Topic: Post-Information Age

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...the business of the record industry is not to sell music, but rather to sell contrivances such as CDs and cassettes. To entice people to buy their contrivances, they record popular music onto them. When file sharing became a prominent practice, it threatened the industry by offering the musical content for free, bypassing the need to buy their expensive contrivances. If no one honoured their claim of ownership over the intellectual property rights of the musical content that they filled their contrivances with, then they would no longer be able to monopolise its use for the purpose of selling contrivances. The recording industry quickly and aggressively moved to outlaw file sharing and to punish those who did it. Once the act was deemed wrong, the act and all who did it, became evil themselves. This had the benefit of protecting their industry long enough for the record companies to put themselves into a position to be dominant in the file sharing industry at a later date, when it became possible to shift their industry from charging exorbitant amounts for contrivances to charging exorbitant amounts for offering file sharing services. In support of this, complex memes such as ‘artists will not be able to make a living if file sharing continues’ were introduced alongside more basic memes like ‘file sharing is evil’ in order to bolster the strength of the superstructure. The accompanying prohibitive law became ‘thou shalt not file share lest ye be punished’.

you always CREDIT THE CREATOR... the TRUE MEANING of copyright law.

So the idea that creators won't make money is absolute bunk.

Fuck popular, corporate music.

Sure, there's lots of creative people doing lots of creative things, but it takes a PhD in economics to fully understand a recording contract(figuratively).

intellectual property, read the monopoly of information, is wrong.

so, everything i write on paper is no longer mine? every song i write is now yours? conversley, anyone is free to perform your plays for money without your say-so? am i free to sell copies of the davinci code with my name as author?

don't get me wrong, you want to give away copies of your cd, that's cool. i myself prefer some returns on all the money i spent recording and post-production.

If I film a movie and I want to use it, I can, so long as I credit you and so long as I register my film with the GPL/CCL

Anyone could perform a play that I wrote, make money with it and not give me a dime.

if someone made money from your work and in the long run, it ended up providing you with a living (through 'advertsising' exposure), then how would you feel about it?

Did I hit a nerve, Jim? Didn't mean to... I'm just trying to express the internal debate I have been running for the last six months :D

This is a very recent innovation--and a radical expansion of the previous (also recent) concept of "ownership" at all.

That is because you've grown up in a culture that believes that the creator of an idea owns that idea.

I do not believe that any concept of "ownership" whatsoever has any place in a healthy society

When one steps back and examines the notion of “owning” something, the abstraction becomes readily apparent. Ownership represents nothing more than a power relationship—the ability to control. The tribal institution of “Ownership by use” on the other hand, suggests simply that one can only “own” those things that they put to immediate, direct and personal use to meet basic needs—and not more. A society crosses the memetic Rubicon when it accepts the abstraction that ownership can extend beyond the exclusive needs of one individual for survival. Abstract ownership begins when society accepts a claim of symbolic control of something without the requirement of immediate, direct and personal use. Hierarchy, at any level, requires this excess, abstract ownership—it represents the symbolic capital that forms the foundation of all stratification.

Most of us feel wronged when something is stolen from us, but why? Much of it is acculturation, but what bothers is most is the denial of our own use. As I write this on my laptop, Giuli is using my desktop. This does not bother me in the least, though by Lockesian logic it should. After all, is she not violating my sacred rights as "owner"? I do not mind, because it does not impinge on my own use. If I wanted to use it right now, the situation would change, but so long as another's actions do not change my ability to use those resources, it doesn't bother me.

The theft of material goods leaves us feeling wronged because it robs us of our ability to use a given resource. If someone broke in and took my computer, I would feel wronged, because I could no longer use my computer. It is not that my "right to ownership" has been violated that bothers me; it is the violation of my "right to use."

Such a distinction may seem like splitting hairs at first, but there are important--if subtle--implications. One is that the "right to property" is devalued from the realm of sacred rights, to mere practicality. Robbing someone of their use of some object is no longer "wrong," but simply "mean." Enforcement of laws against theft is no longer upholding some moral order; it is merely oiling the gears of a smooth society.

The implications are profound for intellectual property. The RIAA and MPAA have recently recruited the U.S. courts in a campaign against sharing over the internet. They call such sharing "theft," based on the speculation that every download is a lost sale. This, despite the empirical evidence that file sharing has no effect on sales, to say nothing of common sense, forms the entire basis for their claim, ignoring the very real difference between potential and actual loss. Yet they have managed to prevail, and their unfounded presumptions are now accepted as fact, with an increasing and dismal precedent forming the law on this issue.

Thus, sharing is illegal. But it is by no means immoral. The RIAA and MPAA argue that it is, sometimes supporting such bogus evidence as summarized above, but ultimately relying on their sacred rights of "ownership." If we accept, instead, a paradigm of "property by use," this issue is transformed. If I have a song, and someone copies that song, then my ability to listen to that song again is in no way compromised. Neither the RIAA's nor the MPAA's members have lost any of the discs they have imprinted data on. No one has lost anything, but someone--the one with the copy--has gained something in that copy. If we believe in "property by ownership," sharing is wrong, because one's ownership has been violated. If we believe in "property by use," though, sharing is good.

We are currently seeing the logic of ownership unravel as computers provide a purely abstract environment for these ideas to play out, forcing us to refine our thinking and be more precise with what, exactly, we believe. It gives the lie to "property by ownership" with increasingly draconian measures such as the DMCA, and forcing its proponents often to rely on completely fabricated evidence.

"Property by use," on the other hand, was the pragmatic reigning paradigm of human society throughout our evolution, abandoned only recently with the rise of civilization and hierarchy. It is a practical arrangement that promotes the idea of sharing--something we instinctively see as "good," because of its long history as a basic underpinning of our society and survival. "Property by ownership" ends up being an unfounded mythology that must be maintained in spite of all facts and logic; "property by use" ends up being a practical, reasonable understanding of property rights that fits nicely with our moral intuitions. "Property by ownership" is new, untested, and already falling apart at the seams; "property by use" has been proven by two million years of human evolution.

We own nothing; we have no "right to property," and nature is not ours to take and do with as we please. We can use the things we need, just like any other animal, within the same bounds as any other animal. But to pretend we have some kind of divinely protected claim to anything is simply delusional.

oh geeze..... you haven't read or either haven't properly understood (and i use that word lightly so as not to offend) Ishmael, have you, MxM?

So you think a strong healthy human society is one that is capable of limitless expansion by outcompeting other cultures? If you disagree, say so...

On population, you are correct. Those few, perverse and unworkable cultures which are currently disintegrating before our very eyes also suffer from severe, systemic overpopulation problems--being among the most primary reasons for their inevitable collapse in the very near future. I do not see why this means that their arbitrary rules should be counted more heavily. If anything, it is proof that their particular taboos are an unworkable, inherently unstable configuration. I would think that anything they believe should be held up to suspicion precisely because they believe it .

So .... you have a society that goes on happily and sustainably for millions of years in one corner ... and an uncontrollable, raging behemoth of a culture which, in its suicidal death-throes, kills the other .... and it's the suicidal behemoth that's the "healthy" culture that we should take our cues from on matters of morality and ethics? The one with the Holocaust, and the worst mass extinction in the planet's history, and all of that?

Survival of the fittest, does NOT mean the strongest, most aggressive, most selfish, etc. Because those traits are not necessarily the most advantageous for a species to have.

Likewise, when talking about cultures (again, being very careful that we do not slip into Social Darwinism's fallacies), the most successful culture is not necessarily the one that can dominate all of its competition...

More over, as long as there are significantly different cultures, I think there will be competition between them (not nessesery wars, but wars as well) and the weakest cultures will be out-competed (not killed, out-competed). And no one can stop it.

This is exactly my view! This is exactly what I am saying. The survivor DOES NOT mean the most aggressive or selfish. Did I anywhere applied that? The surviver means just that - surviver. Though it has to be able to put a fight and WIN the fight (if attacked or not) against those civilizations that ARE aggressive, selfish and so on (e.g. fascist Germany) but not best fitted to surviving. So the successful surviver has to have some aggressiveness - so that it can control the resources, so that it could win that fight.

If, on the other hand, there is nothing in Quinn's work that does appeal to you... then why are here? That's an honest question... not an attempt to be snide.

The healthiest culture is that which is most sustainable, and most adapted to human nature.

The thing that is kind of missing here is the prevention from catastrophic events like huge meteorite, WW3, or new virus that kills as all (directly, not through the absence of resources).

All of which small band-level society would be better equipped to handle. Natural disasters are nearly non-events to such societies; the extant foragers in the way of the tsunami earlier this year were quite safe, for example.

Hey --.



And




Just the same...

Ahhh, now you're talking my language....

What is human nature? Why, precisely what we've evolved to be, of course!

No, it is not the same. What I wanted to say it is not the MOST aggressive civilization, which is the best survival, but SOME level of aggressiveness is probably beneficial in competition with other cultures.

I suspect, that you want to say that civilization is not a part of the "human nature", but how you can take and remove some parts of it (for definition of the words "human nature") because you do not like it? If you do that, then again the definition of "human nature" become really subjective and not generally accepted.

Technology != medicine != civilization
"Technology" is a primitive invention, remember. Pretty much every ethnomedicine on the planet winds up with the same effectivness. Every culture believes their ethnomedicine is the only valid one, and everyone else's is just a bunch of hogwash. But they end up being more-or-less interchangeable. Our ethnomedicine treats some things better than theirs; theirs treats some things better than ours. So, that's no reason to keep civilization around, as you could pick up any primitive medicine on the planet without any noticeable loss of effectiveness.

Mass extinction-level events--like a meteorite--might wipe us out. Or might not.

New doesn't mean bad; new means untested. New means you should be suspicious of it, because it hasn't proven itself yet. In this case, it means, "Holy shit, how can anything fail so completely--and on this kind of scale--in such a short time?" Civilization is, in terms of scale, completeness, and time, the single greatest failure in the known universe, ever .

Interestingly, at this extreme, two forager correlates--the nuclear family, and the Inuit kinship system--return to the fore. The complexity of industrialism reduces the ROI of child-bearing while also lowering the death rate and extending the expected lifespan to very near forager levels. Europeans only reached the stature of their Mesolithic ancestors once again in about 1950, for example, thanks to "affluent malnutrition"--the state of nutrition that Steve Brill characterized as "overfed and malnourished." This results in a significantly lower birthrate for industrialized counties.

Unfortunately, like pastoralism, industrialism is also incapable of existing on its own. This extreme level of complexity is very costly, and can only be maintained by externalizing costs. This generally requires a less complex area--an agricultural region--that can serve to pay those costs.

...

Thus, we see that industrialism cannot exist on its own. It can only exist on top of an agricultural system, by exploiting the lesser complexity of that system to offset its own costs. The First World needs the Third World--and so, industrialism can never succeed in replacing or eliminating agriculturalism. Industrialism and greater complexity are no solution to the current crisis of the diminishing returns on complexity.

If some catastrophe happens then, we would not exist any more.

So yes, the chances that we will survive without civilization each particular year is 99.999...%, but it means that you just have to wait long enough until humans die out for one or other reason.

Meanwhile civilization has capability to carry humanity until the thermal death of the universe, and who knows, may be beyond...

We did not fail, we still alive and kicking. We may fail in future if we do not learn how to live with limited resources. However, limited resources does not mean limited development.

You're pointing to the failures of civilization, to prove the viability of civilization? The mortality rates of the Third World are not the mortality rates due to some other culture's conception of medicine, they're the mortality rates of a civilization practicing Western biomedicine !

The Later Pleistocene Bottleneck was because such a catastrophe occurred--probably the eruption of Toba, Sumatra. But, because it's damned near impossible to wipe out a bunch of nomadic omnivores, we survived. We've survived several bottlenecks, actually, because we were nomadic omnivores. Civilization has yet to survive anything--so far, it keeps killing itself too quickly for it to face any kind of natural disaster.

True, but civilization doesn't help your odds any. In fact, it lowers them. Not only are you less likely to survive a natural disaster, you also have more disasters to worry about.

No way. No way in hell. The point of diminishing returns for complexity is somewhere about our own technological level which, despite our self-gratified attitude, is not really all that much above medieval leeches if you try to look at it objectively. The fossil fuel subsidy has allowed more energy--and more complexity--in our industrialized culture than ever was or ever will be again, and even we aren't that complex. And the fossil fuel subsidy is about to end very abruptly. We're already past the point of diminishing returns for research & development, education, and technological innovation, and we're nowhere near that point yet. It's a science fiction daydream like the Singularity without any basis in reality whatsoever.

Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy would seem to indicate otherwise. Civilization will not outlive us; it can't outlive us. To cheat Peak Oil (which we probably reached yesterday), not only do we need that "fairy dust" solution the Chicago School keeps talking about--you know the one, that magical energy source that burns as well as oil, but not one of thr 6.5 billion people on earth have ever thought to try burning, despite the promise of becoming the richmest person alive if they find it first? Once we have that, we'll just need the time machine--so we can go back to the 1970s, to retrofit out entire economy to make use of this new fuel source.

Even if an "economic equivalent" does exist, it's too late--you needed to find it 30 years ago. And get everyone on board with it.

My contention is simply that at this point, we've tried burning, bending, eating, cutting, striking, folding, smoking, melting, or otherwise manipulating pretty much every substance on earth--and quite a few substances that aren't. If we still haven't found it, it's probably not available in sufficient quantities to matter. That means Peak Oil is it, that's all there is, no more.

Coal is mined using oil.

Are you saying that such parameters like child mortality rates, and the average life span of the African people before we got there were better than what we have right now, say in Europe?!!! No way!

One question: where are the Neanderthals? They were "a bunch of nomadic omnivores". And they died out extremely fast on the whole geological scale! species come and go, and if humans live as animals, they will go as animals as well.

I do not know how well are you qualified to make those statements, I have Ph.D. in physics, and I disagree with you. There are lots of unsolved problems on fundamental level, let along on pure practical/technical levels. A.I.? Quantum computers? Unified theory? String theory? The list just goes on, where we can have discoveries that can change the world. You may disagree with me, but think about this way: With civilization we have at least some chance to outlive our Planet, without civilization none, zero.

How about nuclear power plants?

And what is "soon" means in soon after oil? 30 years? This is quite enough time to be prepared for that. The nice thing about market system is that as those resources go away, the price for them increases which make very profitable to invest into other types of energy. So the market will react and correct automatically, even if government does not do a thing. We started seeing this now with oil companies investing into, say wind generators, but now the oil is still cheap, so even though they have technology, they do not widely install it.

But right now I do not see the "global catastrophe" in the nearest 50 years because of the oil. Honestly, I am more worried about middle east situation, and possibility of nuclear (or as our president say nukelar) terrorist attack than about the oil problem.

How about nuclear power plants? Tidal power plants and all other alternative sources? The technology exist now and used, and IIRC quite significant portion of electricity is provided by nuclear power which was available for 50 years at least.

And what is "soon" means in soon after oil? 30 years? This is quite enough time to be prepared for that. The nice thing about market system is that as those resources go away, the price for them increases which make very profitable to invest into other types of energy. So the market will react and correct automatically, even if government does not do a thing. We started seeing this now with oil companies investing into, say wind generators, but now the oil is still cheap, so even though they have technology, they do not widely install it.

The problem that I see with the free market, or inaction of government is that the companies goal is to get as much profit as they can. They do not care about people. So when that restructuring is happening, a lot of people looses their jobs. But it does not destroy the civilization as a whole. This is where the government should step in and to make the transition as smooth as possible, by financing in ADVANCE R&D and deployment of alternative energy sources.

You may be right though, that out governments could do more to smooth out that transition. But right now I do not see the "global catastrophe" in the nearest 50 years because of the oil. Honestly, I am more worried about middle east situation, and possibility of nuclear (or as our president say nukelar) terrorist attack than about the oil problem.

In my mind the problem of the modern wold is inability for people/countries to find common language and understanding to such extend that it still leads to wars.

So what? Everything what we do now uses oil directly or indirectly, it does not mean that coal could not be mined using coal.

That's exactly my point. Everything we do uses oil. And coal is a poor substitute at best. We use oil for fertilizer, pesticides, shipping, harvesting, planting, plowing, etc. We eat the stuff. Most new medicines are oil. The computer you're using is oil. Your transportation is oil based. (Even bikes are made of oil.) There is no substitute that can do even half of this stuff.

This is the crux of the problem I have with 'Peak Oil'

This statement has two implicit assumptions in it.

1) We can only replace oil by finding a single, all encompassing alternative.

That's just dumb. I'm sorry, but I really think it is. there is NO reason in the world why we need a single resource that does everything. In fact, this is another point where diversity is king.

2) (And this is more contentious) That in order to replace oil we need to replace every last watt of energy(complexity) that it provides. Currently, we waste more energy than we used fifty years ago (I'm making up figures, but I'm sure it is true at some point in time). I think that this is a questionable assumption. Jason has made a strong case for critical compexity and all that, so I am willing to consider that it MIGHT be true. But we simply don't have examples to look at for proof. I mean, when Rome fell, Rome itself never fell. The empire broke apart from the outside in... and the further from Rome you were, the more dramatic the fall (ignoring the Eastern Empire, for now). What does this look like when the whole world is involved? I dunno.

I think the big question here, is slope. If we fall off of a cliff, then things are gonna be really bad. If, on the other hand, we alleviate the problems gradually, then not so much. Currently, politics is driving us toward that cliff with no end in site. If our only chance for 'salvation' is poliitics, then its all over. Of course the other alternative is Quinn's -- mind change. Interestingly, as things get worse, the possibility for mind change increases. So its a race for the finish. I mean, right now, we have this 'voluntary simplicity' movement. What happens as the 'voluntary' part becomes more necessary? And how quickly does it happen? I suspect 'how quickly' depends on how much 'voluntary' action we see.