I'm a writer. I can imagine it. But the landlord, grocer, car dealer and pretty much everyone else dealing in physical things wants me to pay for what I consume. I'm not independently wealthy. The only reason I can afford to write books is because the publisher pays me. The only reason the publisher can pay me is because people buy the books.
I can guarantee you that this type of behavior means I'm writing fewer books. It's very short-sighted.
Writers getting paid by the amount of books they sell is a pretty efficient way to allocate their work, but it's not the only way. If book sales vanished over night I'm sure interest in alternative means of financing would surge, and a new "standard" would establish itself.
Historically most art was financed through patronage/sponsors, wealthy people or institutions that sponsored people for the social status, or commissioned works from them. Both of those systems have been democratized by the internet, with people sponsoring artists they like with systems like Patreon, or just straight paying them money to create something. The same is happening with Twitch subscriptions (essentially donations to the streamer). There's no reason it can't work on a larger scale for most literature. Sure, priorities would shift, but it might also enable authors more creative freedom than publishers are comfortable with.
I understand your point but it is time for the system to change. Most writers in traditional publishing get 50 cents or a dollar for every sold book. My wife wrote a chapter in a science book that is being sold for over $100 and she received...nothing!
Everybody deserves to be paid for their work and I would argue that this is more about preserving knowledge than it is about not having the writers get what they deserve.
I get what you're saying by this, but I think OC is just being practical. This is the world we live in. It's shit and I hate it, but if you want something done, 9 times out of 10 you need to consider these questions
Maybe if you read the right books you would cultivate a worldview where you don't "need to consider these questions" so much. Maybe if more people died that we would even help build a world like that.
it's counterproductive to passive aggressively imply that people should cultivate a worldview that you think is correct. even if you are right, you seem not worth agreeing with.
no one worth agreeing with starts a sentence with >Maybe if you read the right books
I was only addressing the "this cannot be understood" aspect.
It's not what most people would want when given a choice, but that does not mean it's very hard to imagine how and why it happens.
I did not mean to imply I approved either, just that, I think "this is insane" is kind of silly. It is, but, it's also inevitable and not new or hard to follow.
In our current world, the currency is money, (vs land or humans in the past) and things pretty much only get done if someone can make money from it, and someone else doesn't make money inhibiting it. That's it. That's the entire mystery.
The unspoken answers to my two questions were "no one" and "many many many". Everything that you can do for yourself, some company somewhere would rather you pay them for it instead. The product doesn't exist because there are zero companies out there with any interest in producing it, and unlike pure information (software), individuals can't just do it for free for the feel goods.
It would require some imaginary and highly different societal structure to alter that equation. The people who would manufacture the home libraries, where do they get the materials and facilities from, and how do they eat, if they aren't selling these either to you directly, or by way of your government and it's taxes? Some kind of co-op type organization that takes the place of a for profit company? And they get their electronics parts and their vegetables from other co-ops since they don't have money to buy them? It could all be done some other way than by counting dollars, but literally everyone in the world would also have to be doing things this other way. And all the people currently on top of the current system will not be the ones rewarded with success under any other kind of system, and so they wield their power to keep things exactly as they are.
I don't mean in an illuminati way like there are 11 people running everything, I mean countless people inhabiting all levels and niches all act to preserve what they think is all they have, in countless little ways. Even people who actually have essentially nothing and would live far better in any other system, because it just takes more imagination than most people have to even consider not having dollars, and more generosity of spirit than most people have to even consider not being able to boss other people through their need of dollars.
We would somehow have to collectively figure out how not to reward the very worst of us with all the leadership positions, both private and public. Ultimately it comes from that. The exact wrong kind of people to make rules are just about the only people who gun for those roles. There are all kinds of asshole things I wouldn't do if I were running things. And I have no interest in being anyone else's boss, nor in figuring out ways to parasite off everyone else or harness them to some will of my own or anything like that, and so I will never end up running things. You have to be a sociopath to do what it takes to ever get into such a position. It doesn't happen by any nice fair reward-the-good kind of way, and we have almost no mechanisms to detect and defer such people from suceeding in their shark-like process. It just works and they go right to the top.
I'm not sure what the point is supposed to be of this imagining.
Yes obviously pure capitalism is as shit as pure anything else, and no system made by humans, and made of humans, actually works very well to create sanity and fairness. So even not-pure capitalism creates all kinds of undesirable results, like available tech doesn't get used in ways that would be wonderful for everyone.
What solution to human nature have you imagined in your split second?
I can guarantee you that this type of behavior means I'm writing fewer books. It's very short-sighted.