This article went a lot of places, but somehow I just knew it would reel in Bitcoin as well. I thought it was interesting - if I understood it correctly, it argues that our supposedly modern views on digital capitalism (especially in relation to online content creation) is that we should enable small creators to flourish freely without interference, and that this view is a) not new at all because Proudhon wuz here f1rst, b) flawed because it is centered on a small creative part of the actual labor, so it c) won’t lead to our economic salvation and “enabling creators” shouldn’t be such a focus of national economic policy. Right? I like that it aims to contextualize, explain and trace an in my opinion very dominant view of digital economics. It’s not often you can string together hipster microbreweries, copyright infringement, Youtubers, Napster and Bitcoin. But like so many of these kinds of papers, it fails to communicate the above with enough clarity that I’m not even sure I got the message right. I think he could’ve saved himself a lot of work by discussing techno-libertarianism, which he seems to entirely sidestep. And is there some kind of minimum amount of Marx/Engels mentions to get published these days? For crying out loud. Also: Good luck with that idea, buddy.“Creative workers could align with others in the production chain as a class of laborers rather than as an assortment of individual producers, and form the kinds of organizations, such as unions”
The Californian Ideology is techno-libertarianism as preached by Wired. I think a tech Mondragon could work without and then a revolution occurs.
So... did this article just softly criticize the patenting process in the 21st century?