Death Is Bad

Kindle Worlds lets you get paid for fanfic. Yay? No.

John Scalzi summarizes the legal jargon, go read it. You’ll get paid for what you write, but then Amazon and the Licensors have full copyright ownership of everything you created. If you want to protect your rights you’ll have to change all the names, like Scalzi did with Redshirts.

This is nothing new, of course. Anyone who writes fanfic never had any legal claim on their work. That was a large part of the appeal. You are making something and gifting it to everyone for free, and in return they do the same. Eliezer wrote HPMoR, I used that to podcast it, Sam used the podcast to animate it. I get many of my FX from freesound, where other people upload their sounds for free for everyone to use. I upload my sounds in return (at least one of which has been used in a product) and the community as a whole financially supports the site. No one particularly minded, as there was no money to be made anyway. At best the original author gets extra sales from people who become interested in the world due to the fanfic (I only bought the original Harry Potter series because HPMoR was so good and I wanted my background. I never actually finished reading it, because frankly it wasn’t as good). At worst it’s just a bunch of people telling stories to each other and it doesn’t affect the author or publishers. Fanfic has been largely untouched by hostile hands due to this no-profit agreement.

Now Amazon is licensing fanfic for profit. At first blush this sounds good for the fanfic authors, but I have extreme reservations. Because now there is money to be made. Which means that if you’re writing fanfic and you AREN’T charging for it and giving the copyright holder a portion of the profits, there are lawyers that will make the case that you are stealing. Lawyers with a LOT of funding behind them.

I’m not saying this will happen, but now it could. And I don’t trust Amazon to not be evil. Hell, I don’t trust humans to not be evil, and they have preferences other than Maximize Profit! Give this tool to a Profit-Maximizing Optimization Process (which is what corporations basically are) and you will likely have to fight it to prevent a scouring of free fanfic.

Some people may not have a problem with this. The best fanfic writers will get some supplemental income and maybe make a name for themselves in the publishing world, and the rest will finally die off. But a lot of people first cut their teeth on fanfic. Every writer started out writing fanfic, most of them just had it in their elementary school notepads where they don’t have to admit to it. Imitation is always the first step in learning. Even people who don’t plan to write professionally often write fanfic sheerly for the pleasure of writing it. Soon they might be prosecuted if they don’t wish to turn over fiction written in licensed worlds to Amazon.

And some people have other agendas entirely. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is explicitly a teaching tool. It isn’t just there to tell a story, it’s there to promote rational thought in readers. To help raise the sanity waterline of the reading public, just a wee bit. That’s why it was written. That’s why I do the podcast. I am not seeking financial gain, I am trying to make the world slightly better, and slightly more like me. This is a purpose important to us, too important to limit it behind paywalls. The work is given away free not just out of necessity, but also to disseminate it as widely as possible. If we do not wish to charge for it, will Amazon be able to take us to court and force us to charge or remove it?

I’m betting we’ll find out sooner or later.

Back when we were in the process of Beating The Game the education system was exactly what we needed. A base of farmers to keep us in calories, a large pool of industrial workers to keep society growing and upgrading, and an elite corps of intellectuals – as administrators and to make new progress in understanding how reality works and exploiting that knowledge. Robin Hanson has argued that schools are very important for teaching humans how to efficiently work in factories – to accept domination and hierarchical rankings. The brightest kids could be routed through colleges, where they would gain additional skills for the rarer intellectual jobs.

The climate has changed since those days.

Here in America we can feed our entire population using just 2% of the workforce. All of our manufacturing and industry uses another 20%. But we’re still running our education system like we need tons of industrial labor. This leaves us with a lot of people who are very fit for industrial work, but no jobs for them to do – both the newest generation and the working adults who need to retrain as their old jobs disappear. They see the college track that has been laid down, and they think “Ah ha! Here’s the next step! I will make my labor more valuable!” Which is exactly what society has been telling all of us for decades.

This creates the education bubble we’re now experiencing. The college track was designed for a small percentage of students, not all of them. The demand for higher education rockets upward and the supply cannot be increased quickly enough to meet it, so prices go through the roof. Everyone is willing to pay those prices because the loans are freely available, subsidized by a government that had evolved in a period of relative intellectual-labor scarcity. It’s the same thing that happens to us when we’re exposed to unlimited high-sugar high-fat foods.

Now we face a glut of highly-skilled individuals with a bare handful of jobs to employ them. It’s gotten bad enough that people have paid $13,000 at auction for the privilege of getting an unpaid internship.

A large number of otherwise very smart people have been saying something I find rather surprising. That these highly-skilled and generally intelligent people should create new jobs. Just like all the innovators and entrepreneurs of the past, they should help to enrich society by applying their intellect in creative new endeavors. This would indeed be a great solution, if it wasn’t for one major hurdle.

We have stripped that ability from these people. We spent 12-16 years and tens of thousands of dollars per person doing that. Intentionally removing initiative and daring, in order to get cooperation and stability. To such a degree that many people can’t muster the initiative to keep themselves alive without a compelling outside reason to do so. Nowadays we get our cooperation and stability from machines, and we haven’t yet retooled our schools to keep up with changing demands. It doesn’t look like the government is making any effort to do so either, at least not in the US. Most politicians seem to be pushing the “do what we’ve always done, just do it more and better!” idea. Education needs to fundamentally change its focus.

In addition, we need to stop threatening people with death for showing initiative… which I’ll get into tomorrow, as this post is already long enough.

Yeah, the Expansion is Existential Angst.

As far as I can tell, untold volumes have been written about Existential Angst, and no one is any closer to beating it. Are there any things we can say we’ve learned so far?

1. It’s not a fear of death. Indeed, some people seek out death as a release.

2. The most commonly expressed sentiment is that nothing seems to matter.

3. Thinking makes it worse. The common coping methods all seem to be ways to inhibit thinking and reducing opportunities for idle thought.

4. Particularly well-informed and intelligent people tend to do worse.

5. You can’t reason/motivate/will-power your way out of it.

6. Doing something makes it better, temporarily.

Let’s expand on #6. People often report that while they are actively doing something they feel temporary relief. Generally this has to be something engaging that requires effort. The greatest relief is felt when these activities are perceived to have a lasting effect on the world. Games and socialization wear off very quickly – eventually failing to elicit any relief at all. Cleaning a room will have minor effects. Painting a room or building a shelf (or writing a blog post) achieve more relief and for longer periods. Large projects (helping co-ordinate a convention) over long time periods (losing weight steadily for months) have great impacts. In short, the greater the impact upon the future, the more permanent the change – the stronger the effect.

Considering again #4… A greater appreciation of the world and the events that shape it leads to worse outcomes. We are taught that all sentient beings should be in our circle of concern, but then can do nothing to affect the overwhelming majority of them. Shit happens and what I do doesn’t matter.

I’m starting to suspect that the Final Boss is Learned Helplessness. And… it looks like I’m not the first person to think so. Unfortunately as far as I can tell there has been jack-all written about what tactics to use to beat him.