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We live in a post information scarcity society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Edit: Changed title to be more accurate.

Also here is the summary from Wikipedia on what Post-scarcity means:

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.

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[–] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

We 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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I see what you are saying but it’s somewhat different from 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.

    Edit for clarity / sentence structure

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    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 in a world without IP Law, the instant that piece of information is digitized and put on the internet, it's value rapidly drops to $0 since it costs fraction of a penny for someone to make a personal copy off the closest person / server to them.

    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 decided to reward first discovery by inventing made up concepts like patents, copyrights, DRM, technological walled gardens, etc. and spend billions of dollars a year on them, all of which function by creating artificial scarcity, just to hamfistedly mash an information economy into the rules of a material economy.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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)

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    So here's the problem with that idea: it means that you would need to keep the entire IP system operating and add more layers on top of it. For example, you would still need to file patents, it is just that the way that it is monetized by the creator would change.

    This means that you still need the same amount of money to keep doing what we've been doing, then you need more money because if things like pixiv uploads are eligible you need way more people to track way more things.

    Then you have to actually assess performance of a given thing, be it number of streams / downloads / units sold / etc, meaning that we have to basically track everything happening in the entire economy as well as the entire internet.

    Sounds like a bureaucratic black hole to me, but I will grant you that if it was feasible it would probably lead to more innovation.

    One thing I will add to the end here is that the current IP laws specifically are currently ridiculous, fuck Disney.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    If you have enough information you have noise, and hence less information. It actually does not work like electricity or any other physics phenomenon.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 2 years 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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Is a library noise just cause there's a lot of information in there? We're talking about a user being allowed to reach out and copy and modify information, presumably from a curated source they trust.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    How do you reward inventors then?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    Create a system of attribution, where by new products and inventions acknowledge the work they're based on (and they acknowledge the work they're based on etc), and then have a system that takes total sales volumes etc and splits a portion of government money to all the inventors / creators based on how popular their product was. Fund it with a small increase on sales tax for all products, then there's no incentive to not provide attribution since it doesn't effect your take home pay regardless, and have a system for applying for attribution when you think it wasn't fairly given to you.

    We spend billions and billions of dollars on our current patent system and the legion of lawyers required to maintain it, there's more than enough resources to build a system that's not based on scarcity.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You pretty much described the current patent system but instead of the market determining license fees some buerocrat does.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    No I did not. In the current patent system, once a piece of knowledge is discovered, only a single person or entity is legally allowed to use it for 20 years.

    In the system I described, anyone is allowed to use it, modify it, and improve on it, immediately. Discover something great that can improve lives? Great! You'll be rewarded for your efforts, but we're not going to wait for you and you alone to figure out how to setup a global manufacturing and distribution supply chain to get it to everyone, and we're not going to prevent anyone else from daring to improve upon it

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    In the current patent system the owner can choose to licenses their patent, they can choose how much licensing should cost and manufacturers can decide to pay it.

    You're awfully light on the details of how an inventor is rewarded.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    In the current patent system the owner can choose to licenses their patent,

    Yes, but they do not have to, because it is a system of scarcity. They get to choose whether or not it's scarce and exactly how scarce it is. In many cases companies buy patents just to sit on them and prevent anyone else from using them. In the system I'm describing, all ideas are available for everyone to use in any way they want.

    It honestly feels like you're intentionally not understanding that distinction at this point.

    You’re awfully light on the details of how an inventor is rewarded.

    I've already explained it very clearly. You want more details on a specific aspect, go ahead and ask a specific question. You want a fully fleshed out system that covers every edge case? Then get politicians and lawyers to start actually designing the system, if we spent the billions and billions and billions of dollars that we have spent creating and enforcing our current system on creating and enforcing a new one, a lot of those details you're looking for would get filled in.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Inventors getting a percent of sales doesn't is a vague description.

    How is the royalty rate determined?

    How are cheap to manufacture/replicate inventions handled? With a low royalty rate the inventor may not recoup costs for a valuable patent.

    How are products with multiple patents handled?

    How are patent fees enforced?

    Why would a company publish a patent in your system? They can be 1st to the market and be the only ones in the market until their competitors reverse engineer their patent.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    How is the royalty rate determined?

    How was 20 years decided for patent lifetime? This is an implementation detail to be argued about to find a fair formula.

    How are cheap to manufacture/replicate inventions handled? With a low royalty rate the inventor may not recoup costs for a valuable patent.

    Again, this is a matter of determining a fair mathematical formula that rewards inventors appropriately depending on the amount of sales.

    Also, for comparison how does our current patent system ensure that inventors recoup costs on valuable patents? How does our current patent system reward downstream inventions and ideas? You seem to have lofty goals for a new system that our current system doesn't address.

    How are products with multiple patents handled?

    Again, implementation detail, but if multiple ideas contribute to the same product then the inventors of both would get rewarded.

    How are patent fees enforced?

    What patent fees? We're talking about taxing products / services / corporate profits and then using that money to reward inventors.

    Why would a company publish a patent in your system? They can be 1st to the market and be the only ones in the market until their competitors reverse engineer their patent.

    Because 6 months later when it's reverse engineered any competitor will be able to recreate it. If your idea is so unique and complex that you don't think it can be reverse engineered then fine, keep it as a trade secret, that's already how our current system works.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    This is an implementation detail to be argued about to find a fair formula.

    I thought your plan was simplifying things and getting lawyers out of it, guess not.

    Again, this is a matter of determining a fair mathematical formula that rewards inventors appropriately depending on the amount of sales.

    How is a fair mathematical formula determined?  Who decides what is appropiate?  Are sales the only metric for the formula?

    Also, for comparison how does our current patent system ensure that inventors recoup costs on valuable patents?

    The inventor licenses the patent for for an agreed upon value.  Value is determined by the market.

    How does our current patent system reward downstream inventions and ideas?

    See above.

    You seem to have lofty goals for a new system that our current system doesn’t address.

    How are those not addressed?

    What patent fees? We’re talking about taxing products / services / corporate profits and then using that money to reward inventors.

    Money that goes to patent holders is a patent fee no matter how the money is collected.  If a company uses a patented invention but doesn't list it how is that infringement enforced?  More lawyers and lawsuits?

    Again, implementation detail, but if multiple ideas contribute to the same product then the inventors of both would get rewarded.

    Details are the important part, how is the value of one patent determined over another, ie how do they split the revenue.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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? and how do you reward them?

    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.

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