Not just merely dead, but really most sincerely dead!
It is one of the great injustices of the universe that I can't resurrect dead assholes to force them to see how their ideas have been condemned and forgotten.
In a just and sane universe, the MPAA, the ESRB, and every other form of "self regulation" that forces artists to censor themselves due to the cowardice and complicity of the businesses that employ them, not because of government force, would join it in short order. We do not live in a just and sane universe. Even so, it's my hope that as it becomes easier and easier to go directly from creator to audience without any intermediary, the ability to create de facto censorship by controlling bottlenecks of sales and distribution will vanish. Unfortunately, the unavoidable laws of economics seem to inexorably push towards some form of aggregator, gateway, or portal, and as soon as you need to be included in some list, site, collection, or index in order to have any hope of reaching an audience which can sustain you as a professional, you make it not just possible but inevitable that there will be a bland, constrained, and politically correct set of "standards" which you must adhere to. Even worse is when there are no such published standards, no way to prove compliance or stay within the borders, and the gatekeeper simply reserves the right to remove whatever it wants whenever it wants -- Amazon, I am looking at you.
(None of this is illegal, nor should it be. There's no right to be published or to have an audience, nor any obligation for anyone to publish or distribute anything. But -- and this is the part lots of people seem to have problems understanding -- the fact there's a right to do something doesn't make it right to do. I will defend absolutely Amazon's right to refuse to sell particular books or a movie theater's right to not show an unrated or "NC-17" movie, and I will state that making those choices is wrong and that if anyone can devise a system of distribution which doesn't lead to bottlenecks and which doesn't make it impossible for a content-seeker to quickly find content he wants or might want, they should do so, and if such a system makes censorship or "regulation" impossible, so much the better.)
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Doug Socks
Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
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An economic system that could do as you say, is possible if the ultimate monoplized, employee owned and equally shared, non money paying, rotating committee ruled, mertiocracy governed corporate communist hyper-business were to emerge.
I think I know how to build it, but it will require technology. Great technology. Many of the pieces are already here.
All I have to do is put them together....and if i can think of it, so can someone else.
This isn't just possible, it's probable that we will ive to see the day that people stop owning 'things' and trade directly in programs or Program Ownership Units. the POU would buy you more programs for your augmented reality or systems that cook various foods right in your house, with robots.
Just think about it.
They're a branch of big pharma. They merge with a major telecommunications company, then conglomerate with a new transparent microscreen producer and finally they absorb several video game companies and web cam producers.
What they create is glasses created agumented reality with virtural goods sold to employees in 'modular' apartments being fed on the company dime.
Eventually this company takes over the world and after several shifts and upheavals, it becomes a corporate democracy of sorts, with meritocracy binding threads.