Monetization models that intentionally create scarcity are scummy, including the one proposed in the article. The existing intellectual property economy is scummy. But we can fix this.

Imagine a future where:

The Internet rewards passionate creators more than instrumental alpha-seekers. This is key. But how?

We publish everything for free under reciprocal licenses like the AGPL and CC-BY-SA, not permissive licenses like the MIT and CC-BY. Those who take from the pile must add to it, or at least not claim it as exclusively their own.

Creators are rewarded by the populace via direct payments, like how streamers are rewarded. People decide what's valuable and what's slop, not Big Brother.

This creates an incentive structure where:

Those who make software and content because they love it will have more resources to make more quality stuff.

Those who make software and content for the money but actually hate what they do will find something else to do because companies will pay them less.

There are two necessary conditions that must be met, that we can work on right now:

We recognize artificial scarcity as evil, so we can enforce reciprocal licenses socially and bypass the broken legal apparatus.

We use multiple competing payment platforms to pay creators and receive payments, so there is incentive for these platforms to get better.