You're going to collapse the whole thing on what is honestly a pretty dubious principle in a context that has no precedent? Yes, the metaphors to physical goods aren't perfect because it's an entirely new sector, and as many are lamenting in this thread you don't have the next generation on your side.

So what does your plan actually boil down to? you save a couple grand across your entire life to, if your position is wide spread enough to not be a footnote in history, get vastly interior content? Which you would have gotten for free anyways under the status quo? I can't even tell what principal this is supposed to be on behalf of, you all know that private property itself is a social concept right?

So what does your plan actually boil down to?

We get a world where art is made by the people who can't help but be artists and inventions by people who can't help but be inventors, and not in search of a profit.

I can't even tell what principal this is supposed to be on behalf of, you all know that private property itself is a social concept right?

Ideas cannot be owned. Full stop. Yes, ownership of material objects is a social construct, but one that has been with us far longer and that I don't have any problems with. If intellectual property is the pillar holding up all of industrial civilization, then so be it. In that case we should not have come this far this fast, and if it would never have been otherwise then it was never meant to be in the first place.

Your ideals involve billions starving, your ideals are bad. I could dress this up in more words but it wouldn't add anything.

Just because I would prefer a world where those billions might never have been born doesn’t mean I want the people alive today to starve. Two wrongs don't make a right and what has already been built must be defended, but I won't lie and say that I think it is good.

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