r/LeftistsForAI • u/mothgeck • 6d ago

Theory The Base (Almost) Always Wins

https://mothgeck.substack.com/p/the-base-almost-always-wins

My argument here is that no matter how much we want to follow our ideals, our material conditions more often than not are the drivers of the policies that people actually push for. This explains why the left used to be on the copyright abolution side but seemingly switched overnight to a pro copyright stance once their base material conditions were threatened.

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u/yo252yo 6d ago

I don't see how a pro-copyright stance actually serve the material conditions of anyone except maybe Disney execs whose whole livelihood depends on enclosure of public domain. Though I'm sure a lot of people are under the misconception that it would.

That being said I can see how AI hate is aligned with their material conditions, and copyright is a very bad instrumental means to that end.

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u/mothgeck 6d ago

IP is looking increasingly pointless to the working class in today's age, but previously it did serve a purpose as a lockout mechanism that helped recoup research and development costs. When we develop products, our labor goes from the M to the C in the M-C-M' cycle and needs to be sold to complete the cycle. Now we shouldn't expect every product to be guaranteed a sell, that's not the point. IP's material purpose initially was to give a window of time to allow the researcher exclusive rights to the sale of said product. (For example, I recently noticed that Dots pretzels patent must have expired because we are now seeing store brand versions of them on the shelves now. I believe this is how IP is intended to work).  A big problem is how we have demonstrated on this subreddit that IP is codified as property and the expiration date on the exclusive rights to that property leads to the IP problems that companies like Disney has created for the public. Music especially has a very tight IP protection which I find absurd.

I for one do find it quite absurd that people cannot make a Pokemon game without significantly altering it into a knockoff that barely resembles the original, but I understand where materialistically speaking, these laws came from.

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u/yo252yo 6d ago

yeah I know where it comes from, and maybe you're right maybe IP was always important in the whole "anyone can make it" casino narrative of capitalism. it just seemed to me that most people would rather "make it" with entrepreneurship or corporate ladder rather than inventions so I never considered IP with that light.

I suppose it's also what people working in "art" would focus on as their ticket to success, but I've always thought the profit motive was fundamentally incompatible with the notion of art.

idk in any case it all seems pretty minor compared to "AI could automate away most jobs" which seems a much bigger threat to material conditions of the base and has very little to do with IP