The dickhead libertarian "exchange theory of value" as opposed to the Marxist "labor theory of value" The idea that price reflects nothing at all other than how much value it gives the customer, and bringing the worker's actual needs into the picture is "coddling" them
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Creative fields, especially, follow a power law distribution The works that genuinely become classics that nearly everyone agrees are great are very rare They only exist because of a general artistic community that "subsidizes" art existing in general until someone breaks out
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If you bristle at the idea that your money keeps getting spent on "regret" purchases that you didn't think were really worth it, remember the "mid-tier" games and music and movies you love were paid for mostly by people who didn't love them and just wanted to try them out
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Yes, everyone is broke right now - although that's us ALL being in the same boat, ALL of our wage floors being attacked as a "disease" ("Why should cab drivers' wages get propped up when anyone can drive a car? Why should hotel staff have jobs when anyone can have guests?")
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There's a lot of strategic errors that have been made in this tug-of-war, red CD prices in the 90s probably really were too high, ebooks could've tried harder to compete on perceived quality to justify the price point rather than the Big 6 just trying to kill them completely
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One big thing I'm fascinated by is apparently Tim Berners-Lee coming to think the Web itself was designed badly, that the assumptions behind its design made it way too easy to strip context and attribution (by default the owner of an asset has no control over being linked to)
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The Internet as it's designed currently makes the concept of "invisible microtransactions" almost impossible And that's a compelling image of an alternative Internet that seems like a pipe dream today but could possibly have worked
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Instead of big visible subscription paywalls everywhere, an invisible process by which you pay something like $10-20 a month for being online and the money gets split between the owners of whatever content you looked at No advertisers need to get involved
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"But Arthur, people would absolutely game such a system, they would mirror content or archive it or spoof their own IP to avoid giving people money for clicks and steal clicks from others" Yeah I know That's already the world we live in now, only worse, because ads are involved
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And advertising-based models are, like, the worst - combining all the downsides of all the other models And the specific way in which advertisers decide want to get paid is what incentivizes the consolidation of giant corporate content hosts who spy on everybody
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it really helps to have money - like, i'm the well off middle aged guy who buys stuff cos i can and i am *also* the author who knows people have to want to give me money i've been trying to square this circle for nearing 40 years now, it's not a new problem
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the problem is an oversupply that makes the market not work - see from 2013 and 2016 https://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/ … https://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/10/20/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-redux-scented-candles-in-a-human-face-forever/ … the solution? well the destruction of neoliberal capitalism of course! but the hard part is how to feed artists in the meantime
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