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Intellectual Property Is Violence Actually

The concept of intellectual property as defined by capitalism is the strangest mind virus that seems to have infected pretty much everyone and has had the most damaging effect on culture. Why have most people just rolled over and accepted it as normal? Being made a petty tyrant over an idea by default backed by a threat of violence from the state just because you were the one who remixed them is actually pretty fucked up actually. It’s just one more way that bougeroise society takes for capital what rightfully belongs to the entire collective.

“Laws are a threat made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean?” –Brennan Mulligan

The concept that ideas themselves can even be owned, bought, and sold is so capitalist violence coded. But if you dare challenge that idea, the knee-jerk response is always “don’t steal from artists” or whatever as if not being instantly declared a dictator just because you did a little art that’s just enough of a remix that it fits the legal definition of “original” is somehow theft. It’s only seen that way because we force artists to be essentially creative factory workers in the capitalist system, forcing them to have to market and sell their creations like they’re just a pair of sneakers at Walmart. That’s actually pretty abusive honestly. We ought to just structure society in such a way that they’re just supported by default without having to prostitute their creations, and then the need to be made a dictator over ideas won’t be necessary. It’s incredibly ironic that it’s become so prevalent even among scientists considering it’s definitively unscientific. It’s now possible in academia to plagiarize yourself. That’s a concept so patiently absurd that it really shows just how ridiculous the entire thing is and anyone who acts like it is normal, sane, or makes any kind of sense deserves to be mocked and possibly committed. I mean who’s even the victim here? They say “Self-plagiarism misleads your readers by presenting previous work as completely new and original.” but there’s no such thing as new and original. That’s not how reality works and you’re delusional if you think it is.

Checkout the documentary series “Everything is a Remix” for a great breakdown of what I’m taking about complete with examples, but in short the human brain is physically incapable of purely original thought. Literally all it ever does is remix things it encounters. The entire idea of an “original work” is based on the superstitious concept of divine inspiration, something that isn’t backed up by reality. Just because you personally can’t identify all the elements that were remixed to make a thing, doesn’t mean they came from nowhere. That’s a logical fallacy called “argument from personal incredulity.” True novelty does not exist in nature. Life itself is entirely built on copying. The DNA of the parents gets copied and remixed to make something new out of something old. There’s nothing new under the sun because truly new isn’t physically possible. To pretend that it is is delusional.

In a collectivist society where the means of production are collectively owned (a mode of production that has been scientifically proven to be superior) the intellectual production must so too be collectively owned even if that production must by its very nature be a product of an individual. We must stop using the violence of the state to enforce dictatorship over ideas. It was always wrong, but they used the plight of the way artists are exploited by capitalism to trick you into thinking it was normal. The opposite used to be normal for most of human history. It was called the folk tradition. It’s how cultures, religions, and society organization itself formed. Pretending that it’s somehow bad is intellectually dishonest and one of the core contradictions of capitalism.

People are fighting back on a small scale. The growing copyleft movement is pushing back against the violent narrative of the capitalists. Things like creative commons and FOSS software licenses like the GPL are ways that people push back against the violence. But so long as we live under the violent domination of capitalism, those methods will unfortunately always be a way to opt out rather than having to opt in to choosing violence just because you created something. It is worth noting though that the entire backbone of the Internet was built on collectivist labor utilizing copyleft licensing. Pretty much every major website and service runs its server infrastructure on Linux; a copyleft operating system. They do so because it’s better. No matter what they might try to tell you, collectivist labor makes better products.

The next time someone tries to tell you that when the proletariat copies from the stuff the capitalist class have metaphorically written their names on with a sharpie is somehow bad, remind them that they wouldn’t even be alive today if their DNA wasn’t pirated and remixed from that of their ancestors.

Appendix: Have you ever heard the accusation “white Americans have no culture”? This is the reason at its heart; culture is a form of collective remixing. A variation on a theme that a group of people develop over time due to their physical proximity. However when you build metaphorical fences around everything and say “this is mine, you have have it” backed by a promise of state violence, it’s pretty hard for such a thing to actually develop naturally.

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Collectivist Labor is Demonstrably Better

As a software developer, I’ve long known the power of collectivism. Free and Open Source Software that’s community developed by non-profit organizations forms the backbone of the internet. Pretty much every major corporation runs their backbone on it because it’s demonstrably better. With rare exception, pretty much every major website runs on servers that run Linux, an operating system developed primarily by volunteers working on it because they want to, not because there’s any profit to be made. The idea that we need the profit motive to be innovative or productive has always been a lie and the proof is sitting in front of all of us every single time we go online. Companies are all too happy to exploit the fruits of collective labor, but rarely turn around and offer the same back. Microsoft will run Azure on a backbone of Linux all day long but they will never open source Windows even though free and open source development would rapidly improve Windows, because it isn’t about making the best product, it’s all about control. It’s market fascism. Windows isn’t the dominant operating system on computers because it’s better, it’s because they spend billions of dollars making sure it comes pre-loaded on every computer you can buy so you don’t have any choice. They have a history of choking their competition out of the market too. Just look at what they did to Novell. They were hit with an anti-trust lawsuit over it and lost, but the punishment was basically a slap on the wrist. Also Apple isn’t real competition. They bailed out Apple years ago under the agreement that they wouldn’t actually compete, and they’d let you install Windows on your Mac. That’s why every Mac comes pre-loaded with BootCamp, which lets you install Windows but they’ve made it increasingly hard to install Linux.

Apple is the DNC of the software industry. It’s controlled opposition to give you the illusion of choice while refusing to actually compete with Microsoft directly. The proof is sitting there in every install of MacOS from the first boot. BootCamp comes pre-loaded to let you install Windows, but it doesn’t let you install Linux, and they’ve made it increasingly harder to sneak around and install it anyway, while they actively go out of their way to keep people from using MacOS on non-Apple hardware, which is artificially inflated in price over the competition. The illusion of choice is sold to you at a premium so only the affluent can get access to it.

If you think that Linux is behind Windows just because of market share, how do you explain Android? Companies rushed to support a Linux-based brand new platform with literally no market share when it came from a giant corporation with a history of questionable policies. It isn’t about market share, it’s about prejudice. Linux is the greatest proof in the pudding example that grassroots community organized labor is greater than corporate labor. They’ll run Linux all day long on servers that the public doesn’t get to see directly, because it’s demonstrably better than the corporate made closed-source choices, but they generally won’t run it on production machines in the office that the average worker or customer gets to see, even when it would actually save them massive amounts of money in licensing fees and maintenance overhead, because they don’t want employees to start getting ideas.

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How I Realized Capitalism is Obsolete

I didn’t come to communist ideas out of some form of idealism but because l’ve actually done the math. I played and made money on the stock market then realized that because of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics capitalism is doomed to fail and if we want to have a society left when it does, we gotta structure one around stability instead of endless growth. We’re on a finite planet. The markets can’t grow forever and when they run out of space to grow, the whole system falls apart. We’re already at the breaking point. That’s why they’re betting the farm on Al. It’s a desperate bid to invent a way around it, but it won’t work. As someone who was working on Al long before the big tech companies were, I know it just can’t do what they’re trying to make it do. What they call hallucination” and “model collapse” is actually the problem at the root of the entire thing. It’s too technical to explain in a Facebook message but basically unless you can build a machine that can rewire itself in real time, all you can build is a fancy plagiarism machine. Computers work by taking in instructions, doing fixed algorithms to those instructions, then outputting the result. You can’t algorithm creativity because that comes from neurotoxicity, which is something our brains are constantly doing; literally rewiring themselves. It’s how we’re able to improvise, adapt, and overcome. No machine we currently have any idea how to build is capable of that. If you look into the Al industry, what you find is a circle jerk. There’s no money actually being made except for a small amount of government funding for surveillance programs (something no freedom loving American should tolerate). Even if every single person with a smart phone bought a ChatGPT subscription at the highest level, they would still be losing money because of the astronomical operating cost. So if it’s so unprofitable and doomed to fail why are they doing it? Because they’re panicking and think throwing money at the problem might make it go away. But you can’t money your way out of a physics problem. So yeah, l’m a communist, but only because I tried it their way and found out the hard way that it doesn’t work. But had already stumbled onto things like permaculture which fill in the gaps that used to exist in old world communism. We didn’t have that kind of technology back then but we do now. We can literally terraform the entire planet into a food forest. There’s already people doing it and it’s proven to be 100% scalable and works astronomically better than factory farming, because you’re working with nature instead of against it.

Farmers in America are committing suicide at a much higher rate than any other profession and the problem keeps getting worse. The reason is that they’re not getting enough return on investment to be profitable. People always say that if you make a product everyone wants to buy you will be successful but literally everyone has to eat food and yet they’re not making enough to keep the farm. Why? Well it’s a complex issue but a big contributor is the depletion of topsoil. Monoculture farms (farms that grow a lot of one kind of plant) deplete the nutrients in the topsoil overtime and the longer you try to grow just one or two kinds of crops in a field the worse return on investment you get. Permaculture answers this problem by studying how nature solves the problem in a natural forest and repeating that with intent. The answer is layering and plant allies. Naturally different species of plants use and release different nutrients from each other. By clustering groups of plants that complement each other together in layers (not unlike how buildings are constructed in layers) you can engineer self replenishing soil. It takes more work to setup initially but after you get it going it basically takes care of itself. Plus you don’t need to worry about weeds and pests because you engineer around them, so you don’t need to dump chemicals all over the field. Weeds are plants that get in the way and cause damage in a nonoculture farm because you’ve artificially left niches open that they’re spreading into. With permaculture, you’re manually filling every niche with plants that naturally compliment each other. Since there’s no open niches to spread into, weeds just don’t have anywhere to go. And with such high and diverse yields, permaculture ends up producing so much more than it can use that pests just become a non-issue.

So now I imagine you’re asking if it’s so great why isn’t everyone switching? Well three big reasons: first, it’s a brand new science that’s only recently just started being deployed at scale in certain areas. Secondly, companies like Monsanto and John Deere have built entire industries around monoculture farming and they’re not in any hurry to suddenly switch to an entirely new way of doing things overnight. Finally, most people, even in the agricultural industry, simply don’t know it’s a thing. That’s changing though, thanks to that topsoil problem I mentioned there’s now a growing number of activist groups working to turn things around and spread awareness of the problem and its solution. Joe Rogan recently did a podcast with one such activist who has been riding across Asia and Europe on a motorcycle teaching people about the topsoil depletion problem and how to respond to it by moving away from monoculture farming. lt’s a great listen of you’ve got the time. So how does this all tie back into communism? Well if you solve the food problem by turning every backyard into a food forest and you suddenly have more food than you can eat, suddenly we’re in a new kind of economy. Star Trek depiction is probably the closest metaphor. In a post scarcity economy we don’t need everyone working in order to keep things chugging along. People will still need to make things but nowhere near at the scale were currently producing. Plus the current economy is overproducing at an absurd scale. So much gets produced only to end up in landfills. What a waste. Uber capitalism in order to stay in business you gotta keep growing That growth drives inflation thanks to that thermodynamics I mentioned earlier. (You likely know it as supply and demand, but fundamentally it’s just a physics problem; matter and energy exchanges) In order to keep up the demand you gotta balance the supply. The primary way they do that in today’s economy is to intentionally make the products worse so they slow down or even outright break so you have to buy another one and another one and another one. We all kinda know this by now; planned obsolescence. It’s why everyone always rushes out to buy the new iphone even though it’s practically the same thing you bought last time. They artificially slow it down so you’ll buy the new faster one. Why I realized communism does what capitalism don’t was actually something I stumbled into by accident. You see, while 1 work in IT as my day job, I moonlight as a musician. T have a decent collection of guitars from all over the place. Well I got tired of having to pay Guitar Center to fix them for me so I bought a soldering kit and learned how to do it myself. After fixing up all the ones in my collection and deciding it was a fun hobby,I started looking on eBay for stuff on the cheap I could fix up. 1 found couple Soviet guitars and I just fell in love with the design. They were only about $200 a piece so I figured why not. That’s practically nothing in guitar terms. There are Chinese knock off Temu guitars for more than that. 1 got them expecting them to be junk and needing major repairs and bought parts and tools in preparation for their arrival in advance while I waited for them to get here from the Ukraine. Again, this was just gonna be a fun little project; let’s get some old Soviet junk working again with modern parts bought here in the good old USA. Then they got here and they were not at all what I expected. They were in practically pristine condition. I couldn’t believe it. For how little they cost and how old they were how could they possibly still be in working order? I’d just spent like an entire month repairing my capitalist made guitars that were all less than 15 years old and these things were from a country that doesn’t even exist anymore and yet they still worked? Amazing. But it didn’t stop there. No, these things sounded better than anything else in my collection at any price point and even sound better than some of the most expensive guitars Ive ever played in my life. Even more shocking is they play better too. They’re the most comfortable things l’ve ever played and they hold their tuning like nobody’s business. And these things are rock solid too. I’m pretty sure I could drop kick one of them off a lighthouse and it would still work after it hit the ground. That’s how well put together these things are. was absolutely shocked. They were so much better than my other guitars that for a hot minute other guitars that for a hot minute I genuinely considered just selling everything else in my collection After having to replace damn near everything to get my capitalist guitars working again after less than 15 years, having Soviet guitars that didn’t need any work at all just broke my brain. The contrast was unreal. Literally the only thing l’ve done to them since getting them was swap out the strap pegs with strap locks. The Soviet ones used a different size standard which didn’t fit Western straps and I always put straplocks on any new guitar I buy regardless. That’s literally the only thing l’ve had to change. So yeah, that’s when it finally clicked; we’ve been doing it wrong this whole time. We’re wasting so much time, money, and resources making garbage for landfills on purpose just to keep capitalism alive when there’s better alternatives.

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Actually It Turns Out Communism Does it Better

I own physical proof that capitalism can’t compete on an even playing field with communism unless it cheats. Have you ever considered what it might be like to live under an economic system where things are built to last instead of built with planned obsolescence in mind? Well, I don’t have to wonder. I have it in my hands. I happen to be an amateur musician and I own about 10 guitars and have played a whole lot more. I’ve been playing for almost a decade and a half too and released half a dozen albums. I’ve got the kind of experience it takes to actually know what you’re on about. Well, over the summer I decided to do a project to fix up all my old guitars and bring them back into repair. I easily ended up spending over $200 in parts and labor to get just a couple of my guitars working again. My first guitar was about 15 years old and needed pretty major repairs. Almost all the electronic parts needed replaced and it needed serious rewiring. After that project was done, I was looking for another and I happened to come across a couple Soviet era guitars; a matching pair of electric and bass. I picked them up figuring it would be a fun little project to try to get them into working order again. They weren’t expensive either, I did the math and I paid about what you would have paid for them in Soviet Russia, adjusted for inflation. We’re taking about roughly $200/piece plus shipping.

However, to my surprise when they actually arrived despite being significantly older than any other guitar in my collection, they were in perfect working order. They didn’t need any work at all. Even more surprising though was the fact that they were so solidly made I feel like you could drop them off a truck and they’d barely take a scratch. Even more surprisingly though, they actually sounded better than any capitalist made guitar in my collection at any price point, and were easier to play too. I was blown away. An entire lifetime of capitalist propaganda and assumptions that had been drilled into my head since childhood obliterated in an instant. I was holding the proof that it was nothing but lies right in my hands. What could I do but accept the truth right in front of my face?

Know what else I can’t get over? The bloody things are so good at holding their tuning that I only have to tune them about once a week, whereas every other guitar I have to tune every time I pick it up if not more often. Talk about engineering!

Soviet Kavkaz Terek Bass (left) and Soviet Ural 650 (right), the pride of my collection.

Get this; the Soviet economy was so stable, they printed the prices directly onto the guitar, alongside all the other information on the back label. I didn’t have to guess at what these originally cost, or have to go digging in dusty old economic records to find it. I just look at the back and there it is: 145 rubles. Yeah, imagine living in a system so economically stable that there’s virtually no inflation and so you can print the price directly on the product instead of having to use a sticker so you can keep changing it. Plus, without a profit motive, you don’t have to wait for a sale to get a fair price, stuff just costs what it costs from the start. Imagine that! Kinda makes capitalism seem whacky and unstable by comparison doesn’t it?

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Thermodynamics and the Economy

“All natural and technological processes proceed in such a way; the availability of the remaining energy decreases. In all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves an isolated system, the entropy of that system increases. Energy continuously flows from being concentrated to becoming dispersed, spread out, wasted, and useless. New energy cannot be created, and high-grade energy is being destroyed. An economy based on endless growth is unsustainable.” –From The Second Law by Muse

Economics is the study of the conversation of kinetic energy (labor) into chemical energy (wealth). The laws of thermodynamic therefore directly apply to economics. Inflation is therefore simply the measurable increase in economic entropy. Wealth, as a storage medium for the value of energy extracted through labor, losses value over time as the system tries to expand beyond it’s fixed physical limits. It’s value goes from being concentrated to being disappearsed.

Therefore, according to the second law of thermodynamics, if no wealth enters an isolated system, such as is the case on the planet Earth (or more accurately the solar system if you insist on being pedantic), under the pressure of capitalism’s need for constant economic expansion, it will always ultimately devalue the currency until it inevitably reaches collapse. They call this a “market crash“. This is the inevitable result of what happens when the needs of the people outweigh the amount of value their labor can provide them. Since there’s only so much time in the day that one can use for working without physically collapsing, there is therefore a fixed wall beyond which no more labor can be extracted from an individual. As the pay cut effect inflation has on one’s income increases exponentially, eventually you reach critical mass.

Therefore, because of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics, capitalism is inherently unsustainable. Late stage capitalism always gives way to fascism in a desperate attempt by the exploitive class to keep capitalism alive on life support. It starts with corporate subsides and bailouts at the taxpayer expense, and ends with a totalitarian expansion as the rich try desperately to hold their crumbling wealth together as it inevitably gives away to entropy. Economic expansion hits its fixed physical limits and so they look to military expansion to try to maintain the endless growth, but that too is unsustainable and will inevitably fail.

Under such conditions the poor, who’s share of the pie continues to dwindle, is forced to work harder and harder to make less and less until they can’t anymore. Eventually they have no choice but revolt or starve.

This isn’t hypothetical. We have direct historical evidence of this happening. After the end of the first world war, the economy of the Weimar Republic was in shambles. Its currency had reached an inflation rate so astronomical that they literally had to carry carts of the stuff everywhere in order to buy anything. Faced with such a situation, the rich turned to a fascist takeover of the country, turning it into what we now know as Nazi Germany. In order to win over the masses, they pulled a bait and switch. They feigned socialism while being its literal polar opposite. Additionally, they used forms of prejudice such as racism (primarily in the form of antisemitism and romaphobia), homophobia, transphobia, ableism and the like to turn the working class against themselves so they would accept the new totalitarian regime, mistaking their neighbors as their enemies rather than the predatory class that was pulling the strings. (Sound familiar?)

If it wasn’t for the brave heroism of the allied Anti-Fascist (Antifa for short) forces taking the flight to the shores of Normandy, it likely would have gotten a whole lot worse before it got any better.

Therefore, if we want to halt the inevitable march towards fascism, we must convert our economy from one centered on endless growth into one centered on maintaining stability, such as democratic communism. We have no other options and time is quickly running out. Like it or not, the rise of fascism is inevitable under capitalism due to the fundamental laws of nature.

The word communism likely made you flinch, but have you ever considered why? How about we follow the money and see who has a vested interest in keeping you afraid.

Now, if communism is really as bad as they say, why would they feel the need to spend so much money to keep you afraid of it? Really makes you think, doesn’t it?

I know the knee-jerk reaction is to say “yeah well communism failed” but have you ever thought about why that is? If in the Olympics, a US athlete pulled a gun and shot off the kneecaps of the Russian athlete, we wouldn’t say that the Russian athlete was a failure, we’d say the US athlete cheated, so why when the race was economic, do we let the sabotage of the Soviet Union by the US get a pass? In reality, capitalism cannot compete with communism without cheating. I’m not just talking out my ass either, I’m holding physical proof in my hands.

If you need further proof of what’s coming if you don’t fight immediately, look into the actions of Plantir and Oracle, which is a capitalist led effort to build a social credit score system designed to force people into compliance with the upcoming fascist regime.A great breakdown of this threat to democracy can be found here:

All the horrors they said would come about under communism are things they’ve done under capitalism. It’s the old “everything accusation by the right is a confession” once again.

I’m now reminded of the words of one of the founding fathers of the United States:

“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.” –Patrick Henry

So in the words of the Dropkick Murphys 🎵 Who’ll stand with us? 🎵

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The Life Review

After you have arrived in Kur, when you are brought before the assembly, they will review your life with you and your deeds will be weighed; your sins against your service. Everything you do in service to the Divine will be taken into account. However it must be something you yourself did. Just like nobody else can serve as your substitute for the consequences of your sins, nobody else’s work will be taken as your own. Paying or ordering someone else to do it for you doesn’t make their accomplishments yours. This is your life that’s being examined, not theirs. Once the assembly has come to a decision and rendered a verdict, that is to be your fate in Kur.

Don’t sell yourself short, anything you do in service to the Divine is counted, however transitory or seemingly small. You don’t have to build ziggurats to do acts of service that are meaningful. Any time you make an offering or do something to further the divine order, you’re performing acts of service. Whenever that’s making a drawing, singing a song, doing a dance, building a temple, or just living according to the divine values; it all counts. 

However this is also a warning; anything you do against the divine order is sinful and will be weighed against you. Remember that Enki decreed a destiny of value to every single person no matter their ability. When you do things that harm others, you violate that destiny. Even seemingly small things like voting for someone who supports harmful policies will count against you. So be mindful of your actions and their consequences, not just to you but to all. It’s your actions that matter; not your thoughts and not your words.

Live in service to the Divine and protect the divine order and you have nothing to fear in death. Your place in Urugal will be secure.

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Conservatism is a Trick

The latest headlines; More racism from the Whitehouse.

“Trump orders all federal diversity, equity and inclusion employees placed on paid leave. It also asks federal agencies to submit a written plan by Jan. 31 for dismissing the employees.” —NBC News

So I guess we’re no longer making sure everyone has a seat at the table. So much for equal protection under the law. Talk about unamerican. Trump just throws away our founding principles and then shits on them.

He called it “radical and wasteful”. I guess all of America is radical and wasteful then Mr President?

Disgusting.

For as much as conservatives want to pretend they’re the party of American principles and values, they sure love throwing them to the wayside and shitting all over them at every opportunity.

I left the right for the same reason I left Christianity; it’s a bait and switch game of hypocritical bullshit. Say one thing while doing the opposite.

What’s sad is so many don’t even comprehend the reality of it. Christians are supposed to aspire to live like Christ but instead they do the opposite.Love thy neighbor as thyself? No can’t do that, they’re gay, or trans, or Muslim, or undocumented.Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth? No thanks I’ll vote for the most obnoxious, money and power hungry grifter I can find. It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? I’ll ignore than and pretend the most pious man is the adulterer rapist billionaire because sometimes he poses for photo ops with a Bible.

When I say conservatives are stupid, this kind of shit is why. It’s like willfully pulling the wool over your own eyes and then blaming your neighbor for not being able to see where you’re going.

And they love to repeat the word freedom over and over but it’s clear none of them even know what it means and if they did they’d realize they don’t actually want freedom. Freedom is the right to do anything you want as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, including stuff you don’t like. That means smoking pot, that means getting an abortion, (anyone else doesn’t apply to a fetus, that isn’t a person and you’re just an idiot who hasn’t done the homework if you think otherwise), that means practicing witchcraft, that means playing violent video games, that means swearing in public, that means burning a Bible in the middle of town square, that means shooting up with heroin. That means being in the country undocumented without it being illegal. Don’t like that stuff? Then you’re not actually in favor of freedom so shut the fuck up about it. If an America where you can do all those things legally isn’t the America you want then you actually hate freedom. Because that’s what words mean.

I’m convinced most conservatives have never opened a dictionary for how much they use words wrong. They love to call stuff communist but I doubt a single one of them has ever even read Marx so how the fuck do they expect to know what that word actually means? They never do the homework.