Read a thread about hiring processes and corporations etc. It make me think about how incredibly much smaller the ideal company size is than the companies we work for today. Has anyone ever noticed how incredibly productive Anarchist groups of open source software developers are compared to... Google/Facebook/IBM/Microsoft/Whatever? Like, the Slashdot software was written by a couple of guys, Mastodon by a couple of guys, Git was created by Linus Torvalds and passed off to a few tens of people?

Minecraft built by a few people... But then you look at Meta + Metaverse, and they spent like tens of billions of dollars and got 6 users all of whom were in the testing department at Meta.

In tech, Instead of enormous companies employing 300,000 people, we need like 10,000 companies employing 30 people each. Most tech is *public goods* that we try to pretend are "property". Most of it should be funded by grants and donations and then be open-source and Free.

There shouldn't even BE HR departments screening the hiring process. People know how we get collaborators in Free software: some guy has an idea, implements some portion of it, gets involved in the discussion, if they have good ideas they eventually become a member of the core team... If there were a robust grant system for this stuff, they'd just start getting paid. This is what Anarchy actually is.

This is what we could have if we didn't support The State making it a federal felony to "copy that floppy".

Which is why I am so disappointed to see everyone railing against AI saying "they're creating a derived work from my copyrighted materials" etc... FUCK COPYRIGHT because COPYRIGHT IS STATE OPPRESSION over people *sharing information*. Copyright is oh you played a song to a group of friends... that's a statutory violation of Copyright law and subject to $250,000 in damages for each event

Don't double down on that shit! Demand that musicians get paid *to do the recording* and then *the recording is our public good* same for art, photography, books, movies, videos... Funding the production of the public domain should be easily 30-40% of GDP.

GDP is about $84k/person so that means for a family of two adults and two children there is on average $336k in market activity that corresponds to a group of 4 people. Obviously most families of 4 are making less than $336k since median household income in the US is $74k.

Anyway, if you assume 30% of GDP could be put towards public goods production, there's about $100k that could be going to that family, if the parents were for example producing educational videos online, writing books

if they're musicians who play local gigs and record their gigs and upload them to archive.org or similar.

Tear the recording industry to the ground and rebuild it as a massive free archive of recorded music. Some people could even get paid to *curate that music into hand-picked themed lists* just like you could get paid to hand curate scientific publications that are freely uploaded to archives... like... you're the "Roger Ebert" of the physics of granular materials or water pollution research

@dlakelan how do you decide who gets to be an artist, programmer, or other content producer and gets paid a stable salary for it? Do you want committees to select which musician is good enough or leave it to the listeners to decide? Or maybe allow anyone to be a paid musician if they want to?

@mjambon
These are all good questions and deserve thoughtful answers that as a society we should come up with.

Follow

@dlakelan hard-to-produce, easy-to-copy content is such a weird thing invented in the 20th century. I wish I had more wisdom about it.

@mjambon
Tons of plausible ways to deal with this though. There are 3000+ counties in the US. In each one create a nonprofit innovation,education,and arts corporation. Randomly select 100 people for each 100,000 in the county and put them on grant committees. Let anyone in the county apply for grants and have the committee vote on them. Give 0.3*N*GDPC to each organization where N is the county population. Have different sized grants for students, full time creators and part time creators.

@mjambon
Let's do 0.1*GDPC as UBI, so then the grants would come from the other 0.2

Sign in to participate in the conversation
Qoto Mastodon

QOTO: Question Others to Teach Ourselves
An inclusive, Academic Freedom, instance
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.