there's a debate here about IP, about ethics, but honestly?

socialism. free the means of production. this isn't a practical answer for the word we live in, but the world i want is ok with ripping things off, and maker spaces all over the world participate in helping each other rip products off, sharing the plans, helping folk do for themselves, cheaply. or wherever on the scale of cheaply to expensively someone so desires.

colossal in-efficiencies of scale. huge amounts of wasted time. material loss from doing it wrong. damage to tools from less-than-expert users. what i propose is economic madness, radically ineffective.

but i continue to think that society ought entail itself into the creation of everyday goods around it. that this would be such an incredibly helpful way to enhance the people of the world, give them such a more immediate grasp on what reality is, what it's constructed out of, that it would entail people in to participation. that it would encourage us all to think that the door is always open to more innovation, to more adjustments and tweaks to the product, that we all can have a say in how to shape things, that we all can do things.

capitalism has effervesced industry. it's created these huge tensions, between the small, the makers, the imagineers, the doers, and the giants, the goliaths, that operate only at a consumer-maximum mode, at vast volume. i feel like endless words are going to be shed over this forever-war, that this tension will rage, but almost never will we explore a 3rd way, or a 4th. we're going to be stuck in emotional debate over these situations, but to me, these are all artificially constrained debates, that squabbiling over control paves over the inconvenient underlying truths about consumerism and make. it's vital, it's absolutely vital to me, that we re-open the doors, to people everywhere thinking of themselves as active agents within society. we all consider that really difficult, really impossible, it sounds so hideously inconvenient: "who would ever try and make something like this themselves," it seems like a disaster. but i for one really believe in people. i am so optimistic that a socialist culture, one that sprung free the means of production, that enouraged us to think, to involve ourselves in the ideas that preceeded production, would be so healthy for the world, so beneficial. it's so easy to reject. in some ways my best defense is to point out how many pointless useless words we will shed over this forever war, to point out how damned and hopeless the situation is in it's current condition, how much worse it will keep getting, forever, and how little room for improvement there is in sight. intellectual and artistic property rights don't fix this situation. ip is at an impass, now that the world has been gobbled. post-late capitalism is upon us. i don't know how, but i want to escape the moralistic good vs evil tale here. i think there is such virtue in permission, to re-create, to re-do, the re-try the works of others. what's vulgar & iniquitous is that it's only the very big doing it, that it's only amazon. i want competition from below too. i want us all exploring, trying, learning, and i want the means of production unlocked, to facilitate the individual & the small group, as progenitors of change & re-creation.

society has so much become about forgetting. and it's so obvious, so easy to make the cases for why. it so hard to imagine society ever re-engaging in itself, in it's processes, it's been such convenience we've been delivered in to. but i don't think we know how to account for how much is lost, how astray & wandering so much of society is; i don't think we grasp anywhere near the scale of the drive & finding-itself pushing-forward behavior that is untapped in the world. it is so hard to connect to humankind-the-tool-maker, to be lucky enough to use that huge brain to assess the world about us & build alternate futures. socialism, freeing the means of production, letting us all embrace, as we may, the acts of creation, and supporting those individual & small-group endeavours: i think, if the ball could get rolling, it would do so well, spread such good, affirm so many of humankind's slumbering better natures, connect us so much better to the material real, to such good ends.