Private property is the only rason why your medical records are not on FB today. Or in databases of your favorite pharmaceutical, or insurance company. What could be fairer than your ownership of your medical records? That the community or some Dear Leader can peek into your medical records because “it’s all about sharing” and “information wants to be free”?
How could you collaborate with others from the community and exchange (or sell) something when you don’t own anything?
You’d better realize that you cannot be free without a functioning private property system. This “post capitalism” is impossible because people instinctively know that’s the case, but also because as long as they don’t want to give up on their property, you can’t make them do it (as I mentioned above, you can’t exclude them from participating in whatever comes next). Regardless of what kind of new system some people (e.g. yourself) may think should come next, it won’t.
Take some time to think about that “new” system and how private property would (or wouldn’t, in your view) function in it.
Good case scenario: free market capitalism.
Bad case: more of the same or totalitarianism.
Sorry, I’m not following you - Are you saying we can’t have a system that respects private property rights, without having Copyright/Patent Laws?
What about the Safe Network model - how are Copyright/Patent going to be enforced?
If technology causes a paradigm shift, then new ideas/ models have to be adopted - it’s just the free market you love, in action as you say.
You don’t need copyright or patent laws to reach an agreement with someone to keep your data secure.
For example, I could trust a hospital with my medical records, but ask them to sign an agreement to keep them secure. There could even be a compensation clause should they fail to achieve this, likely underwritten by an insurer.
I think the decentralization and democratizing of industries are the main points and that people will start to collaborate more. Efficiency in production lowers costs of goods, makes a 9-5 less important, shifts people’s work ethic to something more collaborative and distributed (either globally and/or locally), IoT provides improved efficiencies that lower costs more also. I don’t think it comes down to property rights really. Maybe there will be more co op owned land and businesses but everyone still wants and needs privacy (privacy = private = ownership Is part of this projects goal and we all acknowledge that). If there’s less emphasis on property rights as far as land goes maybe more people will live in public housing but they still will maintain there personal property rights and their privacy behind four walls, wherever that may be.
But it looks like the term “ownership” will get a little tweak. People’s property should be getting in the way too much of other people’s freedom or opportunity. Its ownership of property resulting in the defacto control of other people that we have to resolve. And it seems the old capitalistic way of doing things will find it hard to compete with conflict free product that is superior and virtually free. Breaking the choke point gateways with a collaborative bigger picture commons just makes sense.
I think there are two opposing factors here: the ability to keep the results of your labour vs whether keeping it causes hardship to others.
Take owning a car. There is no shortage of them and everyone can have one of they deliver enough value to others.
Land, however, is different. There is a limited amount of space and everyone needs a fair bit to survive on (think food, shelter, heat). Fencing off some as your own and using violence to defend it , is rather questionable.
Getting back on topic, monopolizing information can only happen to the current degree with a large degree of institutional violence. Statism, in other words.
Talking of alternatives to Copyrights etc, this article is quite informative and explains how collaborative/Creative commons adds value to the economy.
You mentioned a fairer system that copyright.
MaidSafe has copyright on their s/w because they own it.
It may or may not be patented, and it may or may not be licensed gratis. But it’s their property.
I don’t know in what system MaidSafe (or Linux or whatever) can have a fairer system and yet not own the code.
Any ideas?
Enforcement is different from ownership, so you’re mixing things up. You can’t claim that fascism is a new model that does away with property rights just because the government can steal with impunity - even in fascism property rights exist (on paper), but they are selectively enforced. Those are different issues.
But still, to answer your question: in this “new” post-capitalistic system Copyright/Patent rights are going to be enforced exactly the same way as they are in the old system. That’s why I’ve been telling you is nothing “new” in this so called Post Capitalism.
In more concrete language:
3.2 Customer may reproduce and distribute copies of the Software in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that Customer meets the following conditions:
(a) Customer must ensure that any permitted user is required to enter into a written software licence and is not allowed to use the Software (including any modified version of the Software or any software that is based on or includes any part of the Software) in any manner that would not be permitted by this Licence;
Now be my guest and ask MaidSafe people or the author of that article whether this license will be changed anytime soon.
I feel I’m wasting my time because I am reiterating what I already mentioned twice in previous comments, but…
So how exactly is it going to be enforced? If you’re using the s/w, we know you accepted the license. Since the s/w is free, MaidSafe doesn’t need to enforce anything in particular. But if you start violating the license, you’ll get on their radar and you’ll be dealt with accordingly providing property rights exist and are being enforced.
If you claim there won’t be property rights or they won’t be enforced, I wonder how do you expect for the Foundation to continue developing this s/w and investing millions in the ecosystem. I suppose the answer is “sharing”. I just don’t know what you’re going to share in exchange for food, clothes and HDDs when the current property paradigm will not exist (or property rights won’t be enforced).
This has nothing to do with patents, by the way.
What new ideas? You guys are constantly beating around the bush. I’m yet to see what exactly will be “new” in this new model.
The free market that I love is the market which does away with State (“public”) property, so yes, that’s what I like. It seems you’re trying to make an argument here, but you’re in fact contradicting yourself:
Before you claimed that this “new” approach would eliminate property rights, then that it wouldn’t (“some” rights wouud remain), and now you’re saying that this “new” system would actually be anarcho-capitalism which you said is different from “Post Capitalism” (it can’t be, anarcho-capitalism is capitalism in its purest form).
There is no firm anarcho-capitalist view on intellectual property rights (and patents). Some anarcho-capitalists think they don’t exist because duplication of data doesn’t take away the original property (for example, someone takes a photo of your photo, or copies your MaidSafe movies), while others disagree. But in either case, the both groups’ core belief is that property rights are the foundation of freedom. Even on MaidSafe, the second group has a choice, and that is to not share any private data they don’t want to have duplicated by others and sold or given away on the network. The first group will copy all your data, including your medical records and sell or give it away.
Since you and the author appear to believe that data wants to be free and shared at will, it’s up to you two to explain why this so called Post Capitalism shouldn’t allow hospitals and banks to share your data with the highest bidder. It’s absurd that you now feeling like you’re scoring some big point are posing this question to me and I’ve been arguing throughout this whole topic that something like that would be against the law.
I really don’t know why you keep making out I’m arguing against property rights. I’ve repeated said I’m not and also that previous posts were quotes from the article, not arguments I’m making. Insofar as the article goes, it is not suggesting we set up some “Fascist State” or “Anarcho-Capitalism” - nether the article nor I have mentioned anything remotely along these lines.
The article makes a good case for why the Capitalist system is waning and posits what a Post-Capitalist Society might look like, given the impacts and implications of technological advances. The article suggests that Society may come to value “Collaboration” over “Ownership” over time and speculates that the Societal Zeitgeist will change; from one of an Individual, profit driven model, to a more group collaborative/sharing way of thinking about global resources.
The way we think about intellectual or other property, copyright and patents will also change.
I’m not going to defend the taking away of property rights, Fascism, Anarcho-Capitalism or anything else like that because neither I, nor the article have advocated these things.
BTW, RE Copyright and Maidsafe – I didn’t mention that either. I said the “Safe Network model”. The point I was making is that Copyright would appear to be unenforceable over the Network insofar as streaming videos etc goes – new ways of looking at the issues/dealing with the technology will have to evolve.
I could have mentioned GNU/Linux or something else, but I’m used MaidSafe since it’s a GPL project that everyone here is familiar with.
Why I keep arguing about property rights? I already said that there’s a lot of beating around the bush.
I am asking you how exactly is this new economy supposed to work?
I explained how it can’t work (using MaidSafe and healthcare as examples).
Give me one example from your side.
How is value created in this sytem and how do people who create it get rewarded, while at the same time doing away with capitalism?
Yes, it would be unenforceable. It’s also largely unenforceable now (if you’re into copyrighted movie/music torrents). But there is no economy there.
Authors don’t make money. Actually not only money, but nothing at all.
How is that going to work?
Stephen King lets you download a copy of his book and in exchange we allow him to read our MaidSafe comments, is that it?
So if it’s agreed that it’s going to be even more unenforceable due to technologies such as Maidsafe, then Copyright would be ineffective in protecting intellectual property rights…right? So who exactly are copyright/patents designed to protect? This would be the inventors/creators to protect a reasonable income from their ideas. However, currently it is usually the aggregators of other peoples work who benefit. By directly paying content creators and missing out the aggregator middleman, the creator benefits.
At the end of the day content creators/aggregators have to find a better way to monetise than relying on an unenforceable outdated system - it’s just market forces.
The Maidsafe licences are needed for defensive purposes by Maidsafe because it is not operating within a Post- Capitalist Society yet - it has to arm itself to suit it’s environment.
How is what going to be enforced?
Once again…I don’t.
In exactly the way it is planned initially, until such a point as the Network is large enough that Pods no longer need 5%. I personally would suggest that the Foundation then becomes more like a DAO with consensus given to the user via a voting system. This would create an embryonic Post-Capitalist Socio-Economic Model that is desired by the article, but would achieve it in a different way than the suggested Universal Basic Income type idea.
A lot of your points are from an Individualistic profit driven perspective - the idea is that people are gradually moving away from that way of thinking and more to group/collaborative thinking. How this manifests in the future is a matter of conjecture but nobody is suggesting getting rid of property rights or enforcing some new political system on people.
Yes, of course. But how is that new or Post-Capitalism?
Dis-intermediation due to computer networking has been going on for close to 20 years and before that with other advanceds in communications (Disintermediation - Wikipedia).
P2P-induced intermediation won’t create Post Capitalism, just like the Internet didn’t create it.
(from TFA, quoted by you earlier): “The foundational principals and philosophies upon which the capitalist system is based — private property, wage labor, profit-driven competition and debt-based finance — are no longer relevant under such conditions.”
You can say you didn’t say that, but that’s what you quoted (I suppose as an argument of how the new system is going to function - if that’s not why you quoted it, please do us a favor in the future and explain the purpose of such citations).
You think you are, but you really aren’t. These changes are just taking dis-intermediation to a new level.
Those who stand to lose the most in this cycle of dis-intermediation are the government and rentiers, so the direction in which this is moving is the free capitalism.
If an artist can successfully sell access to his works without getting just 20% from it, that’s because of dis-intermediation, not because capitalism would be eliminated.
There’s only one thing that people need to remember: needs (perceived or real) are unlimited, while resources aren’t.
That’s why it’s irrelevant how much some new techno
Some details from TFA
The question then becomes, how to protect certain types of personal information and data without compromising the transparent and accessible nature of open networks.
I find it hilarious that these Zeitgeist folks think there’s a difference between “personal” and “private” property and the former is relevant while the latter isn’t.
And yet in the same article we find claims such as “Just as information wants to be free, Big Data wants to be distributed.”. Except his own “personal” information, of course. They’d like to redistribute property that belong to others, but keep their own. That’s a new one!
Another part related to this discussion about private property is where he mentions how in the “new” system “ownership is becoming less important than access”, but as we learned later, that doesn’t apply to his “personal” property.
Hybrid companies like Uber, Airbnb and YouTube, while facilitating lateral networks of exchange, continue to operate around a centralized third-party profit making company. Truly decentralized networks of exchange on the Commons will allow for direct peer-to-peer transactions without the need for third-party intermediary trust or involvement.
Where did the cars come from? Did the revolutionaries steal them from Uber, or were they perhaps printed for free using free inputs, and run on free energy that comes from free power plants? Probably not.
Apparently someobody somewhere had to say “All right, I’m not going to buy me the latest model of RoboDoll, but instead I’d invest in this community-owned PostCapitalistUber, because…” . And I can’t finish that sentence because I don’t know why would someone park his personal property (capital) in a non-profit. So no, there won’t be no not-for-profit Uber.
In order to prevent a sudden and catastrophic collapse of the capitalist system, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) will be required to stabilize a transitional hybrid economy as it moves towards a Commons.
This says it all, really. I can sit all day in front of my favorite Web site SafeNetwork.io and “collaborate” with you posting these worthless comments as long as I get paid a UBI.
There are numerous methods for financing a UBI, including taxation, redistributing existing social welfare payments, and revenues from public resources
Ahhhh, now I get it. Post-Capitalism as it was envisioned back in 1917.
(Gotta love the part about “public resources”. Where do those come from?) Post-Capitalism 1917
Capatalism will always exist in one form or another and may function in tandem with the commons but it’s hard to ignore the commons becoming more well established in this digital age with the advent of crypto currencies, trust less and autonomous systems that are distributed and non hierarchical. Is this where you’re getting caught up @janitor? Because post capitalism sounds so definitive that there will be no capitalism?
Also if you want copyright or what have you then sign an ethereum contract with someone else that is willing to but that is up to their transgressions. And in a time where more and more can be either pirated or offered freely well… Other things will HAVE to be figured out. What I’m saying has nothing to do with personal property in the sense you can hold or data that you keep secure and private on the safe network but what you wish to profit on by putting it out into the wild
Being massively “even more unenforceable” is new for a start. When you ask “How is that Post-Capitalism”, it indicates that you are thinking of it as an Ideology, such as Communism, Fascism or Conservatism, whereas I see it just as a description of a Society "After - Capitalism, " ie as the wording suggests “Post-Capitalism”.
Ok, I take it you mean dis-intermediation, which I agree won’t create Post-Capitalism.
The purpose of such a citation was to summarize one of the Author’s conclusions based on his reasoned speculation for readers (as a very long article). Hypothetically, given that his speculation that Capitalism will die, due to the reasons he gives is true, then the statement is reasonable: Under such conditions of abundance and given that people are becoming more collaborative in ways of thinking, then the things mentioned will become much less relevant, if not totally so.
No, not really mainly to do dis-intermediation and everything to do with changing attitudes. I am not suggesting we cut out the “middle man” in any conventional supply chain from wholesaler/retailer /customer etc, I am talking about removing the central authorities and parasitic aggregators and ring-fencers of other people’s work etc. Obviously people can strike a fair balance with aggregators that provide a useful service, I think it’s just got out of hand currently in the aggregators favour, it could be argued that dis-intermediation is counter-productive to achieving a Post-Capitalist Society in fact.
I’d totally disagree. Needs are limited, whereas Individual desires can be unlimited. Humanity’s needs, need to be met before Individual Human desires This is a realisation that people are waking up to, as Capitalism pays no regard to this idea, a better system will evolve that does not concentrate the wealth among the few.
I’m glad that you recognise that resources are not unlimited. Capitalism does not recognise this either - you cannot have infinite growth with finite resources.This further demonstrates why Capitalist ideas lead to the rape and pollution of our eco-system - I’m so glad you now recognise the need to protect the Environment that produces the available limited resources.
I find it hilarious that you think I’m referring to some film, rather than using a word in it’s proper context, though I get how it tars me with a certain brush.
Zeitgeist:
The Zeitgeist is the intellectual fashion or dominant school of thought that typifies and influences the culture of a particular period in time. Wikipedia
Thanks, Wikipedia’s Creative Commons!:
Not sure what the contradiction here is. He appears to be saying that people would rather just rent/share or use something (such as a film or car say) than buy outright.
Ok, I’ll maybe answer all the “revolutionaries” bit later…there’s a lot there.
Its time to let go of the term “capitalism.” The term socialism is dead too. No matter how much some people want to wash capitalism of it connotation of exploitationism it can’t be done. There is no way to hide capitalism’s record either. The honeymoon is over.
More than anything capitalism seems like a scheme to drive technology by socializing the cost of risk through handing the product of society over to the control of bankers. Despite all its talk about the decentralizing market mechanism its really a centralized system of development based on banking and bankers knowing best. Its centralized risk management. The lie about capitalism is that it leads to anything other than centralized planned economies. I’ve heard Scotland experimented with true free market banking but pulled it back because the wealthy didn’t like it.
Real issue is profit is a chronically broken mechanism that doesn’t track contribution well enough. I could be an incredibly profitable meth dealer. What’s my contribution? I’ve got a lot of profit. I can claim I did it by free trade. I can say I sold it where it was legal. I can say I am a capitalist. And I’d be right. But we know that I didn’t earn it and I am not entitled to the money I extracted. Oh now I am legit, and I sell the chemical stock for the food additive that causes diabetes in children and the chemical stock for the drug used to treat it. I am free you can’t stop me…
We could say Sweden during the height of its planned economy socialism still had some capitalism but the most disgusting outcomes of capitalism were sawed off. I think its time the term capitalism died. The heart of the term is not “free trade” but more along the lines of unnecessary freedom of contract and having a wealthy parasite class that can still puff, bilk and oppress people and fight for injustice and inequity through bribery and blackmail especially when driven by xenophobia or racial fears. We really don’t need supervisor robber barons, if we ever did. Don’t want any planning under any guise then welcome your meth dealers who force samples on people. But with planning we can do better than capitalism. It seems we have to if we are going to survive.
I’m missing the point I think, maybe because I don’t know what the Uber or Airbnb are perhaps - I understand how Youtube works though - it aggregates creator content doesn’t it in a centralised way?
In regard to the Energy bit, it is covered in the idea of “Pro-sumers” whereby people both produce and consume and an “Energy - Internet” grid of sorts can be envisaged. This would be eco, Green, re-newable energy of course.
Again, the choice of whether to rent/share/buy would be dependent on what a “Robo-Doll’s” function would be. If it was something pervy, then I’d probably prefer not to share and buy outright too.
BTW,haven’t you in a roundabout way, just invested 5% of your Safecoin “Capital” in the non-profit Maidsafe Foundation?
Lol…: I was waiting for you to get to that bit…I knew you’d love the idea.
Beginning to grow on you is it…lol… I did actually clearly state that this is where me and the Author have different solutions to the problem.
OK, go on, enlighten me - How in any way is anything touted by either me or the Author in any way related to or analogous to Nazism?
Yet this is precisely what SAFE Network is: a non profit Dropbox/hotmail/Skype…Uber et al.
OK, not necessarily all of those, but certainly Dropbox and more, and it creates a model that I think leads to others following, potentially creating all those other services (as SAFE apps) using the sharing rather than self enrichment model. Of course some will create for profit apps, but the suggestion is that increasingly people will create non profit apps, and that this has the potential to become the dominant paradigm, making capitalism a secondary economy (along the lines of batter today).
It isn’t necessary to eliminate private property in such an economy. Perhaps private property will become “so last century” (Bob Geldof ;-))
