In a post-scarcity environment, why should we limit the bounds of our creativity? All barriers presented by physicality and finity are null and void. There is nothing lost when data is replicated. No one (and definitely not the users of the software) is harmed by the isolated act of file replication.

This, quite literally, is only a semblance of an issue under capitalism. One may rebuke this, as the central thesis of Marxism is opposition to unequal value exchange (though this is such an individualized version of that it hurts), but fucking hear me out.

The commons (according to wikipedophilia, as remiss as I am to use that NatSec hive as my definitive basis when I'm not on a time crunch) are the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth.

The internet is effectively the newest addition to the commons. A significant portion of the global population will access and interact with it every day. It is the modern medium in which we connect our global society, to a collective and individual level.

However, unlike most commons, the internet is post-scarcity.

The Tragedy of the Commons is a theory that is always presented with heaps and bounds of pure ideology :zizek-preference: before a coherent, materialist point can be found within. That point being: exploitation of the commons for personal gain, past what you need as a person, deprives access to the commons to others.

That is, under the framework of scarcity.

An aside: this is an anti-capitalist point of view in every sense of the matter, the mf who synthesized this did it as a refutation of invisible-hand ideology and the only reason it's so, so fucking drowned in ideology when taught is that commons sounds like communism, tragedy bad, and therefore tragedy of the commons equals communism bad.

Tragedy of the Commons inherently takes scarcity into account, as a material hypothetical. Why would it not? All that appeared to be post-scarcity would have never crossed these people's minds, because back then, the only people 'concerned' about too many people breathing the air were, of course, Malthusians.

No one argued the economics of air, of the very atom, of access to the material plane, because these weren't economical. Why would they be? It's not like there's a limited number of nodes on the reality server, unless the techbro-creationists happen to be somehow right about simulation theory.

Are these not commons? Are they not resources? Do we not draw on access to air, atoms, and reality at every waking moment to supplement our being? To function? It may seem to stretch the idea of the commons, but that's the point: one's perspective of the commons tends to be inherently focused on what is material and relatively finite, because that's how we experience reality.

To understand the internet, we either have to reframe the commons as a broader framework, or synthesize a new term to cover this (to my knowledge) not frequently accounted for area.

Coining terms is inherently cringe, but to not give materialists a brain aneurysm trying to reconcile the inherent scarcity framework of commons with my arguments, let's just use 'the myriads' as a placeholder until someone not as cringe and prose-y as me jumps on it, (noun/adjective combo just like commons, it implies countlessness, and goddamnit I don't want to have to email Noam Chomsky even for linguistics issues :chomsky-yes-honey:)

To be clear: the internet itself is not what I'm talking about. The internet requires energy to function and physical labor to maintain, and is therefore scarce. That internet is, in fact, the commons as it is initially described. I am talking about the information residing on the internet. The infinitely replicable, accessible, and transmittable data.

As it is infinitely replicable, these 'myriads' (if you hate it more than I hate purposefully coining terms please email :yes-honey-left: yourself I sent him a really cringe electoralist email back in early 2020 and I have never done it since, you can't fucking make me) of data are never deprived from; in fact, the data only survives due to the replication of it, as single nodes of data hosting are liable to data loss.

As such, the workings of the internet as a medium, as to not lose the data that perpetuates it, functions opposite to the tragedy; to maintain data, one must take what they do not need, hoard it, and let it sit until the initial node is lost. Ironically, to maintain the myriads, one must take from the myriads. As the only deprivation of the internet's myriads is through no other nodes holding them, all labor on this medium is an expansion, so to speak, of the medium. It adds more infinitely replicable, accessible, and transmittable data to the network.

There are no intrinsic barriers, given capability of internet access, to accessing the myriads of data that is up on the internet. One may not be able to use the data, per se, but that's a non-issue, since one can freely copy off it. As such, just as the strategy is for the commons, the only way for capital to enter this sphere of influence is to set up artificial barriers. Paywalls, subscriptions, and licensing.

Unlike the commons, there's no fucking argument to be made about scarcity here that could 'justify' markets within it. The existence of piracy is literally in and of itself proof. If scarcity to the point of inherent barriers did exist in this realm, then there wouldn't be replicable distribution of it without the barriers.

Therefore, the capitalists have to not only use artificial scarcity, they have to invent means in which the data on the internet can be considered scarce. That's where the techbros' very unfuckable tokens come in to play, but even so, the data attached to those 2/10 chuck e cheese bucks is still replicable, nullifying the scarcity entirely. It's actually pretty funny. You cannot invent scarcity in the myriads without destroying the function of it entirely, and rendering it moot.

If data is irreplicable on the internet, there is no point to the internet. The means of which the internet functions is reliant on the replication of data. How would you access a webpage without the replication of the site data over http(s)? how would you send and receive messages, if the data could not replicate? Who decides what is replicable and what is not? Either the scarcity is artificial, or the medium has no function.

A lot of words to say web3 is a scam, but /tangent. My point is, these fuckers are so cucked to capitalism that they actually limit their creativity based on how much they can pay to remove a fake barrier to replicate infinitely replicable data. it's so fucking pathetic. the saddest stage of ideology brain rot.