Comment by nurple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nurple | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, their creation is held behind legal walls in order to create, by definition, an artifical scarcity from which it derives its monetary value. If it was not protected by such a wall, and was not scarce, it would have no monetary value.

No, I don't think the inherent value in their talent is artificial, but I _do_ think that the monetary system we've built around such things as a necessity to survive in our modern world is abberant and bound to fail.

ETA: Just to give some flavor. Do you realize how much human energy is expended in finding ways to build these walls of artificial scarcity? It's frankly sad.

I was watching a showmatch that a streamer I enjoy watching was invovolved in (ShahZaM a Valorant pro). For nearly an hour in the leadup to the showmatch we got treated to a realtime negotiation between him an the player organizing his team. From comments like "no I can't use that graphic because I'm sponsored by another PC builder", to "every dollar I get I'll increase the size by 1px", and the piece de resistance "Whaaaat?! we have casters?? I'm not even getting paid for this!", followed by a streamer-initiated 10(!) count roll of twitch ads.

When the match was over, Tarik, the guy who organized the allstar team, was supposed to do an interview with the casters but had accidentally kicked off his own 10-pack of ads and they had to embarrasingly stall until his viewers were done watching them so they could see the interview live.

It was a repugnant view behind the curtains of the rediculuous amount of work a lot of people go to in order to profit behind the artificial scarcity put in front of their skills. This is usally hidden from the viewer behind production, but happened to leak in this instance due to the slapdash nature of the event.

Frankly, we can, and we must do better.

>Sure, their creation is held behind legal walls in order to create, by definition, an artifical scarcity from which it derives its monetary value. If it was not protected by such a wall, and was not scarce, it would have no monetary value.

That's... not artificial scarcity. By definition (and using your own words) it is actual scarcity.

A person's performance -- which is more than just their voice reading lines -- is not held back behind some imaginary wall. It's literally limited by the hours in the day, the person's ability to get from place A to place B, etc.; it's not like David Attenborough is a Santa Claus figure and can be in California narrating a documentary and in New York providing some random dude a personal voiceover for his life simultaneously.

> It's literally limited by the hours in the day

If a textbook isn't available because it's still being written by the author, then true, that's the real scarcity of the author's time. But if a textbook is finished but isn't available because effort is put into preventing the information from being freely shared, then that's artificial scarcity.

Restricting access subject to payment is currently the most common method for extracting profit to incentivize creation, but it's not the only method and for digital goods it's incredibly inefficient.

None of that is relevant to this discussion. We are talking about someone who spent time growing a skill and is charging people who want him to use that skill for whatever they are hiring them for.

nurple said: "their creation is held behind legal walls in order to create, by definition, an artifical scarcity from which it derives its monetary value"

In my example "their creation" is a textbook, and "legal walls" would be copyright/DMCA.

There is also Getty/Universal Music/etc. attempting to enforce artificial scarcity in an area where real scarcity existed (in addition to plenty of artificial scarcity) but is beginning to be overcome.

I don't see copyright or a record label as artificial scarcity. I think the artist should have every right to profit from their work.

> I don't see copyright or a record label as artificial scarcity

It's allocating resources towards preventing distribution. Maybe you'd agree that it's "direct" artificial scarcity, but believe without that necessary artificial scarcity we'd soon become worse off overall?

> I think the artist should have every right to profit from their work.

Sure - but you see that is not inherently the same thing as the specific method of profit extraction through requiring payment per access to the book/image/music/..., right? An artist receiving donations or public funding for releasing their work to everyone under a permissive license is still profiting from their work, for example. I'm not necessarily saying you have to agree that alternative methods are currently feasible in all or most scenarios.

Sure, I'd agree selling access is not the only method but given that there is a story on the front page of HN about once a week about why open-source maintainers should be paid and how the current model isn't sustainable, in my opinion shows, that relying on donations or public funding is a fool's errand and not a viable alternative.

> given that there is a story on the front page of HN about once a week about why open-source maintainers should be paid and how the current model isn't sustainable

Opinion articles on HN notwithstanding, do you not think that free and open-source software has, as a whole, been fairly successful?

Moreover, IP law doesn't just apply to art or code - evergreening of medical patents is enforcing artificial scarcity on information that could save lives. Textbooks that could teach millions being restricted to the few thousand that pay is also going to have a huge hidden impact.

I don't know if there are viable alternatives for all scenarios, but given how much is on the table if artificial scarcity can be replaced - I think it'd be wrong not to actively try, encouraging any potential alternatives, rather than just being resigned to the idea that this much waste is necessary. At the very least we should oppose the attempts to enforce artificial scarcity in areas that currently managed to do without it.

No given individual has 'every right' to anything.

Virtually everything we humans do was inaugurated by those who came before, and our wholesale, liberal replication of those prior actions defines our very existence.

> I don't see copyright or a record label as artificial scarcity.

Any concept of ownership beyond "what is possessed and am in physically controlled" is artificial. The law of nature is that might makes right.

>copyright or a record label as artificial scarcity.

Lets say I have a plant and I grow that plant with a bunch of other plants and make special seeds. This isn't a common skill set. Now lets say I sell you those seeds and you grow plants with them.

Now, which seems more natural.

You take the seeds of those plants and grow more seeds for yourself.

or

I prevent you with laws on taking those seeds and growing more plants.

When you put something out into the world, it is completely natural for people to take those objects and do what they want with them. It's only with more modern humanity that we reserve rights for the person selling after the sale.

Artist aren't plants; Attenborough's voice isn't a seed.

I think what OP is saying is that once AI can replicate these performances (and my coding skills) these things will no longer be scarce. So maybe it's not artificial yet, but it will soon be. Assuming the AI itself doesn't get exclusively owned by companies that implement their own artificial scarcity walls.

Allow me to share my own recent predicament, on which I'm still deeply cogitating, and from where a lot of my own frustration flows.

I am a content creator, I write software and build compute systems to run it upon. I was RIF'd last week and, if I'm really conservative, I have a year of expenses in savings.

I very much believe in OSS exactly because it allows me, not to tap into a monetary stream, but to overall better our human community by sharing my work. IMO, this is a core and fundamental belief of OSS and it frustrates me to no end to see articles like "OSS is going to die without funding", the two concepts are diametrically opposed.

So many, yourself included, have this perverted view of the world where there's no way it could exsist without our current monetary system, no alternative that would be more efficient, more fair, more equitable. I just refuse to believe that's the case.

I do not bemoan other content creators their right to generate monetary revenue from their creations, in fact they have no choice. But that doesn't preclude my opinion that it should change.

Indeed, what do I do now? I have 1 year to create a revenue stream off of which my family and I can live, or I need to go back to an industry that has corroded my soul in ways that sometimes make me wonder if it's even worth it anymore.

The most effective path for me to generate sustained revenue is to abandon my desire to improve humanity by sharing and turn selfishly inward, all or in part, to create a Rube-Goldbergian golem of artificial scarcity around my "content". I have to build a payment system, I have to protect the code at rest and at runtime, I have to build licensing and consider segmentation, I have to market, I have to build systems around revoking access to those who lose their own monetary stream and deal with their data, etc, etc, etc.

I know what it takes to build whole companies around systems like this, I've done it from the ground up on more than one ocassion to great success (at least for those who held the keys to the artifical scarcity doors that they paid me to build in front of my own work), and if there's anything that feels like more of a waste of my life than playing technobabel whisperer to clueless middle and upper-management, is considering building something like that again, even if I'm the ultimate keyholder this time.

In a world where we do not have to fight like dogs for table scraps, all of this wasted time and effort falls away, and instead all of us content creators who skulk through it for the love of craft, can instead focus solely on the betterment of our community as a whole. We live in a world with the resources to realize a reality like this, but IMO we have all been blinded by a masterful twisting of our inbuilt self-preservation instinct by the ultimate farce in artifical scarcity: money.

> So many, yourself included, have this perverted view of the world where there's no way it could exsist without our current monetary system

I don't appreciate this assumption; lumping me into a group of characters based on nothing I've said / something you have assumed, based on no evidence, is quite counterproductive to a healthy conversation. If you're going to try to make an argument at least base it on the content of my post and not some inference you've made based on nothing I've provided.

I'm sympathetic to your situation, and do wish you the best in staying on your feet. And I am quite, quite far from a capitalist / capitalist-apologist / what-have-you.

It sounds like you're talking toward using AI tools to effectively "duplicate" yourself, to reduce the scarcity of your own time. I hope I'm interpreting that correctly. I'm 100% on-board with letting the computers do the work so we can all go off and enjoy our lives. It's dismaying that "productivity increase" means "do more in the same amount of time" instead of "do the same in less time and then go live."

This is still a far cry from duplicating the creative work of others (cloning a performer's ability, potentially for profit), and it's still got nothing to do with actual "artificial scarcity." Again, this is real scarcity. There are only so many hours in a day. You only have so much brain power to expend within those hours. These aren't pro-capitalist statements and I'm not insinuating that anything follows from them. I'm only being pedantic here. :)

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