4 ms·

"If I produce something and you want to consume it, and I ask for money, then I deserve to get paid." This is a common misunderstanding of the payment dynamic.

by cam_l 12y ago

"If I produce something and you want to consume it, and I ask for money, then I deserve to get paid." This is a common misunderstanding of the payment dynamic. The reality is it is actually a power dynamic. I make something that you want and I can keep it from you until you pay me.. is more approximate to the truth. there is no inherent value in work, but only in supply and demand. Digital goods have demand, but no natural limitations in supply. Un-natural limitations (social acceptability, guilt, lawsuits, criminalising, etc) are being attempted but it seems likely they will all fail eventually. "You can consume as much media as you want for free" The corollary to this of course is, artists can make as make media as they like, but to make a decent living from it they need to show appreciation and respect to their patrons. If, on the other hand, they want to be stinking rich, or they want to bet big and spend hundreds of millions of hollywood dollars on expectation of a payout, they have to understand and manipulate that power dynamic. Just don't try and make out there is any kind of moral right to get paid.

anigbrowl 12y ago
The reality is it is actually a power dynamic. I make something that you want and I can keep it from you until you pay me. That sort of presupposes that your wants should be satisfied as a matter of course, no? I have to agree with some of the posters above about the immaturity of this attitude. In the natural world, you get some things for free and you have to work for other things; eg you might find a coconut on the ground, but that's not guaranteed - chances are that you'll need to forage or hunt for your food most of the time. You can want the coconuts at the top of the tree to any degree imaginable, but your basic choices are to stay hungry or climb the tree. Is the tree exercising power over you by withholding the coconuts? Of course not. In the natural world, when you want something you frequently have to put your money where your mouth is - that is, expend some effort to get hold of it. The actual power dynamic in the case of piracy is that any attempt at establishing a contractual relationship between producer and consumer can be easily undermined by a small number of people who are willing to break that contract by giving away copies for nothing while painting producers as morally deficient and undeserving of compensation. Digital goods have demand, but no natural limitations in supply. This is simply not true - there is a fixed cost of supply. Just because the marginal cost of supply is zero does not mean there are no constraints on supply. You're equating non-substitutable creative goods with quite high costs of supply from the producer standpoint with fungible commodities in a marketplace of perfect competition. The corollary to this of course is, artists can make as make media as they like, but to make a decent living from it they need to show appreciation and respect to their patrons. So what you're saying is that you want to be entertained and have your ego stroked - you wish your consumption to be reflected back to you in heroic terms, because you place such a currency value upon your attention. Put another way, you consider the time invested in consumption of entertainment as a form of economic labor which is traded for the aesthetic pleasure (qua economic utility( that you hope to extract from the art work.
- cam_l 12y ago
  "That sort of presupposes that your wants should be satisfied as a matter of course, no?" no.. 'should' is such a misleading term. like i said, this is not a moral issue. 'wants' as a matter of definition 'want' to be satisfied. and from experience, once you remove impediments from peoples 'wants' (en masse) they have no natural inclination to limit themselves. the power dynamic exists purely because 'want' is your weak point in a trading situation, and my ability to keep that from you is my strong point (my weak point is my need to eat). your example of the coconut is perfect in fact, it dehumanises or de-moralises the idea. the coconut evolved with its fruit/seed high up, hard to crack, heavy and slow germinating. however it came to be, it is resistant to birds eating it and germinates near the shoreline dispersed by the tides. other fruit evolved to be eaten and dispersed by birds. no morals, just different distribution methods. different power differential. "This is simply not true - there is a fixed cost of supply." no, there is a fixed cost of creation. supply is unlimited (virtually). the media industry got rich precisely due to the fact that a fixed cost of creation could scale up to massive increase in distribution virtually for free (at scale). and here we are only talking about that small percentage of artists who seek to leverage their fix cost of creation to make the same money time and time over. it is arbitrage on an artificially limited supply. now the industry is feeling the flipside of this 'free' distribution. "So what you're saying is that you want to be entertained and have your ego stroked" no. but reading back, i see how you thought that. what i mean is that artists have to respect what consumers pressure points, and their understanding of value is and respond to that rather than to keep pushing shit uphill, so to speak. understand that perhaps the time is gone when an artist can receive 10x value from 1x work. because now to put that 1x work out to a market where the market decides whether it will pay or not completely changes the power dynamic. it forces the artist to foster a relationship with their patrons. also, as an aside, i put forward a point of view about power dynamics in trade and about the non-existence of morality in this issue. i get the feeling that you are trying to moralise not only about the existence of piracy (which imho is in itself a profound misreading of reality) but about me, about which you know nothing. i find this vaguely offensive. if you care to know, the existence of piracy, abundance of content, and the leverage of being one of thousands of eyeballs has allowed me to shift from being a powerless consumer to being a producer, and a patron, as i please. which is awesome.

by cam_l 12y ago

anigbrowl 12y ago

The reality is it is actually a power dynamic. I make something that you want and I can keep it from you until you pay me. That sort of presupposes that your wants should be satisfied as a matter of course, no? I have to agree with some of the posters above about the immaturity of this attitude. In the natural world, you get some things for free and you have to work for other things; eg you might find a coconut on the ground, but that's not guaranteed - chances are that you'll need to forage or hunt for your food most of the time. You can want the coconuts at the top of the tree to any degree imaginable, but your basic choices are to stay hungry or climb the tree. Is the tree exercising power over you by withholding the coconuts? Of course not. In the natural world, when you want something you frequently have to put your money where your mouth is - that is, expend some effort to get hold of it. The actual power dynamic in the case of piracy is that any attempt at establishing a contractual relationship between producer and consumer can be easily undermined by a small number of people who are willing to break that contract by giving away copies for nothing while painting producers as morally deficient and undeserving of compensation. Digital goods have demand, but no natural limitations in supply. This is simply not true - there is a fixed cost of supply. Just because the marginal cost of supply is zero does not mean there are no constraints on supply. You're equating non-substitutable creative goods with quite high costs of supply from the producer standpoint with fungible commodities in a marketplace of perfect competition. The corollary to this of course is, artists can make as make media as they like, but to make a decent living from it they need to show appreciation and respect to their patrons. So what you're saying is that you want to be entertained and have your ego stroked - you wish your consumption to be reflected back to you in heroic terms, because you place such a currency value upon your attention. Put another way, you consider the time invested in consumption of entertainment as a form of economic labor which is traded for the aesthetic pleasure (qua economic utility( that you hope to extract from the art work.

cam_l 12y ago
"That sort of presupposes that your wants should be satisfied as a matter of course, no?" no.. 'should' is such a misleading term. like i said, this is not a moral issue. 'wants' as a matter of definition 'want' to be satisfied. and from experience, once you remove impediments from peoples 'wants' (en masse) they have no natural inclination to limit themselves. the power dynamic exists purely because 'want' is your weak point in a trading situation, and my ability to keep that from you is my strong point (my weak point is my need to eat). your example of the coconut is perfect in fact, it dehumanises or de-moralises the idea. the coconut evolved with its fruit/seed high up, hard to crack, heavy and slow germinating. however it came to be, it is resistant to birds eating it and germinates near the shoreline dispersed by the tides. other fruit evolved to be eaten and dispersed by birds. no morals, just different distribution methods. different power differential. "This is simply not true - there is a fixed cost of supply." no, there is a fixed cost of creation. supply is unlimited (virtually). the media industry got rich precisely due to the fact that a fixed cost of creation could scale up to massive increase in distribution virtually for free (at scale). and here we are only talking about that small percentage of artists who seek to leverage their fix cost of creation to make the same money time and time over. it is arbitrage on an artificially limited supply. now the industry is feeling the flipside of this 'free' distribution. "So what you're saying is that you want to be entertained and have your ego stroked" no. but reading back, i see how you thought that. what i mean is that artists have to respect what consumers pressure points, and their understanding of value is and respond to that rather than to keep pushing shit uphill, so to speak. understand that perhaps the time is gone when an artist can receive 10x value from 1x work. because now to put that 1x work out to a market where the market decides whether it will pay or not completely changes the power dynamic. it forces the artist to foster a relationship with their patrons. also, as an aside, i put forward a point of view about power dynamics in trade and about the non-existence of morality in this issue. i get the feeling that you are trying to moralise not only about the existence of piracy (which imho is in itself a profound misreading of reality) but about me, about which you know nothing. i find this vaguely offensive. if you care to know, the existence of piracy, abundance of content, and the leverage of being one of thousands of eyeballs has allowed me to shift from being a powerless consumer to being a producer, and a patron, as i please. which is awesome.