The paperback is like half the price of the hardcover, and it's not because the hardcover is actually that much more expensive to make (far from it), it's because the paperback came out later for the people who wanted it less
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And it's a really perilous thing, bottom-up price discrimination People don't like thinking about how the sausage gets made They're selfish, yes, but what's more than selfish is people are SHORT-SIGHTED After a thing exists, no one wants to think about the work it took to make
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That's the Marxist shit about "alienation of labor" and "commodity fetishism" "Well the file exists, it's right there on the server, it doesn't COST you anything to let me download"
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When you give things away "for free" you make it seem like they didn't cost any of your labor or time to make, you create the impression they just appear by magic Price anchoring is a powerful effect, it shapes people's thoughts more than they realize
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And we live in an era where a whole lot of people are just willfully stupid, they just see "content" appearing as if by magic in their feed every moment of every day, and prefer not to think about the conditions under which it was created It naturally creates a vicious cycle
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I dunno man If the Internet worked as it was advertised in the heady Free Culture days there wouldn't be anything to be pissed off about Nobody would be trying to hire artists "for exposure", nobody would be paradoxically both Internet famous and real life poor
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Nobody would exist who had a decent job and disposable income but "doesn't pay for music" or "doesn't pay for porn" But they obviously do
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The way people would frame this if they were serious about this being about the poor having a right to enjoy art is that it's price discrimination, it's doing you a favor
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The argument that it SHOULD be free, the NATURAL price for all information is zero, you can't MAKE me pay anything for it even if I'm the richest person in the world is massively destructive All by itself that attitude sabotages the pay-what-you-want price discrimination model
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After all you just gave them moral permission to pay zero It's not me putting it up for free as a favor to the fans, and saying "You have a moral obligation to pay what you can" It's me doing my ETHICAL DUTY to release something that NATURALLY IS FREE
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And turns me from a laborer offering a sliding scale of payment to just a beggar asking you to give me money out of charity So people give less, often a lot less
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End of conversation
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