Motivation
The legacy economy that we are rapidly becoming less captive to, has, structured itself as entirely dependent on strict control over the flow of content who makes it, who has access to it, what we are required to pay for it, but what happens when the ability to produce content becomes nearly universal and the costs associated with creation drive ever closer to and even below 0.
The content itself, is now in a much more natural state of to be free to spread to as many people who appreciate it as possible.
In other words, when there are alternative and far more self sufficient and sustainable, robust, and profitable means to generate and circulate wealth, associated with content, we no longer have to be prisoners to it.
The content, becomes the complement to products, not an artificially enforced product in itself.
Counter intuitively for many, still suffering from control based economic Stockholm syndrome, this change is liberating for content creators, the reason for this is because the representation of value can now flow freely without constraint to reach and grow as large of an audience and community of genuinely aligned and appreciative consumers and co-creators alike, while, the value structures shift to verifiably unique, flexibly owned wealth creating devices, timestamped immutably on the public record.
When creators can engage with a far larger market, no matter where they come from, than what they ever could have hoped for previously, and can enshrine in code the provenance, functional utility of ownership, specialised access to token governed communities, and, countless other new forms of value generation that weren’t previously possible, even small upstart creators can realise much greater gains that the control based world could ever falsely promise to them.
The rug pull here is in the forgetting, both of why we have the copyright trade off to begin with and, in, which things we produce are complements and which are primary products.
IP exists as a category only because of the trade off the US founding fathers and other enlightenment era thinkers at the time made between the recognition that ideas in and of themselves want to be free (in other words, the free exchange and spread of ideas cultivates the greatest innovation), but it is also critical to incentivise creators.
The recognition that ideas want to be free, is rooted in the core of private property. This idea in itself that each of us is entitled to own our own thoughts, actions and direction in life, in as much as we can make decisions for ourselves. Where it becomes tricky is in how we then trade, record and coordinate freely without limiting the rights of others.
Up until the advent of web3, there was no effective way to do that without sacrificing some of that base principle in what was originally a temporary model. IP regimes have become more and more abusive over time as content cartels have completely taken over legislative processes and also nowadays it doesn't actually offer any protection or value to creators. It lulls creators into wage slavery to the benefit of massive corporations.
Instead, now that we have web3, we can finally fulfill the core principle of maximising the spread of ideas and maximising the reward for creators. This is exactly what NFTs do, and more.
Last modified 1yr ago