From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Sep 18 2000 - 23:57:47 MDT
"Michael S. Lorrey" wrote:
>
> What is being ignored? The fact is that the people who create stuff need to
> live. The inscentive of wealth is ONE tool that is useful to to encourage
> creativeness. Historical analysis suggests that to date, it seems to be one of
> the most effective tools to do so. So the better question is: Do we need the
> current or higher levels of creativity, or can we survive in societies of lesser
> creativity before we engulf the planet? I say we need as high a level of
> creativity as possible. It is understood, that at some point, there are only so
> many boats and cars you can park in your garage to make you happy, however a
> creative person can ALWAYS, I think, find something new and better to do with
> more wealth.
What is being ignored is that to date we have been living largely in
scarcity. As our tech advances rapidly toward singularity we live in
comparative abundance. It literally takes less and less human labor to
produce most of our needs and many of our wants.
Throughout history the truly creative have strived to find some way to
be able to create. In pre-capitalist periods that often required having
a patron. This was true of the arts and sciences as well. In
capitalist times, particularly for technology leading to easier creation
of economic goods and services creativity has come to be rewarded more
directly. But I think it is wrong to say that being paid or well paid
calls forth or somehow causes the creativity. It is enabler in a
society where money determines whether people have the means to survive,
much less create. As we gain greater abundance, there is no need that
survival be contingent on working a normal job for a salary at all.
Freed from the need to "earn a living" the creative should if anything
be more creative.
Now there is the question of how whatever resource remain somewhat
scarce get allocated wisely and especially to some of the most creative
and producitive people. But by the time we get to nanotech (if not
sooner) all the material means needed to create most things with
material dependencies will or can be freely available. What will still
be the most rare and valued is highly creative and talented sentiences.
My original suggestion we are missing some of the true issues was fueled
by discussion that seemed to assume that "intellectual property" is
actually a well defined and valid concept. I question this. Especially
since the truly creative, and especially if freed from "making a
living", need the free flow of information and intellectual productions
of others more than they generally need or want to fence off their own
productions as sacrosanct IP. Areas of intellectual creativity and
enterprise like sciences and software actually experience serious
breakage when discoveries and techniques are walled off from relatively
free use. We need to protect the integrity of works from rank plagarism
or modification but this is quite different from most of what is spoken
of in the IP discussions today.
Before we get too far along in deciding our position on these "IP"
"violations" I think it would be good to discuss what IP means and to
what extent and in what contexts we find it valid.
Also, in the case of Napster, I think we need to ask whether it makes
sense to accuse people who simply use the internet to share music that
they would share with friends anyway to be actual "pirates" in any
meaningful sense. It also has been pointed out that most muscicians
never get rich at all from their work no matter how well received it is.
The lion's share of most music revenues goes to the recording industry.
In this day and age of nearly instant global communication most of the
recording industry's advertising and distribution costs are simply
archaic and highly overpriced overhead.
The dumbest thing to me about Napster is that the recording industry
didn't embrace the idea as free advertising and take it a step further
by offering custom CDs containing your favorite music as well as
anywhere availability of your music and perhaps per play micro-charges.
In the long run though, the current music industry must change. It is
incompatible with the every free and faster flow of information.
Blocking that flow too much impoverishes us all.
Yes, artists deserve to make a living. But it doesn't require
protecting an outmoded way of publishing and distribution to take care
of that. Most artists do not create to get rich. They create because
they love to create.
- samantha
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