This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Fresh controversial gaming news.
If you're not familiar with Unity, it's one of the more popular game engines in use today, especially for Indy developers. It's frequently recommended for it's relative ease of use, and up until now, generous licensing. Even if you're a very casual gamer, you've probably played some games built on this platform like Pokemon Go, Beat Saber, or Monument Valley.
Today, Unity has announced some significant pricing changes. Most controversial seems to be that beyond a certain revenue and install threshold, developers will be paying Unity per install of their game. As in, if you uninstall and reinstall the game, the dev gets charged twice.
This has managed to piss off the usual suspects of game developers, games journalists, and gamers. Many an angry comment written by Dorito stained keyboards are flooding messageboards and twitter about how this is the death of gaming. (Tongue-in-cheek by the way, as a non-game developer I find the pricing model half-baked.)
But what's really interesting is the potential for misuse that I predict will occur for the next controversial game. While Unity has said they'll try to limit malicious behavior, they're providing gamers with the ability to charge developers money by essentially clicking the uninstall/reinstall button.
Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?
What is the culture war angle to this?
Whenever topics of digital business models come up, my default culture war angle is:
This is just a further demonstration that capitalism as currently practiced is not a viable economic method for humanities far future, because it relies on scarcity to set prices through supply and demand, and actual abundance causes it to short circuit in ways that create all kinds of stupid schemes designed to produce and defend artificial scarcity.
Capitalism should remain our default for things that are actually necessarily scarce, but as we increase productivity and move to digital realms that will cover less and less of what we care about day-to-day, so we have to actually come up with an alternate method for handling the creation and distribution of those types of goods.
And we need to not be allergic to that discussion just because 'that's communism and communism killed a trillion people' or w/e.
It's not capitalism that prevents you from sharing the data project that you purchases for no marginal cost with others, it's intellectual property laws. Now if you get rid of those and let capitalism take it's course then you will almost certainly see less of these things invented but you're far from critiquing anything at the heart of capitalism.
His argument appears to be that Capitalism is why we have intellectual property laws, that the former creates conditions where the latter will always emerge.
But we can insert into IP laws anything we want. Invoking capitalism is purely going to muddy the waters. IP laws are not capitalism, they are an extra-market hack to incentivize the invention of goods that have little to no marginal production costs. @guesswho can propose any other hack they want, and in fact this conversation has happened on the motte without the invocation of capitalism at least once before. The fundamental problem that exists outside of any economic scheme is that some things have high upfront costs, some of which costs are in the form of risk, that needs to be born by someone while the fruits can be endlessly enjoyed by all. IP is actually a pretty elegant solution to balancing these incentives all things considered. I'm happy to listen to other suggestions but we're not going to be talking about capitalism.
I mean, 'the king hires you to be a bard and tells you when and where to play' was one such solution. Not a good one, but there are lots of solutions out there.
My point is that IP laws are a uniquely capitalist solution to the problem, because the whole point of IP laws is to let capitalist price-finding still work on post-scarcity goods.
There would be no benefit to IP laws and artificial scarcity if you weren't trying to achieve that type of price-finding through markets, which is the heart of capitalism.
Ok, but you have said we're probably better off keeping the rest of the capitalist(I do quite dislike this term as it implies a kind of rule by capital that I deeply disagree with so unless otherwise specified I'm substituting in 'Market based system with private property rights) system so unless you're proposing replacing that it does need to slot into a capitalist framework. You've proposed central planning with a distribution which has all the problems of the IP system, just as hare brained of schemes would instantly arise to maximize payouts and minimize costs, but lacks the things you get out of the box by going with a capital compatible system.
I agree IP couldn't work if there was nothing to be gained from ownership of the IP but that's just dumping a contextual system into an abyss that tells us practically nothing. What any system that encourages production which has high upfront costs and near zero marginal costs must have is a way to both compensate people who produce things that many people actually want and discourage the production of things that many people don't actually want. And it's a big bonus if it's not susceptible to waste based on signaling games, i.e. many people might say they want more educational programming but if in reality none of it is actually consumed that's a failure in planning.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link