and on a wholly different note
¿could someone explain to my Capitalistic, Luddite ass the morality behind file-sharing copywritten material? the three answers i've heard are: Corporations are evil and kick puppies, therefore i'm justified in ripping them off; copywriting "information" is ludicrous on its face, my actions aren't illegal they're progressive; i don't give a crap,
( Read more... )
What I mean by this last statement is that they're not facing real troubles if, it so turns out, a corporation closes a factory. Our society is overrun with money and food; sure, there are real and terrible problems within it, but these - I'm thinking of health and mental problems - are *not* going to be caused by losing one of a long line of jobs. There are more jobs than people in the west, and more food than space in our bellies. Cease to hold in your mind the illusion of a 30s-style job market.
What about not-in-the-west? What about it? Music companies don't employ people who aren't in the west, apart from possibly CD-producing factories. And when you think about it, CD production is either going to benefit from music piracy, due to the burning of CDs, or is going to go into terminal decline due to digitised music, which is a phenomenon that's going to happen anyway whether the music is stolen or not.
Live more free, cast off your morality!
Reply
As for the more food in our society. You have never been a person that has had to deal with not being able to work or not being able to find work. If either of these two things happen. See how easy it is to deal with the government system and keep your self feed. Trust me this is coming from mine and others I know experiences. So the little guys that get cut out of the market do suffer and they can suffer horribly.
If they loose their job and can't find an other one and then loose there place of residence. They can forget getting into the system to get help no mailing address means not government help. It also means no job opportunities. Since companies won't hire you if you don't have a address. Thankfully I have never had to deal with the homeless thing. But I have know people who have had to deal with it. And this is a very hard place to get out of. You basically need to find some one who is willing to let you use their address to get back into the system. And even than it takes for ever to get into the system.
Reply
If you can get access to welfare, at least in the UK, you're alright. Life is going to be tough for a while, but you won't starve. In the UK, almost everyone should be granted welfare, although there are many complications depending on whether you're not a UK citizen, and also processing time - I know alot of people who've existed while not on welfare, with no job, and they can do so here *fairly* easily. If you had a family it'd be different, but single people can go skipping for abundant amounts of food. i.e, the supermarkets throw away huge amounts of good-quality food every day, and all it takes is a leisurely walk to the nearest supermarket skip to liberate the bags of discarded food. Me and a friend do that fairly often. We also went into a nearby squat recently (another possibility for non-rent living), and their kitchen was heaped with pineapples, bananas, etc exotic fruit, asparagus, and so on, that they'd salvaged from skips. One in the squat did have a car, but it shows you what's possible.
There's a cafe round the corner that gives away free food - if you're homeless or even poor or a squatter, and on the same road is a christian landlady who allows tenants to live in her apartment house for no money at all.
A friend of mine lived homeless in amsterdam for a long time, and held down a job at the same time. there are hundreds of jobs which are cash-in-hand or informal; he worked in a cafe in the red light district.
I know things may be tougher in the U.S - squatting laws are tougher for sure, I think - but as I don't have the experience of life there, I don't know...
Reply
however, i'd posit morals and ethics are, eventually, based on personal relationships. the Geneva Conventions of Warfare are designed to deal with the entire system that is modern warfare, however they're eventually focused on the individual. on a purely system basis, biological warfare is quite effective and, if taken in the long view, might preserve lives (assuming we believe the rational behind the local genocide at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). however, such devices are outlawed because they're immoral on a personal level - they don't take personal distinctions into account. we have to take individuals into account when dealing with a system, otherwise we lose purpose and meaning, the whole becomes paramount to the unit
now, in terms of the fecundity of the job market, i'm not sure what that has to do with the ethics of file-sharing. if we accept a direct relationship between file-sharing and job loss, it doesn't matter what happens in the rest of the system. the fact is, this action lead directly to another's detriment. if i blow up a factory, the workers might be able to find other jobs, but it's not important as the outcome of my action lead to them being jobless. it's like saying we should legalize spousal abuse and just increase the number of clinics for treatment - just because support services for abuse are well-defined doesn't justify that abuse
though, i do agree: physical data storage devices are on the way out. this is part of the reason i'm trying to develop a morality regarding the partitioning and distribution of data. right now, it's fairly straight-forward as the data are stored on physical media. when everything becomes digital and totally non-phenomenal, it's gonna be a bloody migraine figuring out right from wrong
as for living free, and casting off morality - i'd rather live free by casting off my boxers ;}
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment