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The title is excellent as summing up the long road that led us to where we're now, and I think it's a really good point in general: > businesses that once reli

The title is excellent as summing up the long road that led us to where we're now, and I think it's a really good point in general: > businesses that once relied on the scarcity of information found themselves leaning on courtrooms to protect their bottom line. We'll always have a ton of laws passed because an industry had enough money to lawyer up its survival despite the technical advancements working against it. On one side we'll have luddites who rightfully try to keep humans out of harm, and on the other whole industries which can only brake progress to stay mainstream. While I used to think that it was a lost cause for them, here we are in 2024 still dealing with call centers and getting snail mail spam. It feels like some industries just found a position where nothing short of a country uprising will displace them, whatever technical advancements we see.

drewcoo 2y ago
> We'll always have a ton of laws passed because an industry had enough money to lawyer up its survival despite the technical advancements working against it. That's not what lawyers do. It's what lobbyists do. Lawyers argue it out in court afterward.
- anticensor 2y ago
  Lawyers and lobbyists are not mutually exclusive.
everyone 2y ago
[flagged]
- andy99 2y ago
  Wikipedia says copyright began as a way to try and control what was printed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright It's not a capitalist thing specifically, it's a power thing. (See also "misinformation" today)
  - delichon 2y ago
    > It's not a capitalist thing specifically, it's a power thing. I'm rabidly pro capitalist, but can acknowledge that copyright is a property rights thing, which is very much a capitalist thing, but that capitalism plus legal coercion is frequently a toxic combination. As with the other isms.
    - _aavaa_ 2y ago
      > that copyright is a property rights thing Copyright is a monopoly on distribution and sale, it does not give anyone "ownership".
      - delichon 2y ago
        Generally ownership of a physical item confers a monopoly on its distribution and sale. Those rights are common parts of the property rights bundle that we call ownership. Whether they're a good policy or not copyrights share those features with other property rights.
        _aavaa_ 2y ago
        I agree that ownership of a physical item general confers both a monopoly on it's distribution and sale. But the inverse (selling or distribution something confers ownership) is not true, see for example selling something on consignment. It's definitely not true for copyrighted works. Copyright, in the US at least, is pretty explicit about it not providing ownership of the thing to the rights holder. It provides the holder with a legal monopoly over the copying, distribution, and (broadly) displaying or building off of it. It does not state that the holder owns the creative work, much less any specific instantiation of it.
        delichon 2y ago
        It isn't clear which bundle of property rights constitute ownership. For instance there are many many restrictions on distributing and selling things that we are said to own. Some say that means we don't own those things, but I think it's more clear to say that ownership is ambiguous and contingent.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Nothing on the GP's comment is about capitalism.
  - wolrah 2y ago
    > Nothing on the GP's comment is about capitalism. Companies and/or industries deciding that some element of technological and/or societal progress is limiting or threatens to reduce their profits, and that it's less expensive and/or more effective to fight that progress than to adapt to a changing market, is 100% about capitalism.
- kbolino 2y ago
  The tyranny of metrics arose with the industrial revolution, not capitalism. It is obviously easier to measure many things by proxy with money in a capitalist society, but Robespierre and Stalin were no strangers to optimizing society around metrics.
  - sophacles 2y ago
    Nonsense, you're just forgetting the metrics that matter most: Number of pennies (or whatever currency happens to be in vogue that millenium) Number of people who will do what you say. (Some say they are the same). If you include those two metrics, it's a problem at least as old as writing.
    - svieira 2y ago
      If you have enough people who will do what you say it doesn't matter how many pennies you have. Mao was right (analogously to how Machiavelli was "right", not in the moral sense of "right" where, as Socrates says [paraphrased] "it would be better to be the one man unjustly put to death for doing what is right than the man who comes to power doing what is unjust").
  - unclebucknasty 2y ago
    What we choose to measure reflects what we value. And, I think your parent's point is that money is not merely a proxy for measuring things in a capitalist society. It has become the only thing; which, in turn, creates distortions.
    - kbolino 2y ago
      And my point is that the existence of a metric and optimizing for it are not the same thing. Money is definitionally quantifiable and, in a capitalist society, very visible. Optimizing for it, just as optimizing for units produced by a factory, or counterrevolutionaries successfully reeducated, or prisoners incarcerated, or graduation rate, or billable hours, etc. is a choice and not inherent to capitalism or socialism or really any other economic system, except insofar as they are all downstream of the industrial revolution and its emphasis on quantity and repeatability.
- munificent 2y ago
  I share all of the concerns with rampant capitalism that many do, but I actually don't think capitalism is the root cause here. I think the fundamental cause is societal complexity and the principle-agent problem. One of the most amazing things about the modern world is how we are effectively able to combine the efforts of millions of people across the world to solve problems and build large things. Even something as simple as a banana split is a marvel, with bananas from South America, milk from English cows turned into ice cream in Europe, flavored with vanilla from Madascar, drizzled with chocolate from Africa. That action at a distance is why our quality is life is orders of magnitude better than humans had a few generations ago. But as in software, the cost of abstraction and information hiding is that sometimes information that is important gets obscured. In software, this can mean that an abstraction gets in the way of optimizing for performance metrics you may care about. In society, the abstraction can mean there are externalities to your choices that you are unaware of and wouldn't deliberately opt in to otherwise. But the trade-off, knowing every single externality of every single product you directly or indirectly use, simply doesn't scale. Capitalism exacerbates this because it's a really good mechanism for building complex social interaction structures and automatically routing away from "inefficient" solutions (i.e. ones that do present the consumer with the externalities). But I don't think it's fundamental to capitalism. If we had some other post-capitalistic way to organize human effort at scale, I suspect it will still be susceptible to these problems. What we probably need most is systems intertwined with capitalism that provide the transparency and regulation needed to avoid negative externalities.

drewcoo 2y ago

> We'll always have a ton of laws passed because an industry had enough money to lawyer up its survival despite the technical advancements working against it. That's not what lawyers do. It's what lobbyists do. Lawyers argue it out in court afterward.

anticensor 2y ago
Lawyers and lobbyists are not mutually exclusive.

everyone 2y ago

[flagged]

andy99 2y ago
Wikipedia says copyright began as a way to try and control what was printed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright It's not a capitalist thing specifically, it's a power thing. (See also "misinformation" today)
- delichon 2y ago
  > It's not a capitalist thing specifically, it's a power thing. I'm rabidly pro capitalist, but can acknowledge that copyright is a property rights thing, which is very much a capitalist thing, but that capitalism plus legal coercion is frequently a toxic combination. As with the other isms.
  - _aavaa_ 2y ago
    > that copyright is a property rights thing Copyright is a monopoly on distribution and sale, it does not give anyone "ownership".
    - delichon 2y ago
      Generally ownership of a physical item confers a monopoly on its distribution and sale. Those rights are common parts of the property rights bundle that we call ownership. Whether they're a good policy or not copyrights share those features with other property rights.
      - _aavaa_ 2y ago
        I agree that ownership of a physical item general confers both a monopoly on it's distribution and sale. But the inverse (selling or distribution something confers ownership) is not true, see for example selling something on consignment. It's definitely not true for copyrighted works. Copyright, in the US at least, is pretty explicit about it not providing ownership of the thing to the rights holder. It provides the holder with a legal monopoly over the copying, distribution, and (broadly) displaying or building off of it. It does not state that the holder owns the creative work, much less any specific instantiation of it.
        delichon 2y ago
        It isn't clear which bundle of property rights constitute ownership. For instance there are many many restrictions on distributing and selling things that we are said to own. Some say that means we don't own those things, but I think it's more clear to say that ownership is ambiguous and contingent.
marcosdumay 2y ago
Nothing on the GP's comment is about capitalism.
- wolrah 2y ago
  > Nothing on the GP's comment is about capitalism. Companies and/or industries deciding that some element of technological and/or societal progress is limiting or threatens to reduce their profits, and that it's less expensive and/or more effective to fight that progress than to adapt to a changing market, is 100% about capitalism.
kbolino 2y ago
The tyranny of metrics arose with the industrial revolution, not capitalism. It is obviously easier to measure many things by proxy with money in a capitalist society, but Robespierre and Stalin were no strangers to optimizing society around metrics.
- sophacles 2y ago
  Nonsense, you're just forgetting the metrics that matter most: Number of pennies (or whatever currency happens to be in vogue that millenium) Number of people who will do what you say. (Some say they are the same). If you include those two metrics, it's a problem at least as old as writing.
  - svieira 2y ago
    If you have enough people who will do what you say it doesn't matter how many pennies you have. Mao was right (analogously to how Machiavelli was "right", not in the moral sense of "right" where, as Socrates says [paraphrased] "it would be better to be the one man unjustly put to death for doing what is right than the man who comes to power doing what is unjust").
- unclebucknasty 2y ago
  What we choose to measure reflects what we value. And, I think your parent's point is that money is not merely a proxy for measuring things in a capitalist society. It has become the only thing; which, in turn, creates distortions.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    And my point is that the existence of a metric and optimizing for it are not the same thing. Money is definitionally quantifiable and, in a capitalist society, very visible. Optimizing for it, just as optimizing for units produced by a factory, or counterrevolutionaries successfully reeducated, or prisoners incarcerated, or graduation rate, or billable hours, etc. is a choice and not inherent to capitalism or socialism or really any other economic system, except insofar as they are all downstream of the industrial revolution and its emphasis on quantity and repeatability.
munificent 2y ago
I share all of the concerns with rampant capitalism that many do, but I actually don't think capitalism is the root cause here. I think the fundamental cause is societal complexity and the principle-agent problem. One of the most amazing things about the modern world is how we are effectively able to combine the efforts of millions of people across the world to solve problems and build large things. Even something as simple as a banana split is a marvel, with bananas from South America, milk from English cows turned into ice cream in Europe, flavored with vanilla from Madascar, drizzled with chocolate from Africa. That action at a distance is why our quality is life is orders of magnitude better than humans had a few generations ago. But as in software, the cost of abstraction and information hiding is that sometimes information that is important gets obscured. In software, this can mean that an abstraction gets in the way of optimizing for performance metrics you may care about. In society, the abstraction can mean there are externalities to your choices that you are unaware of and wouldn't deliberately opt in to otherwise. But the trade-off, knowing every single externality of every single product you directly or indirectly use, simply doesn't scale. Capitalism exacerbates this because it's a really good mechanism for building complex social interaction structures and automatically routing away from "inefficient" solutions (i.e. ones that do present the consumer with the externalities). But I don't think it's fundamental to capitalism. If we had some other post-capitalistic way to organize human effort at scale, I suspect it will still be susceptible to these problems. What we probably need most is systems intertwined with capitalism that provide the transparency and regulation needed to avoid negative externalities.