I don’t want to give a false impression. I don’t advocate this mindset. But from a historical perspective it isn’t that hard to understand. The history of mankind has always been a process of vacillating between societies motivated by self-profit and societies that attempt to live communally.

Right now the world has shifted more towards self-profit because we’re still living in the shadow of the Soviet Union’s collapse (the largest communal society ever attempted). But that doesn’t mean the idea of communal living has gone away completely. What the USSR proved more than anything is a society needs self-profit motivation in order to get people to put in the effort to excel.

There were no startups in the USSR because no one was willing to put a large amount of effort into something that would eventually be owned by the government.

But in that context artistic expression takes on a different bent because it is something most artists feel compelled to put effort into even without a profit motivation. So the question becomes “if something costs almost nothing to produce and the creator is compelled to create it without a profit motivation should it then be communal?”