I am sorry to say this, but Hacker News became another reddit?! For past 1 week, I see similar topic being discussed every day on front page. I agree with the community empathy, but its becoming something else now.
These are the rights that Richard Stallman warned us would be taken from us.
And look what's happened - nearly every video distribution channel is now locked, DRMed, and inaccessible. We now license everything we consume, and it can easily be taken away from us. (Google Play Music, the Stadia precursors, other media.)
We're not the majority on the Internet anymore, but we hold the power to change things.
Please care more. They'll be coming for something you love next.
Copyright is an example and experiment. Something that could before never be considered a commodity, information, became a pure commodity. This process of ultracommodification, in order to be functional, had the side effect of leading to the skewing of ownership into a renting relationship. The trajectory we are on is one where everything is becoming more and more rented and financialized. Because this is necessary in order to allow for more growth.
The concept strikes many as an affront. As long as humans have existed, so have food, air, and human bodies. Were Adam and Eve broken up into tranches and traded by high-speed algorithms across the globe? Why, then, am I?
The dinosaurs that became our fossil fuels might well ask the same.
To gain insight, we must consider the essentials.
Necessarily, your exhalations contain carbon dioxide. However, requiring upon food acquisition payment for potential CO2 release equivalent to food carbon content is not viable. You may well intend to bury the food, or perhaps yourself immediately after consuming the food.
Nor is metering CO2 exhalations. Of course, a financially distressed individual could simply be interred the instant they become insolvent, but this forgets the utility of withdrawing fats from your body by mechanical processes and rendering them into tallow and diesel - which would be effectively subsidized by exhalation metering.
Furthermore, instantaneously committing to earth or industrial feedstock any body at time of insolvency presents impracticalities if that body is far from a hole in the ground or industrial consumer of body carbon.
Therefore, the human body itself, in addition to the food it consumes and gasses it exhales, is also a de-facto commodity in exactly the same way as a modern-day fuel-destined dinosaur or Adam or Eve, who are after all, you and me.
To provide freedom from immediate bodily carbon sequestration, while guarding against even a single atom of carbon from escaping the system, all the wondrous vagaries of our existences are therefore encoded into derivatives sold on the free market. You are free because of it. You may even bet on the possibility that you will hold your breath forever while continuing to live, or alternatively that you are already dead and haven’t yet learned of it. Progress stops for nobody’s body, but you may live out your existence with all the stock market acumen of a velociraptor, if you like.