Comment by psychoslave
Comment by psychoslave 15 hours ago
The main issue on an economical point of view is that copyright is not the framework we need for social justice and everyone florishing by enjoying pre-existing treasures of human heritage and fairly contributing back.
There is no morale and justice ground to leverage on when the system is designed to create wealth bottleneck toward a few recipients.
Harry Potter is a great piece of artistic work, and it's nice that her author could make her way out of a precarious position. But not having anyone in such a situation in the first place would be what a great society should strive to produce.
Rowling already received more than all she needs to thrive I guess. I'm confident that there are plenty of other talented authors out there that will never have such a broad avenue of attention grabbing, which is okay. But that they are stuck in terrible economical situations is not okay.
The copyright loto, or the startup loto are not that much different than the standard loto, they just put so much pression on the player that they get stuck in the narrative that merit for hard efforts is the key component for the gained wealth.
Capitalism is allergic to second-order cybernetics.
First-order systems drive outcomes. "Did it make money?" "Did it increase engagement?" "Did it scale?" These are tight, local feedback loops. They work because they close quickly and map directly to incentives. But they also hide a deeper danger: they optimize without questioning what optimization does to the world that contains it.
Second-order cybernetics reason about systems. It doesn’t ask, "Did I succeed?" It asks, "What does it mean to define success this way?" "Is the goal worthy?"
That’s where capital breaks.
Capitalism is not simply incapable of reflection. In fact, it's structured to ignore it. It has no native interest in what emerges from its aggregated behaviors unless those emergent properties threaten the throughput of capital itself. It isn't designed to ask, "What kind of society results from a thousand locally rational decisions?" It asks, "Is this change going to make more or less money?"
It's like driving by watching only the fuel gauge. Not speed, not trajectory, or whether the destination is the right one. Just how efficiently you’re burning gas. The system is blind to everything but its goal. What looks like success in the short term can be, and often is, a long-term act of self-destruction.
Take copyright. Every individual rule, term length, exclusivity, royalty, can be justified. Each sounds fair on its own. But collectively, they produce extreme wealth concentration, barriers to creative participation, and a cultural hellscape. Not because anyone intended that, but because the emergent structure rewards enclosure over openness, hoarding over sharing, monopoly over multiplicity.
That’s not a bug. That's what systems do when you optimize only at the first-order level. And because capital evaluates systems solely by their extractive capacity, it treats this emergent behavior not as misalignment but as a feature. It canonizes the consequences.
A second-order system would account for the result by asking, "Is this the kind of world we want to live in?" It would recognize that wealth generated without regard to distribution warps everything it touches: art, technology, ecology, and relationships.
Capitalism, as it currently exists, is not wise. It does not grow in understanding. It does not self-correct toward justice. It self-replicates. Cleverly, efficiently, with brutal resilience. It's emergently misaligned and no one is powerful enough to stop it.