In a post-scarcity society, manufacturing would be cheap. Goods are easy to come by, keeping us comfortable and fed. We can spend our time at other pursuits, such as the development of futuristic technology. Some economists argue that such abundance is impossible. Cheaper food, they suggest, will grow more mouths to feed. For data, on the third hand, we already have a post-scarcity economy. With current equipment, it is nearly free to copy data. One original movie, song, game, or program… can be distributed to the internet overnight. Access to these services would be universal.
Predictably. Moneyed interests enforce artificial scarcity. Legions of programmers, lawyers, and other hacks extract payment from anyone sharing in the culture. They dont care who they exclude, only maximizing their own share. The U.S. legal system changes its rules to suit the powerful. For example, The Copyright Act of 1976, bought by bribes from Disney Company, expanded the length of copyright from 56 to 75 years. Now its over 100 years.
100 years is too long
What about living memory? Show an elder – say a 70-year-old human – one of the best movies they saw 50 years ago. Maybe they have an important perspective! But that classic movie may be inaccessible. Better content gets more expensive, and older content gets rarer. Lastly, the elders die. Those cultural moments, connections between real life and stories still locked away a century later, are lost.
Printed books fall apart. Ancient tombs decay. But data is cheap. Lets protect it!
This is how they want things designed. They want us to just consume, consume and consume. Then just dump away whatever we previously enjoyed because they really believe that we have short-term memories or that we won’t ever revisit what we once enjoyed. They want you to think that there is a limit to everything when the obvious truth of the matter when it comes to digitally available items is that there is no such thing.
You can keep a file going and going by transferring, it’ll last as long as you intend it to last up until you lose interest or die.
Hell, they’ve gone after the Internet Archive, which has been compared to today as the modern burning of Alexandria. They just don’t want anything preserved, regardless of how old it is and how long it has been since the creator or anyone involved has died. Nostalgia is just simply another marketing strategy and that has long been put to practice for a good long while now.
Limited physical goods is one thing, we can’t promise about how long we’ll have the resources for to continue making physical things, I get that.
But digital mediums and trying to limit ‘stock’ is such a laughable concept to me.