Olivier mentioned “Copyleft and degrowth” which is something I’ve been talking about with some a friend on email but seeing the post, it’s just “Use copyleft to spread knowledge about degrowth” which is a good idea so check out his post for more on that.
I’ll start by pasting the part from the email that also mentioned this:
Going back to the real world is going to be a cold shower for the upper class and the upper middle class. And they’re the ones in political power currently, using fascist wedge groups & culture wars to fool the working classes into voting for them.
There are two silver linings here:
One is that in the world of digital, the world could easily and sustainably become a lot richer for everyone. In digital, market capitalism is hampered by its bugs and they slather everything in DRMs and ads and stinginess where we could instead make the online desert bloom. However, that doesn’t put a roof over anyone’s physical head or food on anyone’s physical plate.
The second is that the wealth gap is so unthinkably large right now that the rich could take a lot of the fall. Everyone’s life is gonna change (most middle-class people go on airplane trips every now and then, for example, or eat cheese daily, and that might not be possible) but hopefully the rich people’s changes are gonna take the brunt of things.
The idea of the “economy of mittens & socks” is that when applied to the digital realm, copyright is an active source of scarcity. Contrary to what the haters are saying, not a lot of people are reading my blog, but if it was behind a paywall, even fewer would be reading it.
Copyright is a limit on making copies. It’s textbook artificial scarcity. We’re gonna have to get used to scarcity in the physical world so it sucks that we have to inflict the same limits on the world of dreams and poems.