[djb_hackernews]

Imagine a futuristic utopian human society. Are the people writing poetry, playing instruments and painting murals or are they assembling widgets in a factory?

Humans are really good at creating things, that's what I think we are here to do, not "work".

[TeMPOraL]

Most of the content nowadays is created as "work", usually for advertising. In the futuristic utopian society we would get rid of all that crap, and I'm willing to bet we could let people create however much they'd like and we still wouldn't have information overload problem. It's easier to manage your information diet when everyone around you stops trying to push their content into you.

[RodericDay]

> It's easier to manage your information diet when everyone around you stops trying to push their content into you.

quoted from emphasis. remove money from intellectual property and you remove some incentive, from both good actors and bad ones.

[tedks]

This is sort of an easy thing for djb to say, but the truth is that most people are not good at creating things. Most people are barely useful for "work". The average keeps getting higher, but half the population is still and will always be below-average.

Maybe in a future utopian society everyone is somehow above average, or there are radically fewer humans that just are really smart, but right now most of the people are not going to create top-tier "content". And there are enough people creating top-tier content, and enough top-tier content in the history of human art, that I don't need any more content. Who is going to pay them? Why should I? Why should the state? Why is this is a thing we should be buying? I can think of at least ten better uses for my money.

[walterbell]

The average keeps getting higher and the top-tier improves because of non-incremental creative leaps, achieved by statistical outliers in the new-blood people who create "more content". Large sample sizes are needed to yield the good stuff.

[tedks]

But if you're truly a talented artist or musician, you can always make a living. It doesn't need to be easy and it doesn't need to be possible for everyone to "create content."

[walterbell]

If good material can be discovered more efficiently, there will be more opportunities for recursive inspiration. In that case, there would be systemic benefit from ease of discovery, which may require making it easy to create content that guides discovery.