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▲ munificent 3 hours ago

1. Human attention is a finite resource.

2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever.

3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media.

You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually.

Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone.

Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.

▲zetanor 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone

I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game but who went and did something else instead.

▲lackoftactics 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle.

How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.

▲fzeroracer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away.

With agents you can just throw them at every JIRA ticket and get them (badly) implemented. There's no rhyme or reason if it's needed or even wanted, and spending time to think about it is 'wasted'. So the numbers on the burn down chart go up, but actual productivity is stagnant or becomes negative as unnecessary bloat sneaks into your app or game.

▲ryandvm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.

▲rurp 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.

Unfortunately this is completely opposed to the goals of the companies creating AI. An org like Google for example couldn't care less if people are viewing quality art and having their lives enriched by it, but they love it when people spend endless hours viewing slop on youtube.

If we as a society want more of the former it won't happen with the help of leading AI companies, it will only in direct conflict with them since the two goals are in direct opposition.

▲s_dev 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back.

People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can.

The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like. In a cinema, on a DVD, on a streaming site etc.

You've pointed it out yourself, we have these old notions of economics that we apply to a new world where it simply doesn't make sense.

▲hatthew an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Investments need a return on investment. If "the thing you wanted to exist now does" is the only return, that's not enough to support anywhere near the current amount of digital product creation happening today.

▲tavavex 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's almost impossible to predict how much demand there will be in that scenario because the world would be a very different place if that system was the default. And with things that are relatively cheap to make, such as professionally produced YouTube videos, people may only need to chip in a few cents to provide an equivalent return to ad revenue.

Given that people are already accustomed to paying for the promise of future things existing in the form of crowdfunding, Patreon or most subscription services in general, I don't think it would as drastic of a difference as you imagine, as long as the infrastructure is there to facilitate effortless 'investing' into many small things.

▲wewtyflakes 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sounds fine to me! Less inane, pointless, content? Only left with what people chose to exist? Sign me up!

▲Der_Einzige 23 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Good.

▲philipov an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And this is precisely the business model that platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter facilitate.

▲smcg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you want to get rid of patents and copyright then entire industries would have to roll over and die (the music industry, publishing, Disney, etc).

Also, people only invest in things if there is an expectation of profit. Your model for raising capital does not make sense.

▲markerz an hour ago | parent [-]

Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalties on the properties they sold to producing companies.

Intellectual property rights rewards the first-comers, not the innovators. For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available. The same can be said about AI models: the heavy investments by OpenAI and Anthropic to make these frontier models forces them to charge pretty expensive prices, but if we only had them, we would not have much innovation in making fast tiny models that are more cost and energy efficient. That drive comes from China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious.

▲Foreskin_Mafia an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is some New Zealand-level of alternative facts.

"Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights"

Adequately? name one lol

"many musicians make their pay by performing live" ticketmaster

"innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available" that's not what innovation is.

"China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious" you need to go outside

▲true_religion 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

Namely... every society in existence before the year 1496. Our current form of property rights includes copyright, which had no formal treatment until the city of Venice issued a decree that fined anyone who printed an author's work without direct permission.

Previous to that, the effort of copying a book was seen as so high, that one deserved reward simply for doing that. In fact, there were times that copying books was seen as social charity, that needed to be encouraged.

▲HeWhoLurksLate an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

in engineering software land, FreeCAD exists, yet Fusion, Catia, OnShape, Creo, SolidWorks, NX, and many other paid Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Engineering softwares exist and have features and use-cases that FreeCAD simply does not have. In this scenario, how do you square taking the risk and time required to develop something good with the hopeful payoff for creating something?

I guess some of the major value in those closed softwares is enterprise support and that could still be feasible, but still, the question stands - if what is currently software piracy becomes legal, how do the people who commit a portion of their lives to improving whatever it is they're working on get compensated?

I regularly contribute to FOSS, but I am in quite a privileged position to do so, because I have time to do so after putting food on the table.

I hope this comes off in good faith, I'm genuinely curious

▲ericmay 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available.

The pharmaceutical industry is also very highly regulated and so without some protection of profit you actually are likely to end up in a situation in which innovation doesn’t occur because it costs a lot of money to build new pharmaceutical products and if you build them and someone can just reverse engineer it and sell it cheaply you’ve switched your competition model from rewarding the development, however imperfect, of new drugs to rewarding a race to the bottom on cost and increasingly thin supply chains propped up by cost-cutting measures. With more regulations you probably need stronger IP protections as well.

> Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual.

Well it’s good to have a capitalistic mindset since so far that has been without a doubt the best economic model that has worked for humankind, even including the negative repercussions, but you shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to IP. It’s a bit like “free” trade - if the US was, for example, completely open with IP and China isn’t they simply take your IP, build cheaper products, and then funnel profits into IP protected drugs. It’s a lose-lose. Don’t let communists and other such authoritarians confuse you about how the world actually works.

We can also reform some IP for certain industries. When it comes to trade secrets maybe we protect those. Internet content? Who cares? It’s almost universally useless and not economically valuable so there isn’t any need to solve the problem of capturing monetary value. One of the best potential effects of AI would be that it could wipe out all of these useless content creators and pundits leaving only the good stuff left (established institutions like the NYT and truly great content creators - Khan Academy for ex).

▲piker an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The parent was responding to this diabolically uninformed quote from the GP: “You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like.”

It’s hard to have “invest” in a sentence without a capitalist structure unless GP somehow meant invest their personal time or barter or something.

▲foota an hour ago | parent [-]

I think they meant more like "people band together to pay Christophe Nolan to create some new film" ala crowdfunding. Is that a sustainable model for the world economy? Unclear.

▲thereisnospork 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

Well if we got enough people together it would be pretty cheap, maybe 15 or 20 bucks or so with inflation. And we could fill the movie upfront, and create some previews and launch an advertising campaign -- that'd certainly help drum up interest and get more people to crowdfund. Best even to just collect their money as right before they watch it so they know they aren't getting scammed and will in fact get to watch the movie they are crowdfunding. We can also crowdfund some popcorn machines and communal viewing rooms, after all people will want to have a snack and watch their crowdfunded movie with friends and family.

▲foota 6 minutes ago | parent [-]

That was a lot of snark :-) I know what you're saying. It's not clear to what degree the film industry would be viable in its current form though without IP rights. If everyone can watch the latest marvel film at home for free, are they going to be willing to pay to see it in theaters?

There would likely still be some demand for the experience, but the tickets would need to be more expensive to recoup the costs of making the film. At that point: it does seem like people pooling together their funds to fund the movie itself isn't insane. The point is that the "investors" wouldn't be investing in the hopes of a financial return, they'd be paying for the creation of the film.

▲lobf 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

>For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available

Which is why there is famously no market or money to be made on generic medicine.

▲fzeroracer an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

In a world without patents and copyright, there's nothing stopping companies from just hiring the Pinkertons or something to threaten you into compliance. These sort of 'if we just get rid of patents things will be great' ideals will just benefit large corporations with the capital to get their way anyways.

This doesn't mean our current system of patents and copyrights doesn't favor them either especially as they shred it to train their AI models but it's not a system you can fix by simply tearing it all down.

▲izacus an hour ago | parent [-]

That's just absolute nonsense, where do you get these kind of ideas?

Just because you don't have monopoly on your stupid ideas, you don't get to hire Pinkerton's to beat others.

▲fzeroracer an hour ago | parent [-]

It's not exactly an old thing. Wizards of the Coast hired the Pinkertons to seize cards and harass people extra-legally as recent at 2023. As I said, even if you remove the legal barriers preventing control over IP companies can and do operate on the fringe of or outside of the law to enforce it anyways.

▲iamnothere an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If that were to happen on a large scale, people could band together to provide security/resistance. Since what you’re suggesting is a complete collapse of rule of law.

If IP law is the only thing preventing society from descending into anarchy, then maybe we deserve anarchy.

▲scythe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The Pinkerton incident involved WotC protecting a trade secret, generally the least controversial part of IP law. This was not a case of a mobbed up card vendor roughing up a competitor. People can reasonably object to the tactics used, but the distribution of materials that were never approved for release is a small fraction of piracy and one where the grey hats start to get a little darker.

▲watwut 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The article starts by video companies being as profitable as ever. Issue is not with economics not being there.