> From the back row, I watched my friends scroll their social media feeds with ferocious intensity.
Meh, groups taking short rides in long SUVs like he talks about here, that's a good time to catch up on social media before everyone's face to face again.
Sustaining group conversations in a long multi-row SUV is painful. Get your social media stuff done briefly, then when you get out of the car, go back to interacting in person. This is fine.
> From the moment the driver hit the gas pedal, everybody was on their phones. From the back row, I watched my friends scroll their social media feeds with ferocious intensity.
Sorry, but I think you should change friends. Or your friends have a serious problem with social media that you should help them overcome. There are tons of other interesting venues on the internet. This is one of them. And here you have articles from the past, as from the present. No need to live in The Never Ending Now.
But this site is still biased towards the present, and towards short-form takes like this very piece.
One thing that has always seemed significant to me is that copyright, by intending to subsidize the creation of long-form work, has also put a huge tax on the consumption of long-form work, one that's almost infinite relative to the marginal cost of distribution.
With an near-infinite tax on reading books, is it any wonder most people don't read books?
I mean subsidize in the sense that it's an artificial transfer from the public to the private, in the form of an artificially-created monopoly.
Copyright is a subsidy in the way a trade barrier is a subsidy. There's nothing natural about granting a monopoly on stories but not recipes, or on melodies but not the shape of a jacket or a building. It's just a hand-out that certain industries fought for, successfully made the status quo, and expanded over time.
And it goes far beyond paying people for creative work. Mathematicians are paid for their creative work and so are fashion designers. But neither have the right to say what others who weren't party to any contract with them can do with their creative work. If you want to share a mathematical formula or a fashion design or use it in new work you're free to, and the world benefits immensely from that. Books, films and songs are much more encumbered.
When I say the tax affects long-form work more than short-form, that's just based on the observation that books and films are typically locked away behind paywalls and off the open Internet, while the kind of ephemera the article talks about is free for everyone forever.
If books were free for everyone forever after 2 or 5 years, more people would read books, and it would be easier to build habit-driven products out of books. Lower the tax, increase the consumption.
How is it a transfer from the public to the private if I privately create something and want to privately sell it?
Copyright allows me to monetise my private creation. If it did not exist, my first customer could distribute it to everyone else without penalty and I would make no money.
That is why it is an incentive, not a subsidy. Without it, I will not invest the effort to create it. No public property is used to subsidize my creation.
In the absence of something like copyright, subsidy would be required in order for much creative activity to occur. You have it backwards!
A conversation is content created in the Now. The people on their phones are essentially involved in a conversation, or at least an ongoing performance that has attributes of conversation.
Just like our ancestors were, before the invention of writing.
The better question is, what is the content of that conversation? Is it informed by past?
Combine this with fomo and you can really drown in stuff forever. Weird part is that a lot of this content is reaction to other's behavior.. it's a game of mirror trapping light.
Hacker News is much better experienced on a 24 hour delay using something like hckrnews.com.
Middlebrow comments finally get down voted and refuted, inciteful comments are posted and float to the top, and its nearly impossible to get into a stupid comment ear
Meh, groups taking short rides in long SUVs like he talks about here, that's a good time to catch up on social media before everyone's face to face again.
Sustaining group conversations in a long multi-row SUV is painful. Get your social media stuff done briefly, then when you get out of the car, go back to interacting in person. This is fine.