12 ms·
You make a very good point. It's a clumsy catch-all and lazy of me. One could very well say; unacceptable face of greed unacceptable face of idolatry (
by nonrandomstring 2y ago
You make a very good point. It's a clumsy catch-all and lazy of me.
One could very well say;
unacceptable face of greed
unacceptable face of idolatry (money)
unacceptable face of exploitation
unacceptable face of dehumanisation
unacceptable face of power inequality
Capitalism contains all of these, plus an unparalleled ability to
create wealth, growth and innovation. For whatever reasons we weight
these last qualities over and above the downsides.
So I hesitate. Should I use "capitalism" as a shortcut for all the bad
things... or not be lazy and list them fully. Sadly we live in the age
of efficiency.
As for "intellectual property" (perhaps the laziest of all catch-alls
to kludge together a bunch of unrelated concepts); One could not just
as well "argue these laws are unacceptable face of democracy" because
they were never created "under democracy". Sure they persist under
democracy, but mainly because they are extremely hard to dismantle.
And other than the Pirate Party I am unaware of a political group in
recent history that has ever made it a policy point.
In fact they come from a lineage of censorship laws that were created
under conditions of extraordinary tyranny in the seventeenth century
that involved the public burning alive of dissident
publishers. Eventually the Statute of Ann consolidated these twice
repealed and resurrected laws into a notionally "legitimate"
Copyright. Anyway you can read all about that in any honest history
of English law like Lessig's.
What we're left with in 2024 is a set of almost insoluble power
relations that can probably never be reformed in law. They will have
to be over-run by de-facto progress. Much as I dislike many aspects of
"AI" it is at least a fundamental challenge to the absurdity of
"intellectual property" and may have the power to clear away much of
what is rotten. That's why I wrote [0]
[0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...