75 thoughts on “Techno-Socialism”

1. In a court of the future 2 robot litigants will duke it out before a robot judge arguing which robotribe owns the music which best pacifies their human slaves. JG Wentworth 877CASHNOW runs the court.

2. If you’re dead – I’m stealing your shit and going to avoid paying a cent to anyone. Nothing could make me sicker than than a 19 year old trust fund pleb travelling the world on dead daddy’s royalties.

3. Z man..this is the first time that I have posed a comment, so I would like to say that you are third on my morning list to go to. First is Breitbart for the breaking news, then to American Thinker for an expansion on the news, and then to your page for a realistic non PC view. You’re always ahead of everyone else because you think and write about what is inevitable. You’re thoughts are always based on common sense, in as but as Rush is, nut you don’t have the fear that keeps the real truth about what we all think hidden away. You are the best on the net, Bro. Keep it up.

   • Sorry about the spelling…enjoying a Jim Beam and Coke

   • I repost many of your columns to my friends pages. I like th way it scares some, but inspires more.

4. I’m pretty sure that it was Hank Jr. who showed up in court with a flat-top, played a half dozen songs with the same chord change, and said ” Yer Honor, there ain’t but 12 notes”. “Case dismissed” (bang of gavel)

5. This particular case isn’t a good example of copyright violation. Yes, if you strip out the vocals, the underlying melodies and rhythms are similar, but it isn’t a slam dunk. There are actually at least two other cases against Sheeran that are much more clear cut, and are almost certainly cases where he did indeed rip someone off. You can Google those to see what a true case of infringement is in this field.

6. I like your stuff, Z. It was instantly obvious to me that the songs are almost exactly the same. Are you tone-deaf, perchance? Do you know what a melody is?

   • I’m white.

     • Whaaa?

     • “I only know two songs. One is Yankee Doodle and the other isn’t” -US Grant

7. copyright is a type of intellectual property rights…

   property rights….property rights….property rights….

   PROPERTY…

   property rights are a major concern not of socialism, but of capitalism…capitalism…capitalism…not socialism…

   if one is to discuss politics, it might be a good thing to understand the difference between socialism and capitalism…just the funny way my mind works…

   your title says techno-socialism…please change it to techno-capitalism…

   • It’s the government making this situation, not the market. Intellectual “property” is such only because government calls it that. It is not real property in any sense.

     I know a company that has a machine that does a specific task that is kept in a special room with special security. There has never been a patent applied for this machine. The company is afraid that if it applies for a patent that others will simply reverse engineer it and their exclusive ability to do this one task will be lost.

     The machine itself is the actual property. The idea, they realize, is a wisp of vapor, gone in an instant, and no government has the ability, in an ultimate sense, to protect such things from being used or reproduced. They can try. And with a great deal of effort partially succeed. This great deal of effort is unnatural. And lack of any semblance with nature is not economical. And the more a market is forced to comply with the dictates of man, the less in compliance with nature it is.

     Thus the situation as it is now is socialism, not capitalism.

     A good example would be the wheel. Say it hadn’t been developed yet. The idea strikes someone and he gets a patent. The government gives him and his corporation control over the idea for the same length of time that the govt has decided that the Walt Disney corporation gets control over Mickey mouse (essentially eternity). Say he charges exorbitant royalties and only a few people can afford wheels. How much benefit will society get from this? How much expense will the government go to in order to protect this man’s “right” to “his” “property”?

     Go back and look at how the Wright brothers hindered innovation in the aircraft industry with all of their crap.

     Shit like this isn’t capitalism, it’s extortion.

8. I think there might be more than technology behind the rise in the grifter economy. Our modern haruspices tell a story that goes by the name of economic surplus. The idea is that the interaction of supply and demand in the marketplace will end with the creation of a particular price for a particular good in the market. A lot of people however that really desire the product would in actuality be willing to pay more than the market price to purchase it. The extra amount they would be willing to pay over market price is called their economic surplus.

   Crafty businesses have figured out ways to extract this surplus by playing games with pricing. The classic example is the used car sharpies who will sit there and argue with you all day to pay an extra fee or upgrade a warranty or sign up for some service plan because they know some customers are willing to pay the extra costs to drive that car off the lot. At some point I think the MBAs saw this and got it into their head that rather than satisfying customers, the primary focus of selling should be nickel and diming them for every last penny of their surplus. Thus you have the present situation where you can’t even go into the grocery store to buy some Doritos without being hit up to join clubs or sign up for programs or apply for credit or – if all else fails – supply your personal information so they can sell that to somebody else to nickel and dime you. Modern American business has adopted wholesale the underhanded sales practices of used car dealers so every contact with them is a struggle to avoid having your time wasted or getting hit up for bullsh!t fees. As natural hucksters and con men, the technology companies naturally took to these same annoying practices but I think they were preceded to some extent by the retail industry in general.

9. Haven’t read all the replys bar Z’s Teletubby costume for Neo Con’s. Probably going on a tangent but what we sorely need is an honour culture. Similar to Roman Republic, Aristocratic English, Scots, Eido Japan’s, or Southern States ante bellum. A shot of pure Archaeofuturism. For one, and missing the point it’s efficient and cheap, the legal systems point is it’s own expansion and largesse, for disputes to be settled through confrontation or the judgement and potential loss of status amongst one’s peers had a tendency to encourage good character. Granted it’s easier said than done.

10. One curious takeaway from the main post and comments is how bothered people here are at a guy for being too white and not cute enough.

    • Very strange. I suspect it has to do with many whites being highly visual. I used to see it at classical music concerts. They had to stare at the orchestra to enjoy it. They couldn’t close their eyes and just immerse themselves into it into the experience.

      • I think your concert experience has more to do with normal people simply not wanting to look weird in public.

    • Just pointing out to Sheeran’s detractors that a ruddy, blue eyed ginger is pretty much as white as you can get. People around here are generally pro-white, so I don’t understand why they think a prototypical white man is ugly.

11. I don’t have any particularly strong opinion about Ed Sheeran, but I do rather like “Nancy Mulligan”. Coming from a modern pop musician, it’s a remarkably traditional song. (In more ways than one actually).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFlZXlfda6Y

12. I’ve wanted to propose this philosophical question for a while and this may be an appropriate thread. Why has the level of creative talent decayed on so many cultural fronts in American life? In the music industry of course there was the Napster file theft thing that destroyed the economic incentive, but it’s broader than that. Look how bad movies have gotten. In what cultural arenas are the top flight creative minds working these days? TV is in a sort of ascendancy, game of thrones sopranos, but still it doesn’t compensate for the rest. Poetry hasn’t been written for years. Books are bad.

    I assume(hope) technical fields are still advancing, but most business acumen seems to flock to finance. As Michael Lewis’s books chronical, Ivy League schools feed the finance industry.

    What is the reason for this? Decay in educational standards? Genetic degradation? I would love to hear some intelligent analysis.

    • My opinion is there are multiple reasons.

      First, great art requires boundaries. When you can’t show or say different things, you have to find ways to convey what you want to say without dropping F-bombs, or showing gore and nudity.

      Second, art requires a worldview. The nihilism of today is shown by the resulting art.

      Third, diversity kills creativity. It’s harder to be creative in a diverse society because offending some group is always a possibility and that leads to lowest common denominator art.

      Finally, insularity of the artistic class. They all go to the same schools and work in the same areas. They know nothing of life beyond their bubble. They are like Chinese Mandarins.

      • Public, (and most private), school remove all individuality and creative thinking from children from day 1. It’s a factory to stamp out non-thinkers- the goal is just to churn out more mediocre, conformist, rule following proles who will consume goods and hopefully pay some taxes.
        Universities are full of bodies of young ppl, wasting their time, going into debt, in a place that 90% of them don’t belong.

    • Regarding the disappearance of poetry, there is no audience for it and thus no incentive to create it. Bruce Charlton attributes the lack of great contemporary poetry to the decline of genius and general intelligence and the rise of free verse.
      http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2015/07/readers-question-why-is-poetry-no.html

      • Yet when I was in high school back in the late 70’s poetry was still taught in English classes. Kipling, Tennyson, the Bard, etc. It wasn’t looked down upon by students either.

        And look at the older school text books from the 1870’s through the 1940’s, they were full of poetry.

        However you could not teach it today in a “diverse” classroom full of low IQ brown skins raised on Ipods and rap. Furthermore they see it as “white mans English”. That makes it impossible.

        This also applies to white kids raised in on Ipods and the like. Their attention span is gone. There is no place for subtlety in the mind of educated barbarians that whites are producing. Like one ad man stated, ‘you don’t invite a child to sit down and learn chess, you throw the pieces at him to get their attention, then teach them checkers’

        The sad thing is now we have a entire body of works that will be inaccessible in another generation. People will read Goethe or Kipling and go “huh?”, Melville and Cooper will go the same way.

    • Any creative endeavor that seeks a large audience must be promoted and thus the promoters have great power. Perhaps those gatekeepers are part the reason for the dearth of creativity.

    • “Why has the level of creative talent decayed on so many cultural fronts in American life?” It hasn’t. This is the best time to be alive. Pop music has always mostly sucked, and as a product will always specialize in imitation. “Everything sounds the same.” But even pop / hip-hop is more varied and changing than you realize. In the 70’s there were a handful of pop/rock genres. Now there’s scores, with hundreds of sub and sub-sub genres.

      And except for the distracting Lefty elements; movies, shows and music videos are better than ever. Even many on the Right acknowledge this. The creativity is astounding. Why am I even responding.

      Great novels are still being written by the boatload. Just avoid the award winners. What about the essay? That’s a creative art. There’s so many great bloggers you wish you had 3 lifetimes to take it all in. And you’re not really going to tell me that people can’t paint or draw anymore right? Tell me the visual arts are dead. I dare you. I realize how annoying this comment is. I just, I don’t know. The craggy aspect of our side really gets me down.

      • No no movies are unwatchable. The dialogue is atrocious. The plots threadbare. Watch all the top movies from some 70s or 80s list and then compare to today’s. Even the 86 transformers cartoon movie is far better than the current. Why are they only rebooting 80s franchises? And doing it poorly. What was that stupid thing with the fish man? Compare that to something like out of Africa or chariots of fire.

        • Even movies that were considered popcorn flicks had better plots and ideas behind them.

        • If you’re talking about mainstream Hollywood movies, I’d agree. There’s definitely been a dumbing down. (Though the craft has improved). I was thinking of the indie (independent film), art-house, film festival circuit, small studio, low budget, film “industry”. Same with music. You’ve always had to go just a bit below the mainstream surface to get to the good stuff. And the good stuff is out there like never before.

          • Much of the ‘indie’ stuff has been politicized and is off-putting that way. It’s too bad that some artists with real talent waste it on politicized messaging rather than just focusing on their art and their project’s expression aside from social issues du jour.

    • These are all good thoughts. I particularly like Lutz’s. My own theory is that education level has been degraded to try to equalize low IQ minorities. I don’t think people realize how deep and pervasive this trend is. The following is a lengthy aside to elucidate this point: Beginning with disparate impact in that 1971 Supreme Court case, probably before that, the matter of equalizing these people has had profound impact on our civilization and credentialing system. Sailor and various vdare writers have discussed this. The point of the case was that they used to give these little general knowledge tests to persons applying to jobs, which really boiled down to IQ tests. Guess who didn’t do well, and as such were disproportionately excluded from the job market. So they made it so only tests directly related to what you had to know for the job, or college degrees, could be used to differentiate in hiring. So now everyone needs a college degree. Hence the federal lone system, ridiculous inflation of college tuition prices, and people wasting four productive years to probably go drinking every night.

      But I think it’s pervasive at deeper levels. Children are not given a bedrock foundation in core verbal subjects, which is the sort of intelligence and judgement useful in day to day life. This topic tends to form a preoccupation with me so naturally I weight it the most, but I think the notion of a unifying worldview or vision of the transcendent plays a role as well. Art flows from pride, and how can ethnic masochism give one that?

13. Get under the hood and I’ll bet Structured Asset Sales is simply another patent troll fund that has diversified into the music business (and probably other IP realms). Ended up with a couple software troll letters on my desk years ago. The threatened suit was not against our firm, but our software vendors. The trolls were making a Nigerian 419 type bet that a few would cough up some money rather than go through the process of asserting their indemnification right against the software firm (or the bet that the indemnity was limited or non-existent). General Counsel invariably told them to pound sand.

14. There is no such thing as ‘intellectual property’. The essence of property is that two people can’t use it at the same time, so the law gives one of those users the right to exclude the other. As you pointed out, that can’t be done with ‘intellectual property’. This is actually a form of government-sponsored monopoly, such as those granted by English monarchs for things like who gets to trade with the East Indies. As with any other government-sponsored monopoly, it creates its own ecosystem of sharps and cheats who feed on gaming the system, and the more complex the system gets, the more corners there are for them to lurk in.

    • Shouldn’t a person with a great idea, whether a technical innovation or a fresh melody, to be able to profit from it, without being immediately ripped off?

      You guys always say that incentives matter. Why innovate if your intellectual property is going to be immediately copied? Why invent the better mouse trap if your competitors, who may be far better funded, immediately steal it? Do I misunderstand you?

15. Great melody is the pinnacle of art, and the most most elusive one to be achieved as well. Demand does not increase supply. If anything, demand is squashing supply. As to copyright, Bernstein’s “Maria” from West Side Story was kicked off note for note from a Beethoven concerto he often performed, and nobody noticed. One of the five great melodies ever written was by Paganini, but no one knew this until Rachmaninoff played it upside down one day and wrote Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. I don’t think Paganini would have recognized it, much less filed a claim.

    • There was a time when the greatest compliment paid to a great artist was being copied by another great artist.

16. Not only that, a quick search of YouTube finds every Marvin Gaye song ever recorded, is posted multiple times. There’s even live stuff from the old days. Exactly no one is paying for Marvin Gaye music.

    Youtube pays. That’s what the whole monetization thing is about. They insert ads, receiving money from advertisers. They then pay out to the copyright owners, based on the number of views.

    I don’t know all the technicalities of how they run their monetization operation, but I think the insertion of short bits of songs into other videos falls outside of that scheme. So, they take down stuff that complicates their method of keeping track of who they have to pay for a particular video.

17. I spent my morning with my buddy ripping apart my clutch on my Harley and putting it back together. We listened to Mötley Crüe in the garage. We’re too young for Marvin Gaye and too old for Ed Sheeran.

    • You’re never too old, heh.
      https://youtu.be/Q0XcptkS60Q

    • Crude has like two good songs: girls girls girls and dr feel good

18. Oh lord – modern music is puss dribblings from an infected wound… it’s the most awful mind-numbing putrefaction humanity could produce. Excerpts from an internet article:

    ***

    Everybody hates pop music because it is truly terrible.

    If the Beatles were indeed the product of a pernicious Tavistockian demoralization campaign, created to mete out the death blow to Western civilization, then what on Earth would that make Justin Bieber?

    Today’s pop music has become a pathetic symptom of our clickbaity, dopamine- driven, digital culture. The pop music we have today is what happens when art is gamed-out by a very small group businessmen using Behaviorist marketing techniques.

    Harmonic complexity and diversity of instruments have plummeted precipitously while the compression of the dynamic range and general loudness has increased oppressively. The melodies, rhythms and the vocals of popular music have become more and more similar to each other since the 1960s, with hundreds of artists using the same sequence of notes. Researcher Patrick Metzger identified a specific shift from the fifth note in a scale to the third note and then back to the fifth, accompanied by a vocal “Wah-oh, wah-oh” as the “Millennial Whoop” because it’s featured in hundreds of chart-topping pop songs created over the past few years.

    Here’s a fact that I knew 15 years ago but was stunned to learn is STILL true: The vast majority of hit songs in the past 20 years was written by just two people! The Swedish man, Max Martin, who is single-handedly responsible for over two dozen number-one singles and thousands of songs in the top 100 charts over the past decade. And if Max Martin didn’t write it, then American Dr Luke probably did.

    It gets worse. The average attention span has become so reduced over the past decade, that Max Martin and Dr. Luke have to write their hooks earlier in the songs and to repeat them more often. The advent of the iPod and millions of songs at our fingertips has caused musicians and record companies to favor punchy bass lines that demand our attention, stuffing each song full of hooks to instantly grab our focus and keep it for as long as possible.

    “[Pop] music, as an art form is dying. It’s being replaced by music
    which is a disposable product designed to sell, not to inspire.”

19. This is another side-effect of long term societal affluence. In times of great abundance, parasitism of this sort is rewarded and will grow exponentially until the abundance is gone, the host is dead, or an entropic equilibrium is reached. When the number of grifters in society significantly exceeds the number of producers, civilization becomes unstable.

    • I think we’re there.

      • I owned and managed a resort for over 20 years that included a restaurant /saloon with live music venue. We hired many local “bar bands” and enjoyed the excitement and prosperity for several years until we drew the attention of those parasites of “property rights” known as BMI and ASCAP. These guys are shake-down artists with brutal methods that would make Tony Soprano blush. A dozen phone calls a day was not uncommon. A drumbeat of registered and regular mailings that went on for months. I did my best to ignore the threats until it was disclosed in our local newspaper that another bar owner about 40 miles away was actually sued in a federal court [no less] and was forced to pay out about 50k for copyright infringement. This put an end to our live music. But they were’nt through yet. They would send undercover people into our restaurant and record what we were playing on our in-house system. Then we would get nasti-grams from them demanding more vig if any of “their ” music was being played. This went on and on.
        It’s this type of totalitarian bullshiite that makes a small, independent business man want to “Grab yer cutlass and start slitting throats” to quote Mencken.

        • Greedy c*cksuckers. How much did they spend on staff to send traveling around bothering people versus money collected for their ‘property rights’ shakedowns? Disgusting behavior.

        • Now THAT made me mad.
          There is a place for doxxing with violent intent in this world. Those pricks in the offices need to feel it personally.

          Purely criminal behavior understands only one language- real risk.

20. There was a copyright infringement case a few years ago. Two performers each placed a short blank track between two songs. The one sued the other claiming that his silence was more evocative and the other copied his silence.

21. I refuse to believe this. I know who Ed Sheeran is — he’s such a whiny white dork that he makes the dreadlocked white guy from Counting Crows look like Jake LaMotta. Ed Sheeran would burst into flames if he even got within radar range of a Marvin Gaye tune, let alone tried to sing one. I call BS.

22. Everything over 14 years old should be in the public domain whether or not the author/inventor is still alive.

    Creativity is being squashed. Part of why all forms of entertainment are going into the shitter.

    • It’s not just the arts where this is the case either. The number of medically useful chemical compounds that can be mass produced for pennies by anyone with an undergraduate chemistry knowledge base, that Americans get charged hundreds or thousands of dollars for due to abuse of the IP laws, is incredibly high.

      I have no doubt that we will see similarly large abuses with IP abuses on the production of naturally occurring biological molecules as well now that they are such a hot area of medicine.

      On the subject of entertainment, I found the documentary Everything is a Remix to be very interesting. https://www.everythingisaremix.info/ Seeing how many of the sorts of artists who like to sue for being “ripped off” are in fact ripoff artists themselves was enlightening.

      Edit: I realized I should have specified in my first example that many of these drugs are multiple decades old. The grifting of the pharmaceutical industry and its pet regulatory agency the FDA sickens me.

      • A lot of what is happening right now is that the government allows licensing of generics based on approval of the manufacturing methods involved, which raises the bar beyond the capability of what would be a thriving small pharmaceutical industry. Instead, the regs are fashioned in such a way to direct any and all opportunities toward single players creating monopolies in the manufacturing of drugs that have been around for decades.

        Then, what inevitably happens is that a problem arises in the manufacturing process and shortages come about, and excuses for raising prices as well. I suspect that many of these so called problems are contrived, and that the regulators and manufacturers are working hand in glove.

        The more complicated the process is, the more it will be gamed.

    • That’s my view. Alternatively, the rights holder has it for his life, but once he dies his work falls into the public domain. The counter argument is that your creation is your property and you should have the right to pass it onto your heirs. I’m sympathetic, but balanced against the thicket of copyright laws and the cost of policing this stuff outweighs it.

      • The Founding Father specifically request a limited copyright because this is the most beneficial arrangement for society. The normal custom was 28 years, two terms of 14 years and this suits just fine

        As with most things with the caveat of slavery, they were right

23. Brilliant observation. While listening to Radio Derb last weekend, he mentioned being on a jury selection pool some time ago. He opined to the shysters questioning him that he was ambivalent about lawyers. Of course the one greasy shyster replied that of course no one likes lawyers. Until you need one.

    I wondered what I would say to a shyster in such a situation. This whole story posted above comes to mind as a perfect example of why, yes indeed, the first thing we should do is kill all of the lawyers.

    (I note that a very high proportion of the bipeds inhabiting the two Houses of the imperial capital are also lawyers.)

    • My reply to the line, “Everyone hates lawyers until they need one” is “Don’t kid yourself. No one likes you.”

      • Least of all their wives 😉.

    • “Of course the one greasy shyster replied that of course no one likes lawyers. Until you need one.”

      You reply, “I don’t think I’ll ever be that hungry.”

    • My reply: Well that doesn’t explain why you spend so much time chasing ambulances or waiting to pounce on every two-bit scumbag coming out of the Magistrates Court bailed to appear later next month.

24. It is quite possible that Ed Sheeran is the most unattractive pop star ever to grace the swipe screen. His face gives me the impression of being mere moments away from catching fire.

    • He looks ultra white, in his coloration at least.

      • Please don’t tell me soyboys are gonna be the next big thing.

        But then I look at Flava Flav…

        1

25. Ed Sheeran is a guy the womyns like.

    I wonder if the DCMA is another “law of unintended consequences” action or a law written by lawyers for lawyers. Hmm…

    • My guess is smart people have figured out the combination of sounds that elicit of a positive response in women. That’s why every pop song is now computer generated. The plinking sound and staccato vocals turn up in too many pop songs to be an accident.

      • No, it’s just there’s no talent in the industry, same as with movies.

      • https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&t=430&v=oVME_l4IwII

      • Computer algorithms have used for the better part of two decades in an attempt to analyze and reproduce “hit songs”. It’s a mature industry. And most voices on modern songs – highly computer altered.

        • I recall reading soemthing about this years ago. I recall thinking that it explains why songs are just as dull as new cars. Eventually, everything converges to some optimum.

          • Hope it’s possible somewhere to get a PhD in “The End of Civilization” with the topic “The End of Modern Music” …. Bought my first top-flight Strat in ’76 (American before they called them American). Followed the industry for couple of decades. Once Upon A Time – there was music. Once, there were artists like Stevie Nicks (and countless others) that were gifted, talented and wrote and sang songs that filled football stadiums with people who were there to absorb the artistry – not mindlessly embrace the robotic horror that is modern “whoop”. I’ve enjoyed music from all times in history from Robert Johnson to Glenn Miller to the Beatles to Brian Ferry. What is this current amorphous auditory goo? Modern music isn’t in the toilet… it’s at the bottom of a shaft several hundred feet below the toilet. Leonard Pinth Garnell couldn’t add anything here. Society has a cancer, and although it probably didn’t cause it, it is a symptom – modern music and the oh-so emotive “millennial whoop”. If whoever is listening to “whoop” helps decide our fate, we’re doomed.

          • I’m not sure what they’re selling, but it’s not music.

            1

    • Tween girls. My thirteen-year-old neighbor and her friends luuurrve Ed Sheeran (also someone called Bruno Mars.)

    • He’s a young Christopher Cross. Now that MTV is pretty well dead, guys like that can come back.

    • He looks like a Lord of the Rings character & his music is gay & boring.
      I do not understand Current Year music.
      Have you ever seen Marshmallow (sp-Marshmello??) Or heard “mumble rap?”
      It’s the culmination of decades of drinking Promethazine w/codeine cough syrup, AKA, Sizzurp, AKA, Purple Drank, AKA, Texas Tea, etc., in a foam cup with Sprite & Jolly Ranchers, while also smoking unlimited blunts.
      You literally have to strain to pick out 3-4 “words” in an entire “song.”
      I gets millions and millions of hits on YT &
      SoundCloud.

      I…just…no.

26. How can you not like this?
    https://youtu.be/GcZqClYTcwo
    This one chokes me up every time.
    https://youtu.be/nSDgHBxUbVQ

    • After the revolution, neocons will be forced to dress as teletubbies when in public.

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