| How do you create an honest society? Which is easier, DRM that doesn't suck, or consumers who don't "share?" I don't know the answer. I think we are entering an age of consciousness. The realization that we can lie is a natural stage of maturation, a later stage is the realization that lying has negative consequences. Maybe we as a digital society need to go through a similar stage of honest consumerism. Buying things, not because we are forced to, but because we want to give producers an incentive to produce. We could all smash windows, steal cars, bump locks... security is an illusion. We can defeat it if we want to, but we don't have to. We can all win. Life is not a zero sum game. A balance will be achieved. If it is not achieved, then the producers will simply stop producing and life will be worse for all of us or at least for the producers or perhaps the distributors. I don't have the answers, but we are raised to know that stealing is wrong. Honesty is the best policy. Golden rule. Sounds simplistic, perhaps naive, but maybe that's the answer. Personally, I stopped stealing music a long time ago. Now I listen to streaming radio online or I flip through Youtube videos from the distributors' channels or that kind of thing. My point is, there are "honest" alternatives to stealing products, digital or otherwise. I don't know why we create this sense of us versus them. We share this planet. If you make my life better, I want you to be around to continue making it better and I know you need to eat. I think that's the answer. Build a sense of community around the product, the producer, the consumer and the future where we all benefit from our shared existence. |
How about wiping out all forms of artificial scarcity?