February 14, 2024 — The color of the cup on my desk is black.
For any fact exists infinite fictions. I could have said the color is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet.
What incentive is there in publishing a fiction like "the color of the cup is red"? There is no natural incentive.
But what if our government subsidized fiction? To subsidize something is to give it an artificial economic incentive.
If fiction were subsidized, because there can be so much more of it than fact, we would see far more fictions published than facts.
You would not only see things like "the color of the cup is red", you would see variations on variations like "the color of the cup is light red", "the color of the cup is dark red", and so on.
You would be inundated with fictions. You would constantly have to dig through fictions to see facts.
The color of the cup would stay steady, as truths do, but new shades would be reported hourly.
The information circulatory system, which naturally would circulate useful facts, would be hijacked to circulate mostly fiction.
As far as I can tell, this is exactly what copyright does. The further from fact a work goes, the more its artificial subsidy. The ratio of fiction to fact in our world might be unhealthy.
I've given up trying to change things. I have a different battle to fight. But here I shout into the void one more time, why do we think subsidizing fiction is a good idea?