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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Here is as example of a new system that almost certainly wouldn't work, but shows the types of ideas you could discuss... The government measures how much people spend on all digital entertainment products today, and creates a new tax in that amount. Anyone in the country can download and enjoy any digital entertainment they want, for free, at any time. The revenue from the tax gets split among all digital creators proportionally to how many times their product was downloaded, with some type of pro-rating for how long the experience is or how long it should take to produce or etc., details to be worked out by hypothetical domain-expert philosopher kings.

You're describing spotify.

Pretty much, yeah, except with taxes instead of a subscription model so that every citizen can enjoy it no matter what.

(you could call taxes a subscription to citizenship, I suppose, then it's mostly the same thing)

That's kind of my point though: this isn't actually that weird or complicated of an idea. Lots of people recognize the problem and have tried various solutions (spotify, patreon, stream donations, advertising/product placement, etc). Lots of the solutions work ok, but they still have a lot of problems because they're just patches on the existing system, which is fundamentally unsuited for these situations.

I'm just saying that finding a universal solution that we can use for all post-scarcity goods (including things like medicines that cost billions to invent and pennies to produce) is really really important, and we should be focused on coming up with that solution (and not fall into capitalist realism where we reject all solutions as impossible or evil or w/e).

Pretty much, yeah, except with taxes instead of a subscription model so that every citizen can enjoy it no matter what.

Spotify being a voluntary interaction makes it far superior in my opinion.

I'm just saying that finding a universal solution that we can use for all post-scarcity goods (including things like medicines that cost billions to invent and pennies to produce) is really really important

My point I think is that no such universal solution exists and this search you ask for has been ongoing for as long as this class of high upfront cost low to no marginal cost goods have existed. Capitalism, combined with some regulation, offers a lot of flexibility to tailor specific solutions to specific problems. If you want to say "Hey, we should tweak or even heavily change the regulation component to better achieve our ends" that's a totally valid thing to propose. I myself have a lot of things I'd like to tweak about how IP works in the US. But nowhere in this discussion does some adherence or aversion to 'capitalism' enter the picture.

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