On the other side of the multiverse, over in the timeline where sharing is caring and where the downhill battle against the copyright trolls was won and where there’s an efficient peer-to-peer system for songs and videos, every now and then they take a look over at our dimension and they glance a li’l incredulously at what the heck we’re doing with our huge fossil-burning wasteful data centers to manage streaming and distribution and then other huge wasteful data centers make sure to keep it that way, to tear down anyone who’d dare to help distribute it.
This is artificial scarcity.
In the lamb land of loaves and fishes on the other side of the magic mirror, we’re all doing what we can to keep the songs up, to keep the movies and books available. People are downloading them off each other’s computers.
But over here, in this twisted and sick teeth-gnashing reflection, this boiling and grinding shade of a world, half–hollowed-out goatwraiths spend enormous amount of energy at building up walls between us, rending and scarring those who dare reach out a giving hand.
If WIPO managed food, then for every baker there would be three cops making sure you didn’t bake at home, and they’d take the seed from every apple. Deprivation is their business.
The goatwraiths in their half–hollowed-out state can’t tell map from territory and they can’t tell cost from value.
If there are three fields providing grains with a combined price of 150 gold coins, and one of the fields burn, and grain from the other fields go up in price, so the combined price from the two remaining fields now is 160 gold coins, the goatwraiths cheer since they believe that that means the amount of resources in the world has gone up. Never mind those starving kids.
Sometimes my arms don’t bend back.