Exactly, authors should be glad to be paid $7.99 - once - every time they write a book, and be happy about it. Anything further is just proof of their obsolesence.
I would like to watch a Star Trek episode featuring you as the misguided extremist trying to destroy replicators because they put cooks out of jobs. Give it a few years and I'll be able to prompt GPT-9 for exactly that.
At any rate, the future is here. You're free to stick your head in the sand if you wish, but most of us think it's a lot of work to do all that digging, and frankly a little silly.
And if we lived in a fictional post-scarcity economy where money didn’t exist, you might have a point. Meanwhile, in the real world, people generally like to earn a living.
We live in a non-fictional post-digital-scarcity society. It is unfortunate that we're still trying to fit the square peg of capitalism into this round hole, but we'll adapt as a society eventually, even if it involves people like you kicking and screaming as they're dragged into the present.
Again, you're free to stick your head in the sand and pretend otherwise, but that just seems like a lot of work to me.
There's too much to discuss in these comments, but here's a couple of bullet point responses:
- That's kind of the natural state of things for most artistic endeavors. Many artists have a day job that pays the bills.
- Fortunately, we've got some practical alternative funding models now that anybody who wants to quit their day job can use. Patreon and Kickstarter both provide a superior funding model for a post-digital-scarcity world. Either money up front before the art is created, or an ongoing subscription for art creation.
- Humans are short-sighted, and we don't, as a species, generally like change. We're not really prepared to make changes like implementing UBI because of weird emotional investments in the status quo. However, we will eventually adapt, even if it requires some people kicking and screaming until they're dragged into the present and realize how nice it is.
- Also, post-digital-scarcity doesn't mean you can't exchange money for bits. I spend a lot of money at Bandcamp in return for DRM-free bits that I could totally have torrented, but don't because Bandcamp is easy to use and I can support the artist
