The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
F.ART.S.: The future of enterprise?
Lanz
...Za?Registered User regular
...Za?Registered User regular
So, David Wong, author of internet-fave novel John Dies at the End posted a new article today discussing something he called "FARTS" or "Forced ARTificial Scarcity"
Forward: I'm still iffy on some of his details, but find his whole picture deserves some thought
Article text, spoilered for size:
You may, for instance, recognize this behavior in infamous instances such as buying bottled tap water instead of, say, buying a filter at home and plugging that on your own tap. Or perhaps how Music Service X will not allow you to re-download a song you have bought from them already, should your hard drive crash in a fabulously unlucky manner. Or where a video game comes out and you are then told that there's some fancy downloadable content for it to buy for $5 or more, only to find that the content you are "buying" already exists on the disc and some executive somewhere decided they would just charge you extra for the "privilege" of using the full content of the program you just bought. Or, as Wong himself points out in the article above, a mother buying baby formula for her child instead of breast feeding, should she be medically able to do so.
All of these are, in essence, those in the market forcing forms of artificial scarcity onto the consumer for the purpose of what appears to be sustaining what is now an unsustainable business model.
As I see it, while Wong discusses physical versions such as bottled water and baby formula, it seems to me that the issue really lies strongest in the field of digital distribution. And, personally, I don't honestly know how to resolve it in many situations such as properly compensating the content producer without screwing over the consumer (for example, Wong's discussion on the lending of eBooks).
However, there are several instances out there were I can feel comfortable in saying "No, screw you, [Corporation X]." Such as the aforementioned "charging you for content you've already paid for" and Wong's example of how Intel is charging an extra $50 for unlocking the full power of the processor you just bought from them.
Is this artificial scarcity something we should accept as proper business? Or should be be calling for the market to instead treat these goods by their natural properties, where the rules of scarcity do not naturally apply to them? And what of the service industry, as Wong mentions, as that too is consumed further by means that don't actually require a human being to serve you in return for a living wage? Is there any means to balance this need to keep people employed against technological progress?
At this point, I can't really think of the best answer for that.
Forward: I'm still iffy on some of his details, but find his whole picture deserves some thought
Article text, spoilered for size:
David Wong wrote:5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.
By David Wong | Oct 18, 2010 | 204,506 views
Picture your ideal future. OK, not your ideal future, where you're the last man on earth fighting the zombie horde, but society's ideal future: Energy is clean and limitless, goods are plentiful and machines take care of all the dirty work. So everybody's happy, right?
But in many ways, that future is already here, and it can be described in five letters:
FARTS.
I should probably explain.
#5. A Star Trek-Style Utopia is Already Here ... Sort Of
Let's talk about porn and dead babies for a moment.
If I gave you a budget of zero dollars and said, "Get me as much Internet porn as you can for that amount of money," how much porn would you come back with?
I'm thinking the answer is, "All of the porn."
Which brings me to an amusing story. In the last few decades, thousands of babies in Third World countries have died from contaminated baby formula. Wait, did I say amusing? I typed the wrong word there. Anyway, what happens is the mothers mix the baby formula with contaminated water, because sanitation is poor. So why the hell do the mothers feed their infants poison formula when they can just produce milk, for free, from their own bodies? The answer is that they do it because the manufacturer of the formula, Nestle, ran lots of ads telling them to.
If you want to know what the future looks like, there it is. The future is going to hang on whether or not businesses will be able to convince you to pay money for things you can otherwise get for free.
Some of you think I'm about to talk about file sharing and DRM and the evil record labels. But that's just a teaser of what's coming. The world has changed. All the rules we were trained to believe about society from birth until now are about to go out the window.
Futurists and sci-fi writers talk about a "post-scarcity" society, meaning it's like Star Trek, where matter replicators and fusion reactors have ended all shortages. On one hand, that now looks like a ridiculous pipe dream, but in a lot of areas of our life, we're already there. Think about the porn. There's more porn than air now. Literally -- air is limited, but we have machines that can convert energy into .jpegs of titties from now until the heat death of the universe. Titties are post-scarcity.
Now think about how many people you know who live in apartments or trailers barely big enough to host a game of Twister but who don't care because they spend every waking moment at home either playing World of Warcraft or surfing the Internet. They're not looking for a two-story house with a swimming pool and a white picket fence. With a $300 netbook and a $20-a-month Internet connection they can connect with friends, meet girls, get their entertainment, pursue their hobbies and stay in contact with family or co-workers. They may even work from home.
Look at how many of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs they're getting digitally:
http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/5/6/8/33568.jpg?v=1
Everything from that second tier to the capstone, they can get at a cost that rounds down to zero, if they so choose.
We Internet types are so busy haggling over video games with DRM that we're not grasping the scale of this. We're like a dog who's been cooped up behind a fence his whole life, and now a storm has knocked down the gate. The dog looks out and thinks, "Wow, out there is the front yard!"
No, Fluffy. Out there is the whole world
#4. To Stay Afloat, Businesses Have to Pretend Unlimited Goods are Limited
Well, shit, Utopia's here! Mankind won! Let's just stop reading the article here and go celebrate!
Wait -- did you forget the thing about the baby formula?
Because this is where shit gets absurd. For instance:
Public libraries have been lending out books to people, for free, for the last 500 years or so. Publishers are OK with it because the library is paying for the book, and if it's a popular book, they'll buy multiple copies so multiple people can check it out at once. Then they'll replace those every couple of years, because if you read a book too much it falls apart at the binding.
But then the publisher invented a better book. An indestructible book called an ebook that could be read 10 billion times without ever falling apart. How much does it cost to manufacture this marvel? Not a goddamned penny. The readers have the ability to "manufacture" copies of their own, on their computer, at no cost to the publisher. It's a post-scarcity book.
So for the publishers, the next step was clear: Make the book destroy itself.
An ebook sold to a library will thus delete itself out of existence after a year, or after X number of times it had been lent out. This is a big source of controversy between publishers and public libraries, maybe because both of them know they've found the loose thread that can unravel all of society. After all:
A. Why can't the library just buy as many digital copies as are needed for the customers, and keep them forever, if they don't naturally degrade?
B. Wait a second. It's just a digital file. Why not just buy one copy, and just copy and paste it for every customer who wants to read it?
C. Wait a second. Why do you need the library at all? Why can't a customer just buy a copy from the publisher and "lend" copies to all of his friends?
D. Wait a second. If no printing and binding needs to be done, why do you need the publisher? Just buy it directly from the author.
E. Waaaaait a second. Why buy it? Once the author makes one copy available, why can't everyone just grab it for free?
Stop and think about everything that just vanished there. Skyscrapers full of publishing company employees, warehouses full of books, book stores, libraries, factories full of printing presses, paper mills, all the stuff the author bought with his writing money. Gone.
To keep all that stuff up and running, the publisher is resorting to what experts call FARTS--Forced ARTificial Scarcity. Or they would call it that, if they were as awesome at naming things as I am.
Mark my words: The future will be ruled by FARTS.
Remember the debut of Sony's futuristic Matrix-style virtual world, PlayStation Home? There was a striking moment when the guys at Penny Arcade logged in and found themselves in a virtual bowling alley... standing in line. Waiting for a lane to open up. In a virtual world where the bowling alley didn't actually exist. It's all just ones and zeros on a server--the bowling lanes should be effectively infinite, but where there should have been thousands of lanes for anybody who wanted one, there was only FARTS.
Get used to it.
#3. Arbitrary Restriction of Goods Is the Future
It works the same way with all digital goods -- from entertainment to communication to the software you use to do your job. A significant chunk of our economy runs on FARTS now. And as time goes on, more and more of what we use and rely on day to day will be enveloped by that invisible cloud.
Awesome, right? After all, you're not going to do what the Man tells you to do. You're not going to tolerate a future where corporations try to slap a price tag on readily available goods. It'd be like -- I don't know -- making a woman pay huge amounts of money for something that could be accomplished with her own bodily fluids.
That's what I thought, too. I'm savvy. I'm savvy as balls. But then I looked around my desk.
Sitting next to me is a bottle of Aquafina water. It's there because in the 1990s, both Pepsi and Coke noticed cola sales were flat, so they bought tap water -- the same stuff I have an effectively infinite supply of -- stuck it in bottles, put a picture of a mountain on the label and [vidurl=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se12y9hSOM0]upped the price by 20,000 percent[/vidurl]. Then I paid for it
Next to the water is a green bottle of Excedrin. Sure, the generic store brand is identical right down to the molecule, but I paid twice as much for the name brand because this is Excedrin here. The Headache Medicine. It's sitting on top of a statement from the bank showing where they automatically deducted my mortgage payment... for a $5.00 "transaction fee."
And man, don't even look at my PC. I have on it a copy of Windows 7 -- a $200 full copy, because I was installing it on a new hard drive. The upgrade version is only $100, and by the way, they're the exact same product -- all the data is on both disks. The cheap one just has a thing that detects whether you have a previous version of Windows on the drive and refuses to install if you don't.
When I go to upgrade this computer, maybe I'll wind up with that new processor Intel is test-marketing, which ships with software that intentionally disables some of the chip's features. Why? Because along with it they sell a $50 "upgrade card" that does nothing but unlock the capabilities the processor had all along.
They've been training us to pay for nothing, and we're all going along with it. Tell me I won't find any FARTS at your desk.
#2. The Future Will Turn Us All Into Lars Ulrich
I picked the example with the ebooks earlier for a reason. As I mention every chance I get, I have a book on store shelves, a novel about monsters and dongs. It's in paperback now at the reasonable price of $10 or so. It took me five years to write it. But let's face it: If you want a digital copy of it for free, you can get it. The scarcity that would require you to pay money is purely a product of our collective imagination. John Dies at the End is 350 pages of FARTS.
This is the basis of that huge fight between Amazon.com and the largest book publisher about ebook prices. Nobody knows what to charge. We just kind of have to arbitrarily decide, because after the first copy, it costs nothing to make them.
Meanwhile me, my family, the bank what owns my mortgage and car loan, the IRS, the grocery store where I buy my food, all are hoping the same thing -- that you won't notice that free copies of my book are floating all around you. Soon, the whole world will be nursing the same hope.
That's what ACTA is about. This massive worldwide treaty would bring the hammer down on anyone violating intellectual property laws. Everyone on the Internet hates it because we know it 1) would have to be incredibly invasive, to the point of basically peering into everyone's hard drive at any moment for signs of contraband, and 2) is futile. It's a leaking ship trying to stay afloat by threatening the ocean with its cannons.
And for what? To protect the profits of huge corporations and record labels and freaking Activision? So Metallica's irritating anti-piracy crusader Lars Ulrich can buy a plane made of platinum instead of gold? So some hack writer can buy a monkey and train him to ride a tiny motorcycle? Fuck you!
But remember the dog and the fence. The world has changed. For everyone. I'm in the same boat as Lars Ulrich. But so are you.
Lars makes money selling his music. You make money selling your labor. At some point down the line, like his music, your skill as a human being can and will be converted to an electronic format for a fraction of the cost, rendering your skill worthless.
Work at a GameStop or some other video game store at the mall? The next consoles will download their games directly, no store needed. Work at a video store? Same thing -- Blu-ray is probably the last physical media we'll ever see. Work as a cashier? Forget self-checkout lanes taking your job -- soon they'll have RFID systems where customers can pile groceries into a cart and wheel it out the door, and sensors will bill their debit card on the fly.
Work at Starbucks? What are you doing that a machine couldn't do? Work for the post office? You're just a human spambot at this point -- more than half of all mail is now unwanted junk that goes directly into the trash, because in a world with email, direct mailers are the only profitable customers the Postal Service has left.
Note that I'm intentionally listing service jobs here, because almost none of you work in manufacturing. Those jobs have already been outsourced, often to robots.
Thanks to technology, much of the labor is about to become to employers what Internet porn is to you now. Post-scarcity. And it gives them just as much of an erection.
So hate ACTA all you want, along with the MPAA and the RIAA. But you, like them, are getting paid in FARTS.
#1. Only Bullshit Will Save Civilization
And so, here we are. We're celebrating that we don't need to pay greedy corporations because technology means we can get more and more of what we want for free, but at the same time, we're moving toward an era when corporations won't need to pay us. Both of us are hoping that in the future people will, for no tangible reason, simply choose to pay. If you work at Gamestop, both you and corporate are hoping for the same thing: that people will just 1) arbitrarily choose to pay for their games, and 2) choose to get them from a human.
And no, don't give me that old line about, "If you do good work, society will always be happy to pay for it!" I live on the Internet. I've seen how that works. I've seen too many of my favorite websites go under because they were so popular that the traffic crashed the server, but PayPal fundraising drives brought in nothing but the sound of crickets. If people got paid according to the inherent value of their work as measured by the satisfaction of the consumers, Achewood wouldn't have to beg for donations.
No, a "pay what you choose" system eventually becomes charity, and we humans only hand out charity when we're in certain moods, or have extra money. It's no substitute for commerce.
But I'm not just talking about a paycheck here. Human society only exists because we need the things other humans produce. Mutual need is what made us gather and share resources and form the first villages. We need things, and we need other people to need the things we make so they'll be willing to give us the things we need. It's a cycle that has been running for thousands of years, and it's about to stop.
And so, to save society, we're going to have to rely on our old friend, the invisible force that has saved humanity again and again. It's a little thing I like to call bullshit.
Bullshit is the next growth industry. People who deal in it are going to be more valuable than surgeons -- yes, the same people who convinced us that bottled water comes from an enchanted mountain spring and made uneducated mothers believe that contaminated baby formula was a life-giving health potion. Only they can save us.
As civilization advances, these heroic protectors of FARTS will build a culture where we will pay for things we can get for nothing, based purely on a vague superstition that it makes us better people. You know, the way an Apple logo will hypnotize people into paying twice as much for a product when cheaper alternatives litter the landscape.
And if someday we do perfect cold-fusion reactors or nanotech manufacturing and everyone has 100 GB/second Wi-Fi connections downloading data into a computerized contact lens, the bullshitters will be the guardians of the Old Way, convincing you that you shouldn't use those shoes that your replicator spits out for three cents a pair. You need to buy their shoes, for $80. Because they're handmade.
Maybe they'll build the concept of "paying just to be paying" into a new morality. Or a new religion -- one based entirely around FARTS.
Well, unless we figure out something else.
You may, for instance, recognize this behavior in infamous instances such as buying bottled tap water instead of, say, buying a filter at home and plugging that on your own tap. Or perhaps how Music Service X will not allow you to re-download a song you have bought from them already, should your hard drive crash in a fabulously unlucky manner. Or where a video game comes out and you are then told that there's some fancy downloadable content for it to buy for $5 or more, only to find that the content you are "buying" already exists on the disc and some executive somewhere decided they would just charge you extra for the "privilege" of using the full content of the program you just bought. Or, as Wong himself points out in the article above, a mother buying baby formula for her child instead of breast feeding, should she be medically able to do so.
All of these are, in essence, those in the market forcing forms of artificial scarcity onto the consumer for the purpose of what appears to be sustaining what is now an unsustainable business model.
As I see it, while Wong discusses physical versions such as bottled water and baby formula, it seems to me that the issue really lies strongest in the field of digital distribution. And, personally, I don't honestly know how to resolve it in many situations such as properly compensating the content producer without screwing over the consumer (for example, Wong's discussion on the lending of eBooks).
However, there are several instances out there were I can feel comfortable in saying "No, screw you, [Corporation X]." Such as the aforementioned "charging you for content you've already paid for" and Wong's example of how Intel is charging an extra $50 for unlocking the full power of the processor you just bought from them.
Is this artificial scarcity something we should accept as proper business? Or should be be calling for the market to instead treat these goods by their natural properties, where the rules of scarcity do not naturally apply to them? And what of the service industry, as Wong mentions, as that too is consumed further by means that don't actually require a human being to serve you in return for a living wage? Is there any means to balance this need to keep people employed against technological progress?
At this point, I can't really think of the best answer for that.
Lanz on
0
Posts
I do not believe he correctly identifies an economic problem - at least not according to current economic theory, so, what he calls "artificial scarcity" applies pretty much only to the digital(unless we go seriously science fiction in then next 50 years). As long as most people support the current state of intellectual property artificial scarcity is a trade-off needed to enforce it.
Wong's statement that "only bullshit will save civilization" is, well, bullshit. Only bullshit will save David Wong from having to get a day job... which is why he's posting this bullshit.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Its sort of disgusting tbh.
I understand that that's not his literal intent but it's so monumentally dumb that my brain stops parsing text
I totally agree. He absolutely has a point.
I diverge from him where he suggests that this is somehow necessary for civilization to function. There's an interesting discussion to be had about whether small amounts of daily deceitfulness is necessary for a functioning society (for instance, treating your neighbor politely when you really want to kick his teeth in for habitually parking right in front of your house) but obviously that's not what he's talking about. Convincing people to buy things they don't need, or can't afford, or are otherwise harmful to their well-being is a form of economic activity that I find reprehensible.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This was odd to me in the article as well. He's talking about a disappearance of scarcity and how bad its going to be for artists and the like, but these are the people who will do the best post-scarcity. You can't make a machine produce art no matter how efficient it is.
Reading this comment, and others like it, make me wonder if I read a different article. What I got out of it is that, increasingly, we are paying made-up prices for things that have no inherent value. Yes there is value in art, but what is the cost of a story? The price of a physical book is, to some extent, based on the price to produce, ship, and stock that book. A share of the price goes to the people whose creative efforts were necessary to make it in the first place, but unless the physical costs associated are vastly lower than I think they are in that equation it makes very little sense that an eBook should cost $13 if the physical hardcover is $16. Average consumers are, increasingly, realizing that digital media can be free. That you can just go get a copy of a book, movie, TV show, game, or song without paying anything at all for it. And we continue to prop up sales prices with laws, user agreements, contracts, DRM countermeasures, and marketing. All these props were, in my reading of the article, what he was calling BS.
In a world where anything you create I can have a copy of for free as soon as any one person buys it, what incentive do I have to pay? The only incentives that exist are marketing, legislation, and morality. Since you can't just assume that people, in general, are going to obey any of those, creative products rapidly lose value. And as our society trends toward a post-scarcity state for all non-physical goods, what happens to the creative people? If all books are eBooks and eBook prices are made up bullshit, a writer's monetary value is essentially made of hot air. Real, physical, bottom-of-the-pyramid goods will still cost money, but where will the people who create everything above the bottom of the pyramid get that money, except by leveraging vectors which are, in some portion of the populace's view, BS?
I did like #4. That's the issue I think about most - being charged or trading for something that effectively has no intrinsic value. That's the big deal with text messaging as of late: since it costs something like $0.0001 to send a text message (and text messages are sent in a different "packet" from cellular signals so they don't affect actual phone calls), carriers make, what, 10,000% profit on every text message sent? It's fucking ludicrous.
And even if you could, it still couldn't do so 'better' than a human because for art there is no rational way to measure quality. Even if you made a perfect tireless, intelligent and creative AI which could paint then a human painter still might be able to produce a work which would move you more than it's would.
Because if I can create ANYTHING at whim, then the only person who has value is someone who can creatively produce something new. The fact I can copy it may diminish the value, but it doesn't send it to zero.
If I have a machine which can give me any item I wish, then the value of grain is zero. A farmer is useless, since I don't need any 'new' grain. More of the same old grain will do just fine.
However, that same machine can also make me a copy of Tom Clancy's Net Force, but if it then makes me another copy of it the next day it's no good. I need a new book. I need Tom Clancy to keep writing, so he is not useless. In fact, since everyone else is useless, and he is not then his relative value to society has gone through the roof.
He makes repeated mention of the fact that everything will soon be like books and dvds, easily provided and copied without human input. But if that happens, it would be great for artists, since they still have value and noone else does.
The idea isn't, to my mind, "What if we had painting robots?" so much as "If I can have any painting I want, for free, why am I paying the painter for a copy?" Obviously the answer is "to encourage him to paint another", but that isn't going to be enough for probably a lot of people. To those people the moral justification is as much BS as is the marketing justification for using baby formula over breast milk.
In our world of today there's no way to get paintings for free at the same quality that you could buy them, but it's rapidly becoming the case for music, movies, and books.
I don't see much value in talking about value in a strictly post-scarcity world. What does it mean for an artist to have value if every physical good is free? What are you paying him in? What does he need the money for? To pay other artists? If your every physical need or desire is covered for free, what's the point of having an economy anymore?
But we can talk usefully about the current and future cases where a machine can spit out copies of Tom Clancy novels for you for free. And you can either pay for them or not, and if you don't and eventually Tom Clancy stops writing because of it...well, there's still (according to Google) Dale Brown, Joe Buff, and Stephen Coonts. In the meantime you've saved money for a product that nobody had to pay to produce which you can go spend on grain.
At the point where anything can be produced infinitely with no cost then a monetary system, and our entire idea of what constitutes an economy breaks down, because our entire society revolves around the idea of scarcity.
When we reach that point the only thing that has value is that which is entirely new. The farmer has no worth because everyone can just turn on the grain machine or have the grain machine out there tilling the soil. That doesn't work with writers or painters. Sure they aren't making money, but when things reach this point, no one is. Worth becomes redefined as the ability to do something that a limited number of people can do.
I think you missed the huge amounts of sarcasm in his article. I think he is advocating us finding another way to avoid all the bullshit.
Yeah, quite possibly? Not really familiar with his writing.
But I have a way to avoid all the bullshit. Don't expect to make a living from IP alone.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think there is a prolem with this though. There aren't enough "real" jobs to go around.
Nobody makes money, nobody gets paid, everything is shared, and everyone has a job to do.
This all is a great side-conversation to the issue of population and education in a culture and economy of rapidly vanishing resources and need for labor, and the ripple effect of pure liberty in a society where there liberty doesn't actually exist.
I would posit the latter is the civilization we already live in, with people of every economic class demanding "freedoms" of some kind or another without realizing that nothing can be an inherent right if it demands the labor or resources of another.
These aren't really new or exciting concepts, any up-to-date economist can have a much longer, more involved, and more supported discussion about how price models and scarcity and monopolies and supplier-created inefficiencies can modify prices. If you've read the front page of Penny Arcade for the last year you're already prepared to have a deeper discussion on how these price models and intellectual property do (and don't) work.
Would you tell Michalengelo to stop chiseling pristine marble dongers and get a fuckin' day job? Isn't there a considerable loss if we force creative minds to spend their time doing menial tasks simply to make a living? Worse, isn't there a considerable loss if we never get that creative mind because, hey, there's no fucking money in it, so why bother in the first place?
Think about it this way. Suppose two competing goods both have nearly zero marginal cost but high fixed costs - e.g., those scarce-but-not-quite things that Wong mentions.
One outcome is attempts to force competition to stop by differentiating the products, which is what Wong postulates - manufacturers invent fictional differences in lieu of any actual ones. Whether or not you believe that extent of bullshittery is even possible is up to you. We certainly observe it extensively in some existing markets, like fashion and beauty products.
But it is also likely that in the meanwhile, competition does drive P->MC, eventually eliminating all competitors except one (if they don't differentiate rapidly enough). Monopoly - or, more likely, a oligopolistic market of a few, largely anonymous, major suppliers plus a proliferation of small producers that attend to niche markets - is the likely outcome.
And with monopoly power comes price discrimination, aka the free market's very own income tax. For a monopoly with zero marginal costs, artificial scarcity is inferior to perfect price discrimination. Less Intel $50 unlocks, more "processors are all $unaffordable. Unless you're poor. Fill in this form with all your personal data - which will conveniently allow Marketing to profile you more carefully - and we'll give you a 95% discount".
Okay, perhaps not so unsubtle. Geographical and demographic profiling is what we'll see in the near future.
You guys are going to make me copy/paste the RICH Economy thing again, aren't you?
The RICH economy idea is nonsensical, sadly. It's all the weirdest aspects of Keynes shoved together.
Would you say that most artists are putting out work equivalent to Michaelangelo's?
I'd tell that dude who shat on a canvas to stop fucking pooping on canvases and get a day job, yeah.
edit--Also I get a bit peeved by the idea that art is the only thing with value in post scarcity (or even now). To quote Gavin Castleton "I'm not really a rapper, I'm a Greek Chef, I just do those songs to pay the bills". When we set arbitrary limits over what kind of work we can and can't be proud of then we get shit like this--complaining about the injection of competion because 'my' sector of the economy is massively more important.
I worked at a used book store when I was 18. Doing that, I saw guys paying hundreds of dollars for art books. Art books are a collection of images that you could GIS in a couple of seconds. I saw someone pay 600 dollars for a copy of a chess book with a dude's name in it. Now, is that FARTS, or is that people assigning their own value to things? And who's to say that value is wrong?
Zero marginal cost world (i.e., the "artificial scarcity"). Once you set up the infrastructure for the Michaelangelos, allowing the graffiti artists an additional roof to paint costs zero.
If this weren't the case, Michaelangelo could charge the full cost of his marginal product, and there'd be no problem.
Do you believe that creation stops without financial incentive via legislation? Feral was actually spot on.
Edit:
In our current world no business model would ever die unless government structure collapses first. Today they simply pay to keep a certain status quo or change the terms if needed. Thank fuck we managed to get railroads before we got into this situation!
Is this at all relevant to his statement?
Feral suggested not everyone be able to live off of creating art alone.
Garthor equates this to telling Michaelangelo to get a day job.
I'd like to know whether or not he therefore considers everyone that creates art the equivalent of Michaelangelo since that would be the only way it actually applies to what was said.
Fightin' ninjas and eatin' pizzas?
Painting for rich people.
I believe his actual point was that without that expectation art forms would be discouraged and we could miss on talented creators.
Which is what makes this whole thing ridiculous. People realised this problem centuries ago. It's why things like Patents and Copyrights exist.
Enforcing Artificial Scarcity for the public good is not a new concept.
Well, once you draw the lines determining whose labor and resources belong to who, you're already defining the inherent rights. There's only a problem if one insists on a libertarian conception of such property division while insisting on a statist provision of positive rights. Which is contradictory anyway.
The problem with the Star Trek economy is determining how base infrastructure upon which we build our wonderful zero-cost goods is paid for; unless we propose state ownership and management of it all, someone's going to need to charge for it. Which entails money, and incomes, and prices.
I said it in the second post, as long as most people support the current state of intellectual property artificial scarcity is a trade-off needed to enforce it.
In the current implementation of IP, however, it's certainly worth debating the value of that trade-off. Society's interest is not constant and we'd soon be(already are) at a point where IP areas are terribly, terribly broken.
Which is a legitimate concern, but an equally legitimate concern is how many government resources should go towards supporting this and up to what point. The RIAA, Sony, and Disney I'm sure have a number of ideas I don't think most people here would agree with. I don't, however, assume those are the ideas someone's proffering when they say it's important to support artists. Just like it's not sensible to assume when someone says a person shouldn't be able to expect to live off of an IP for the rest of their lives they mean a modern day Mozart should do something "useful" too.
I can slam DRM on it, or I can slap an EULA on it, and externalize the costs of enforcing scarcity.