social.noyu.me

i am normally somewhat restrained in what i say on this topic due to the delicate position of [founding and maintaining a one-of-a-kind game emulator project] but i also can't really be held liable for pointing out the obvious here, right? right? do NOT ask me what i mean by this

i go very far to avoid openly encouraging or flirting with breaking the law. i will not tell you to break it. i do not even mean this in a "haha and then what ;)" way. seriously, do not break the law because of me, do not act like i did not tell you this, do not imply that you read my "real" message

but i can be blunt with you: if nobody out there breaks the law, cultural history as we know it simply doesn't exist. that's a very depressing fact of the world. and you can draw whatever conclusions you want to from that

when i say i want a pluricentric world, one of the things i mean is that society as we know it, all that is beautiful in the world, cannot survive if all laws are consistently enforced to their full extent 100% of the time. there Must exist an entire world in the gray area

and i think this might actually be my strongest single political belief: that the world must be "tolerant" in some way, and that the optimal number of broken laws is not zero.

can you imagine what a fucking tragedy it would have been if drugs actually ceased to exist when they were outlawed?

do you think that, at a stroke of a pen, a powerful man should be able to define away an entire category of human experience? i don't! i will never believe this! even when it's a very, very unpopular opinion to hold. in the limit this includes such things as "murder should exist"

but, back to the subject of culture: we are forever blessed by the people who sometimes do not take the threat of legal punishment seriously enough and sometimes do what society needs them to do, rather than what society says they should do. this applies to so, so, so many things

and i will encourage moderation in all things. taken to extremes i know that this is a self-destructive mindset. but, look, sometimes i have it in me to be brutally honest, and that's what i'm being for once

@hikari I keep my moderation to Discord tbh

@saagar saagar

@hikari well you simply shouldn’t take that philosophy to extremes. All you have to do is apply the philosophy to itself.

@hikari It’s not actually a very unpopular opinion most people will just refuse to admit they have it

@saagar yeah

@hikari There are still issues making it work at scale (and I think they may be cultural, rather than technical issues) but I still think crowdfunding represents a solution to a lot of the problems copyright was invented to solve.

Copyright was invented to liberate work from patronage, but the problems with patronage - the reason liberation was needed - are much less pronounced when that patronage is distributed.

@Catriona oh, very wise insight! you are onto something here

@hikari The argument that gets wheeled out in favour of copyright is that artists (etc.) should be compensated for their work... and yes, they should! But that is a labour issue, not a property issue. And "intellectual property" feels like a way of skirting round the fact that intellectual labour is labour, and a way of legitimising rent-seeking on that labour.

Oh no is this socialism?