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by Spooky23
3959 days ago
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Your premise is backwards. Does your desire to be a farmer oblige society to build a road so you can get access to the market? The the internet is a big stack of books in a room, Google is a librarian with a master index who organizes the data. Calling that piracy is a stretch of the term. Actually, taking the thought experiment further, you could argue that book publishers are the real pirate, taking ideas and making themselves toll keepers. |
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The problem being explored by this and other ideas is this: the Internet has massively increased our intellectual wealth, but for the vast majority this does not translate into any increase in physical wealth. If anything, the Internet may actually make it harder for many people to earn physical renumeration from intellectual activity.
Meanwhile the cost of the most necessary physical goods and services keeps rising. We've created a world where a person can be homeless yet have the combined knowledge of all of humanity available to them instantly. We've created an imaginary post-scarcity society online, but that's coming into stark conflict with the very real scarcity of the physical world in which it ultimately exists. Cyberspace is like the Egyptian afterlife: you go to heaven, but someone must guard and bring food to your Ka.
It's truly bizarre, a total inversion of the ancient world where almost everyone could live off the land yet the priests monopolized knowledge and literacy.