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"Create less and have a real job."

Wow.

I see lots of this kind of sentiment when I bring this up, but yours deserves credit for being exceptionally honest.

The world probably needs less content creation. We're long past the point where there are too many useful books to read in one lifetime. Even in narrow fields, we're producing comedy television, historical fiction novels, or cat pictures faster than one person could consume them all. You could spend a lifetime just researching what's worth consuming.

With this kind of overproduction, it's no surprise creators can't make money.

There are about seven billion people, and they all like different things. There's no overproduction.

Surely there is, unless you think that people like the "content" that is explicitly designed to abuse them and trick into buying things.

That is a ridiculous argument. The more content we produce, the more quality and diversity you can get in the corpus that you will read; the more choices that you can make. There might be infinite insight in the contemplation of cat pictures. :)

Or from another angle: why don't we destroy half of the content of the world? Surely we have enough with the remainings. If we were to find tomorrow another intelligent species, would you be interested in their culture? Or won't you have time to read it?

What you said is hypothetical, but the question we face today is "should we put limits on our ability to transmit and receive information in the name of incentivizing content creators to create when we already have many lifetimes worth of content?"

Right now there are limits on what we can communicate, limits placed in the name of "protecting content creators." These limits are a kluge. For example, what if I where to take a song, compress it a ton, then read out loud the base64 representation to a friend who is transcribing it.

Have I infringed the copyright of that song? Or was I simply describing it so precisely that I allowed my friend to reproduce it flawlessly? If I sing the lyrics to my friend and he learns that, are we breaking a law? And more importantly, should we be breaking the law when we do this?

Why can't we communicate whatever we want? Why haven't we accepted that the progress of technology will slowly make all things a matter of "communication"?

I think that part of the answer to that question is a deep anxiety over such a profound shift in the "business" of our society. It would mean much would have to change, and while I'd argue that change would be for the better, I understand that anxiety.

Yes, more content adds more value. But past a certain point of saturation, it no longer adds enough additional value to compensate its creators. My argument is that we are long past that point.

Which would be more valuable, doubling the world's content, or doubling the amount of time and money to spend on it?

You're solving the wrong problem here.

Let's say we cut "literary production" in half somehow. Is it better if everyone writes a little bit, or if we all pay someone who's really good at it to do it? I'd rather read a professional writer than my own ramblings, which means I'd rather a subset of good writers were able to earn a living off it.

> The more content we produce, the more quality and diversity you can get in the corpus that you will read; the more choices that you can make.

If so, then we should just spend all day reading /dev/urandom. Infinite content there.

> Or from another angle: why don't we destroy half of the content of the world? Surely we have enough with the remainings.

If we destroyed the half that is advertisement in disguise, the world would be much better off.

> If we were to find tomorrow another intelligent species, would you be interested in their culture? Or won't you have time to read it?

I would, but I'd happily limit my time spent on analyzing ways members of that culture abuse one another and look for something interesting to learn from them.

Imagine a futuristic utopian human society. Are the people writing poetry, playing instruments and painting murals or are they assembling widgets in a factory?

Humans are really good at creating things, that's what I think we are here to do, not "work".

Most of the content nowadays is created as "work", usually for advertising. In the futuristic utopian society we would get rid of all that crap, and I'm willing to bet we could let people create however much they'd like and we still wouldn't have information overload problem. It's easier to manage your information diet when everyone around you stops trying to push their content into you.

> It's easier to manage your information diet when everyone around you stops trying to push their content into you.

quoted from emphasis. remove money from intellectual property and you remove some incentive, from both good actors and bad ones.

This is sort of an easy thing for djb to say, but the truth is that most people are not good at creating things. Most people are barely useful for "work". The average keeps getting higher, but half the population is still and will always be below-average.

Maybe in a future utopian society everyone is somehow above average, or there are radically fewer humans that just are really smart, but right now most of the people are not going to create top-tier "content". And there are enough people creating top-tier content, and enough top-tier content in the history of human art, that I don't need any more content. Who is going to pay them? Why should I? Why should the state? Why is this is a thing we should be buying? I can think of at least ten better uses for my money.

The average keeps getting higher and the top-tier improves because of non-incremental creative leaps, achieved by statistical outliers in the new-blood people who create "more content". Large sample sizes are needed to yield the good stuff.

But if you're truly a talented artist or musician, you can always make a living. It doesn't need to be easy and it doesn't need to be possible for everyone to "create content."

If good material can be discovered more efficiently, there will be more opportunities for recursive inspiration. In that case, there would be systemic benefit from ease of discovery, which may require making it easy to create content that guides discovery.

> The world probably needs less content creation.

It's funny how this was noticed by King Solomon, far before the age of print. "Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body." (Ecclesiastes 12:12b). Apparently information overload was a problem even back then.

Anyway, I agree that we have too much content, but not content in general. We have too much for-profit content. I can't back this up with numbers, but I'm willing to bet that the majority of content creation is just an indirect form of advertising.

Take news sites. Why all those articles are so crappy, full of mistakes, and often outright lies? Because news sites don't care about the truth; the content is just the way to make you see the ads.

Or take all those images people repost on social media. I have a close friend working as a "content marketer", so I get to see first-hand how those images are made. There are people whose job is literally to create dozens of such pictures every week and post them on the pages they manage. The pages themselves are only tangentially related to what is advertised.

The whole scheme works like this: imagine you want to advertise a fitness club you own. So you create a bunch of Facebook pages about dieting, general health and exercise, and you hire a bunch of people to make you an image or two for each page, every day, and to spread them around in a way that links back to said pages. The images are usually pretty useless; the content doesn't matter as long as people share and "like" it. The idea is that you will waste a little bit of lots of people's time hoping that a percent of a percent of those people will convert and pay enough to justify all that social media carpet-bombing.

Frankly, I find this scheme evil, but for some reason it is a respected occupation nowadays...

The problem we really need to solve is wasting other people's time to make money. Content overload will fix itself then.

faster than one person could consume them all.

This seems a rather arbitrary performance ceiling to strive for.

The point I was trying to make is that production needs to match consumption. Which can be difficult to plan for digital goods.

I take issue with this "real job" thing.

A "real job" is something you do to get reliable income. More often than not, it implies working for someone else. "Real job" don't have to be interesting, fulfilling, or even productive. If yours is, great, but that is not their main function. Their main function is to get you to pay the bills.

Hence my issue with the qualifier: "real". "Real" implies something inherently good, or at least better than the alternative. It also implies the alternative isn't "real", meaning it has less or no value. Add enough confusion, and you get a moral imperative to work your ass off for a boss that doesn't care about you, instead of creating pieces of art.

This way of thinking would lead to a bleak world. We should say "real job" less often —if at all.

It is quite clearly a 'no true Scotsman'-type argument.

What "it" refers to? My comment? Arguments based on "real jobs"? Something else?

"Real jobs." If we can't value people who are chasing their dreams, then what is the point of working together as a society to accomplish things? If artists should be cogs in a machine somewhere, then what is the point that machine?

It's absurd to suggest that people should get 'real jobs.' Life is a real job, and we've all already got it.

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