The Future of Work: How does copyright differ from rationing?

What is the difference between telling a person they can’t stream music on Apple Music and telling people they can only buy a certain number of granny smith apples per month?

Work might matter to us because it creates new things in our economy, or because it fulfills us. One hard thing about living in a world where products aren’t scarce anymore is that we don’t know what to with ourselves. We already have more things in the world than we need to survive. It’s curious that we still act as if money and resources are super scarce, an artificial scarcity generated by poor distribution systems and political systems that purposely avoid evenness.

Later I will write about the fulfillment of work in a world where we don’t have to work much.

Here I want to address how to measure economic value when there is an abundance of products available.

Copyright as a Model of Value

So what is the difference between rationing music on Apple Music and rationing apples at the supermarket?

It’s disingenuous to claim that we have to decide between capitalism and communism.

We can live in a free market, capitalist system which assigns value to products even when those products are abundant. We already do that. As a musician I know this all too well. The writing of a song, the incredible investment of time, money, and relationships that go into the creation of a recording, and when you are finally at the end, you spend another thousand dollars to print a thousand CDs. This is what is expected of young and poor upcoming musicians just to compete.

And yet, once you do all that, the actual cost of each CD is about a dollar, so when you sell it for $20 out of your suitcase at a farmer’s market gig, you are making 2000% profit. Of course, the timing of this bankroll is completely asynchronized from when you need to spend the money, so it’s a hassle. With streaming services, it’s even more extreme: the price per item is negligible, so after the first copy, the cost of further use is negligible. In 2020, when I made my most recent album, I was actually relieved that there was no point in making CDs anymore. On one hand it meant that there was no way for me to sell products and recoup my expenses, but it was a relief not to feel the pressure of selling CDs to somehow make the music seem worthwhile!

It would be unreasonable to say to a working musician that the value of streaming their song on Apple Music is basically zero because the internet connection is already established and the recording is just sitting there on the servers. We give it a value by assigning an artificial scarcity to the music, telling the user they have to pay for the right to listen to something that is already there and free to distribute.

We obviously do this because we recognize the integrity of a larger system in which the musician operates. We recognize that if we don’t compensate the musician for the intangible, unpaid labor they have put into the creation of the music, they won’t be able to continue contributing to society. And it seems obviously fair to us.

To say that this is socialist or communist is absurd. Yet it is a form of enforced rationing for the purpose of generating a level playing field that we can easily agree to.

So we need to start our discussion of the future of work by reimagining how economic value is tracked. Instead of the value of something being based upon its scarcity of supply, more and more things will fall into models of artificial scarcity, like copyright.

When Apples Become Abundant

I’m sure this is not a perfect analogy. There is a line somewhere between the models. Currently, in a supermarket there are a bazillion apples sitting on the shelf, and you can take as many as you can afford to buy. The primary scarcity lies in the amount of money you are carrying, not in the amount of apples available.

On the other side of the line is a situation where there is simply no shortage of apples. Just imagine for a moment that suddenly apples were always free, because the cost of making and distributing apples had somehow shrunk to zero. Maybe we discover a source of apples raining down from outer space or something, who knows. Imagine walking into the supermarket right now, and knowing that apples are free and they will always be free. Would you hoard them? Probably not. After all, you don’t go to the water fountain where water flows freely, and covet the water. You know that the cost of distribution of drinking water is so low that in many situations we don’t even track it’s use.

Finding a New Equilibrium 

A new equilibrium would be established. You might be inclined to get more apples than before, because after all, they are a free and they’re good. But you wouldn’t say, “I’m going to take all the apples and eat only apples for the rest of my life.” That is the kind of thinking we only imagine because we live in a society dealing with millenia of scarcity trauma.

Just like with people’s productivity (which I will talk about in the next post), the idea that people are lazy and greedy in the absence of social norms is misguided. It’s based on a million other constraints that we have lived with for as long as we can remember.

Our generation is dealing with a change in these fundamental constraints. The availability of products and of free time are both changing dramatically. It makes sense that we’re a bit off balance. In order to find a new balance, we should examine our assumptions about how we assign value to our time and the products and services we create.