Ideas Want to Be Shared
kk.org
kk.org
The title is alluding to the famous quote "information wants to be free" by Steward Brand. The full quote famously includes the opposite as well, because information "wants to be expensive because it's so valuable".
Kevin Kelly as an early collaborator of Brand of course knows this intimately.
There is a wonderful and very insightful book on Brand, by the way, called "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner. [1]
[1] https://fredturner.stanford.edu/books/from-counterculture-to...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120329153458/https://www.paten...
I disagree. Value of an idea is on a scale too. Some ideas are more obvious than others because the evidence required to evaluate it is more readily available. Therefore, they are not terribly valuable since a lot of people can and do act on them.
Some ideas are valuable yet hidden from most because the context to evaluate them properly is not readily available.
Some ideas are valuable for some yet unpursuable because of existing systems and ideologies in place (aka Innovator's Dilemma)
In short, "ideas are worthless" became a meme but it's extremely distilled. There is a lot more nuance to it
I do know that once you publicly share an idea without somehow copyrighting it, people will run with it and the originator can get badly screwed financially by people talented at essentially intellectual theft and lining their own pockets who have an absence of ethics and are too stupid to see that screwing their source is not in their long-term best interest.
They nominally do economic development. I was happy to freely provide ideas but I did expect it to be a networking opportunity and a means to build my professional reputation and local contacts and thereby enhance my income.
That has not happened.
I quit going to meetings because I was tired of their abusive treatment of me and now they cyber stalk me and continue to steal my ideas, give me zero credit, etc so some local cretin and his awful bosses can pretend they are worth the money that the city pays them.
I am getting nothing out of this at all. They can't even be bothered to tell people where they get their ideas so my reputation would be enhanced.
I continue to be dirt poor. I have done everything in my power to play by the rules as I understand them and the result remains the same both online and off: People think I'm wonderful. They think I have great ideas. They also think I should do everything out of the goodness of my heart instead of for pay and everyone turns a deaf ear to the fact that I am dirt poor, going hungry and desperately need more earned income.
I have a real problem here, your platitudes not withstanding.
Nobody gets rich from ideas, they get rich from execution.
An unexecuted idea which is kept secret has zero impact on the world except inflating the ideators ego. If you can't execute it yourself, put it out into the world for someone else to.
The problem with that is that I appear to be talented, which is why these immoral, abusive rat bastards keep stealing from me. Without my ideas, these losers got no game.
And that means the town I live in is worse off and letting the town I live in be worse off makes me worse off.
Regardless of your callous disregard for the stated problem that I need to somehow eat, some problems are actually hard to solve and this has proven to be one of them for me.
I'm apparently good at some things, good enough that other people will jump on stealing from me.
I'm not so talented at monetization and the world is filled with horrible people who feel zero qualms about benefiting at my expense while going "Not my problem that this person whose work I'm stealing is poor and going hungry."
I actually need to find a means to survive and thrive here and stop helping horrible, horrible people for free. But the problem space in question is such that a "Fuck you, got mine" attitude isn't a clear win or ready solution.
It would be nice if other people had morals and a conscience. Sadly, that appears to rarely be the case.
EDIT: sorry if I seem harsh, but believe restricting the free flow of information is morally repulsive, so have a strong reaction to arguments that intellectual property needs more draconian protections.
There are factors I'm not interested in trying to explain to an internet stranger hellbent on schooling me about how wrong I am about my life.
Don't get me wrong: I sincerely wish I had more people in my life who could help me poke holes in what I think of the problem space and find a path forward that works for me.
I think a lack of such constructive feedback is a major overlooked barrier to female business success. The problem is men seem to have access to such constructive feedback privately. Doing this publicly in this way is not optimal.
I'm not arguing that. I run multiple blogs and I am very much on the record as wanting my blogs to remain free to read. I don't want paywalls or subscription newsletters and I no longer have ads on my sites.
I try to support them with tips and Patreon and I don't get enough money that way while other people clearly use the info and, in some cases, have a history of intentionally shafting me by not only not leaving tips, they also do not give me any credit nor promote my work.
I need money. People "value" what I do but don't want to pay me for it. Copyright and even the Nobel Prize are intended to solve the problem that it isn't actually true that "Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything."
Ideas are not nothing and actively screwing over people who generate new ideas -- like, say, Einstein -- is an excellent way to incentivize your best and brightest to tell the world "Fuck you. Got mine."
This is not in the best interest of humanity as a whole.
And if software eats the world, perhaps it will eat patents, too,