John Linton
.....it's always good to come across a sensible person's view how the things that really bug me at the moment are not just my personal aberrations:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646402192953052.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_INTL_LSMODULE
I have read various treatises written by Lanier over the years and even attended a seminar at which he was a key speaker a long time ago. The article is not long and if you have a minute or two it's worth reading. It addresses a number of points including the current defenses of stealing intellectual property from someone who once promoted the ideas and 'philosophies' that led to the current situation - as he says at one point the 'sharing of intellectual property' is turning everyone in to a peasant. One of his insights is what is the inevitable result of internet theft:
"Unfortunately, we were also making another decision at the same
time: that the very idea of intellectual property impedes information
flow and sharing. Over the last decade, many of us cheered as a lot of
software, music and news became free, but we were shooting ourselves in
the collective feet.
On the one hand we want to avoid physical work and instead benefit
from intellectual property. On the other hand, we're undermining
intellectual property so that information can roam around for nothing,
or more precisely as bait for advertisements. That's a formula that
leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term"
and
"Youthful fascination with collectivism is in part simply a way to
address perceived "unfairness." If everyone shares, then a young person
arriving on the scene fresh will not have less than an older person who
has been around for a while.
This is all harmless enough, but the pattern can be manipulated in
dangerous ways. I don't want our young people aggregated, even by a
benevolent social-networking site. I want them to develop as fierce
individuals, and to earn their living doing exactly that. When they
work together, I hope they'll do so in competitive, genuinely distinct
teams so that they can get honest feedback and create big-time
innovations that earn royalties, instead of spending all their time on
crowd-pleasing gambits to seek kudos. This is not just so that they and
their children will thrive, but so that they won't become a mob, which,
as history has shown us again and again, is a vulnerability of human
nature."
I think part, possibly a large part, of my current lack of enthusiasm for what I am doing, and have been doing, for the past ten or so years is the pointlessness of spending the declining years of your business life making it easier and cheaper for tens of thousands (in Exetel's case alone) of people to steal other people's property rather than reducing the amount of money they need to pay to get access to the most valuable source of information for their personal and business lives that has ever existed. It's a matter of perspective but somehow I've allowed my personal perspective to become clouded by the deluge of nonsense I read every day in carrying out the tasks needed to operate a business of Exetel's size. I realise that the only way of getting rid of this lassitude is to do something different but that's not a simple as just doing it because of the inter twined obligations that have been created in believing that what we have been doing for the past six is good and a useful contribution to the current society in which we live.
Somewhere else in the article Lanier comments that "poverty trickles up not down" which I have always observed to be true in many aspects of the societies in which I lived and as I noticed it I became more and more obvious to me why 'socialism' was just a way of reducing human societies to mediocrity and eventually oblivion as 'history demonstrates over the past 5,000 years. Taxing the "haves" to provide for the "have nots" only has one conclusion - it eventually produces a society where there are no "haves" and the "have nots" have no source of future sustenance. I have little doubt that today's collective denial that internet downloading of intellectual property is theft is simply a symptom of many societies around the world today where has become the dominant view of the way of living life. "I want = I take - because I can". I sometimes think that providing internet is like dealing drugs - you are illegally profiting from the weaker minded's need for a substance they will abuse and you take their money although you know it's harmful and possibly fatal.
People can only take other people's property without retribution in a society where morality/ethics are simply words in a dictionary in a society that is heading South towards an ever closer end date. Krudd panders to this societal decline in the most overt example of a politician whose only objective is to keep his nose in the trough for as long as possible - he is the worst example yet of a 'collectivist' who could create an "ideas summit" as an indication of how little idea he had in being the prime minister of Australia.