Hey guys.
This is a text I found in a brazilian humour blog. I tried my best translating it to English too see what you think of it. I know Eyesore will want to say something about this
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It's very rare to see someone defending piracy. Sometimes people justify it with some ragged excuse, saying that it is a symptom of social and economical discrepancies. But even those who practise “the more sophisticated” piracy, like downloading MP3s and cracking Windows software, can't help but feel a certain complex of guilt when listening the speech of the recording industry and the manufacturers of software: “Piracy does not generate jobs! Piracy does not pay taxes!”.
I say that the growth in recent years of the most diverse types of piracy, either thanks to the Internet or to the good and old Chinese, is the biggest weapon that society possesss to pass unharmed through this said “age of information”.
There was a time where the most important thing in economy was food (good feudal times that won't come back anymore). It was so important that the majority of the economic theories were based on wheat grains. One of them, a very cool one, belonged to Thomas Malthus. To simplify, it says the following : the population grows in geometric progression (2, 4, 8, 16, 32.) - after all, making kids is very good (it really says that); However, food reserves grew in arithmetical progression (1, 2, 3, 4…) - the productivity of lands is limited and its resources are scarce. One concludes then that one day this system is going to get really screwed up. Too much mouths for too little food. But no harm done there, God is a wise fella, he kills 90% of the population with hunger and then the cycle starts again. Wars also come in handy to kill lots of people and save food.
Today, what moves economy is knowledge, technology, information, culture, fun… Nobody knows anymore if wheat grows on trees or if it comes out of chickens. And this was only possible because the problem of population growth was solved (I mean the good part of the world, forget about every shit below equador) and people found out that watching television and playing video-games is much better and practical than procreating.
In this scenario, Malthus' theory is inverted. The amount of imbeciles producing information grows in geometric progression (teen pop singers, updates of Windows, writers, magazines, TV shows...) - after all, being a celebrity is sooo good -; However our capacity to assimilate all this new information grows only in arithmetical progression (after all, we only have ONE brain). So it's not necessary to be a genius to find out that, if we won't do nothing about it, one day God will have to get down here and kill 90% of the people that it insist on stuffing us with more and more information.
I mean, how many new Nu-metal bands do we need? How many celebrities, weekly rotating in gossip TV shows are necessary to entertain us? Isn't a new version of Photoshop every 4 months a little exaggerate? A periodical news stand nowadays possesss more information than my high-school library, when I was there!
That's when piracy enters to save us all. Each MP3 we download, we push that teen pop singer towards ruin a little bit more . Each pirate software we install, a Swedish programmer looses his money to buy Prozac and kills himself. Each fake Nike t-shirt we dress (yes, brand is also information), the less basketball stars can show off their super sport cars. With this scarcity of resources a virtuous cycle is formed, and little by little, that one dreamed break-even point, where only “relevant information” is produced, approaches. The world will then be able to get rid of those who only want to rent a little space in our brains just to make a few bucks and to exhibit a life of luxury and wealth. The path would be clear to those who only want to pass their message and to receive what it's worth.
Be satisfied for each act of piracy that you already committed. You are contributing to get us passed by this information era, and in the final all that remains is the good and old wheat, who the age of information almost made us forget where it comes from.
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