“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
~ Chuck Palahniuk
Hello @cheetah, before you pounce on me (again) I want to tell you:
"You claimed to be a bot and I agree that you're a bot. You are a product of some scripts, which are not originals of your master/s. I don't know who wrote the "original" codes for bots and since you're created to be busy (body), I suggest you go find out yourself."
Tip: try looking at GitHub
Okay, now let me declare that this entire post is also NOT original, because (see the above quotes) I am not original in any sense of the word. Nothing is original, not Blockchain, not even Steemit.
Trash all that © ℗ and "Proof of work" nonsense!
We're on Earth and EVERYthing therein is the commonwealth, a gift to every resident living things. Its absurd for anyone to stake a claim on this and that and say "it is mine".
"The decisive question for a man is: is he related to something infinite or not?"
- Carl G Jung
Sacred Economics
by Charles Eisenstein
It is hugely ironic and hugely signifiant that the one thing on the planet most closely resembling the forgoing conception of the divine is money. It is an invisible, immortal force that surrounds and steers all things, omnipotent and limitless, an “invisible hand” that, it is said, makes the world go ’round. Yet, money today is an abstraction, at most symbols on a piece of paper but usually mere bits in a computer. It exists in a realm far removed from materiality. In that realm, it is exempt from nature’s most important laws, for it does not decay and return to the soil as all other things do, but is rather preserved, changeless, in its vaults and computer files, even growing with time thanks to interest. It bears the properties of eternal preservation and everlasting increase, both of which are profoundly unnatural. The natural substance that comes closest to these properties is gold, which does not rust, tarnish, or decay. Early on, gold was therefore used both as money and as a metaphor for the divine soul, that which is incorruptible and changeless. - Charles Eisenstein
Cultural and Spiritual Capital
Natural capital is one of four broad categories of the commonwealth that also comprises social, cultural, and spiritual capital. Each consists of things that were once free, part of self-sufficiency or the gift economy, that we now pay for. The robbery then is not from mother earth, but from mother culture.
The most familiar of these other forms of capital in the economic discourse is cultural capital, which goes by the term intellectual property. In former times, the vast fund of stories, ideas, songs, artistic motifs, images, and technical inventions formed a commons that everyone could draw upon for pleasure and productivity, or incorporate into yet other innovations. In the Middle Ages, minstrels would listen to each other’s songs and borrow new tunes that they liked, modify them, and circulate them back into the commons of music. Today artists and their corporate sponsors scramble to copyright and protect each new creation, and vigorously prosecute anyone who tries to incorporate those songs into their own. The same happens in every creative sphere.
The moral justification for intellectual property is, again, “If I am my own, and my labor power belongs to me, then what I make is mine.” But even granting the premise that “I am my own,” the implicit assumption that artistic and intellectual creations arise ex nihilo from the mind of the creator, independent of cultural context, is absurd. Any intellectual creation (including this book) draws on bits and pieces of the sea of culture around us, and from the fund of images, melodies, and ideas that are deeply imprinted upon the human psyche, or perhaps even innate to it. As Lewis Mumford puts it, “A patent is a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention.”
The same is true of songs, stories, and all other cultural innovations. By making them private property, we are walling off something that is not ours. We are stealing from the cultural commons. And because, like land, pieces of the cultural
commons are themselves productive of continued wealth, this theft is an ongoing crime that contributes to the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the owners and the renters, the creditors and the debtors.
There is no such a thing called intellectual property in the commonwealth, where everything is sacred and belongs to the common.
I 'created' the photograph below, but it doesn't mean that I can morally claim that it is mine because I did not create the clouds in the sky, nor did I create the wing of the jetliner. And I did not create the camera which I used to snap this image. If I were to sell this picture, I will have to pay some commissions or royalties to the creators of the clouds, the aircraft, the airline that own the aircraft, and...the camera maker too.
Monetization has desecrated divine holy creation in every sense of the word - in both religion and scientific term.
A great way to remove greed and drop the human ego is to find out who you really are and your antecedents. What better to do this than looking at the humble pencil. Really? Yes really!
I, Pencil
- Leonard E ReadHundreds of thousands of Americans of all ages continue to enjoy this simple and beautiful explanation of the miracle of the “invisible hand” by following the production of an ordinary pencil. Read shows that none of us knows enough to plan the creative actions and decisions of others.
Ideas are most powerful when they’re wrapped in a compelling story. Leonard’s main point—economies can hardly be “planned” when not one soul possesses all the know-how and skills to produce a simple pencil—unfolds in the enchanting words of a pencil itself. Leonard could have written “I, Car” or “I, Airplane,” but choosing those more complex items would have muted the message. No one person—repeat, no one, no matter how smart or how many degrees follow his name—could create from scratch a small, everyday pencil, let alone a car or an airplane.
This is a message that humbles the high and mighty. It pricks the inflated egos of those who think they know how to mind everybody else’s business. It explains in plain language why central planning is an exercise in arrogance and futility, or what Nobel laureate and Austrian economist F. A. Hayek aptly termed “the pretence of knowledge.” - Lawrence W. Reed
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
~ Carl Sagan..