You know it is curious that the common folk bear the tax burden while getting no representation and thr ownership class gets allnthe representation but evades taxes.

This echoes something I learned in history way back when we were occupied and had to contend with monarchs. Funny Numbers Or Fight!, Better Dead Than Red! Fuck Off With Your Stompy Jackboots! and such.

So during the Great Depression (about a century ago) the industrialists were totally happy, and Hoover was on board with them. The people were seriously thinking about doing that thing Lenin was trying over in the Soviet Union, because really anything was better than eating flour paste and living in cardboard and stacked paint cans.

According to Behind the Bastards in their two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity, FDR’s New Deal was in order to give capitalism another chance since it really was doing the people wrong, and Hoover and his industrialist pals really hated it.

(Christianity at the time was also on team-pinko, except they believed it was the responsibility of wealth and industry to just be relentlessly charitable, so at the time the industrialists had no allies in the Church. The current right wing guns-and-money Christian Nationalism is the product of a decades long propaganda campaign to turn the faith into a pro-wealth, pro-capitalism ideology. And the Catholic Church and Protestant ministries alike bought into it.)

Yeah the art community hated desktop publishing too. People who spent decades working with moveable type were made obsolete.

The problem is not that creativity is easier, the problem is our industrialist masters are all too eager to replace us from the artist to the driver to the lawyer to the task laborer to the engineer.

This isn’t a new problem. The reason Disney only does CGI and live action movies now is because the cell animators unionized.

It’s not the technology. It’s the system that lets you die but for the grace of profit-minded industrialists.

With the US on the brink of autocratic rule, it’s really time to take seriously the notion of communist revolution.

Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.

AI training should qualify for fair use.

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.

It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.

One can only hope. Copyright has, for a long time been wrongdoing against the public by denying it a robust public domain. We should have free access to ideas less than a century old.

This reveals, nonetheless, even European government is about control, not governance, enforcement of established hierarchy, not civil rights for all.

Here in the US, there are no progressive legislative bodies. The Democratic party treats its progressive members as the red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table.

Here.. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The whole point of IP laws (according to the Constitution of the United States) is to develop a robust public domain. Every registered idea, multiplied by every limited rights extention is a violation of public interest and public rights.

By burying or failing to preserve content, they are in fact stealing from the public, since we won’t be able to access it when it is our right.

Media piracy is in the tradition of oyster piracy (stealing from landlords trying to control the oyster market) and the golden age (robbing the Spanish silver train that was exploiting the nations of the new world) in that it’s crime against unreasonable state regimes.

This is not to say underground media sharing has always had the moral high-ground, and it’s not even to say that fair copyright laws are unreasonable, but since the mid 20th century (since Disney, essentially) intellectual property law has not served the public in a community effort to build a robust public domain of ideas and content, rather has been used to do the opposite, to favor established businesses over new ones with complete disregard for the public.

But then there’s the technological matter, where DRM is used to obstruct of sharing (reasonable or otherwise, legal or otherwise). Here in the states it’s legal to use DRM to obstruct legal backups and sharing, but it’s not legal to bypass DRM to facilitate legal backups and sharing. It shows us that our regulatory agencies are captured, that our government serves rich companies and plutocrats rather than the public. The law runs contrary to the social contract.

We are in an age in which our language (English) only has words for wrongdoing that acknowledges two authorities: Sin (wrongness against the Church – allegedly against God) and Crime (wrongness against the state, in accordance to what laws are enforced by a legal system). When we talk about other entities that can be wrong, say, individuals, the community, the world population, ecosystems outside of human society, we have to make do with the words we have, e.g. sin against nature, crimes against humanity, and so on.

Intellectual property law is a construct that (according to the Constitution of the United States) was intended to do a thing that it has totally failed at, going as far as creating perverse incentives to misuse the law. And given the companies that produce the media we might pirate are poor at compensating artists and developers, or at recognizing licenses already established (say, your DVD copy of Ghostbusters when the new medium emerges), given they pirate each other’s content shamelessly, and will steal yours outright if you can’t outspend them in court, it has actually become more ethical to pirate content than to buy it legitimately.

But I’d teach my kids not just to pirate, but to recognize shoddy work from good work, and to not consume at all when they can, since consuming content benefits its producers, whether or not it’s acquired legally. (The MCU is about hero-team organizations who defend the status quo from all enemies, including the far left, and including those who want the human species to have a future. So they’re not really our heroes, are they? Batman runs around and beats up poor people, leaving the wealthy to continue to rule over the rest of us whose last resort is crime.

If we’re going to consume content, let’s use it to inspire the content we make ourselves, until commercial content is entirely unwanted and unnecessary. This is the future the MPAA and RIAA fear. Not everyone pirating their stuff, but everyone not bothered to pirate their stuff.

Edit: Clarification

I look forward to factchecker services that interface right into the browser or OS, and immediately recognize and flag comments that might be false or misleading. Some may provide links to deep dives where it’s complicated and you might want to know more.

They’re spoiled from selling you the same movies over and over again whenever a new medium becomes normalized, despite all your previous licenses. Then they complain when your media breaks or you want to share with your best friend.

They want your money for not doing anything new.

This game is my life now.

Now you know corporations and government departments will lie to children to benefit the ownership class and harm the labor class.

Let your kids know who authorities really work for, to question everything.

Heck, let the grown-ups know too. Many didn’t get the memo.

I think most of us are resigned to this situation.

We’re not good at popular organizing. We’re very good at finding ways of othering factions, which the elite are glad to utilize.

We’re good at consolidating power. We’re not good at utilizing that power to serve the public. Hence billionaires don’t even think of charity work except as a means to preserve power.

The human species may be doomed to extinction or a cap on technological progress. We may just be tribal hunters too attached to dominance hierarchy to reach into space and colonize other worlds.

Or we may be stuck in a perpetual cycle where we just form feudal empires that poison the world for another epoch.

The solution — if there is one — is sociological. We figure out a way to diffuse political power so it can’t be consolidated. We fix dominance hierarchy and tragedy of the commons. We figure out a way to teach people that everybody (even the ones that disgust us) are part of the community and deserve regard.

Until we find it, we’ll continue to let elites hold all the resources and poison the earth with impunity.

When I was able to seed relentlessly, I aimed for 3.0. Typically, popular things got into the tens or twenties, while rare stuff would get lucky to cross the 1.0 threshold.

Thieves and beggars, never shall we die and all that.

…The floating ballerina…

In my twenties my family went to see a showing of The Nutcracker Suite and were seated way up in the high balconies. Every time a sugar-plum fairy daintily sprang up, she came down with a thunderous, audible thump which baked into my mind that physical mechanics works, even when we strive to pretend it can be overcome.

The problem is not the what we want, but the how we get there.

Right now a few old men who don’t care about future are making bank on fossil fuels and personal cars. It’s how we circumvent their armies of lawyers.

Infohazards and cognitohazards, while they exist, we don’t know about them enough to discern the amount of harm they cause whether directly or indirectly.