Episode: 2445
Title: HPR2445: Information Underground: Backwards Capitalism
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2445/hpr2445.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:12:09

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This is HBR episode 2445 entitled Information Underground Markwoods Capitalism.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and is about 48 minutes long and can rim a clean flag.
The summer is clear to DeepGeek and Lost in Drunks talk about markets, innovation and opportunity.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hey everyone, this is Klatu and you're the scene to Hacker Public Radio, another exciting episode of Information Underground.
Today I've got with me as usual Lost in Drunks.
Hello everyone.
And DeepGeek.
Hello everyone.
Today I wanted to talk about what I'll just call upside down capitalism.
And this was a tough topic for me because I kept getting it sort of wrong.
I had something that I wanted to say and I wasn't quite sure what the angle was.
So first I'm going to open up with two assumptions, a postulates and then I'm going to give some observations.
So assumption one is that political systems or systems lifestyle systems are tangible instances
of the people living them out.
So in other words, if I say capitalism, I'm not talking about theoretical like how capitalism is supposed to work.
If I say communism, which I'm not going to say, but if I was saying that I wouldn't be talking about how communism was supposed to be
as written down by Marx and Ingalls, it's just like the actual way that they manifested themselves in the real world.
So that's assumption one.
Assumption two is that most of us sincerely believe we are each one of the good guys, right?
We were raised to conform to our society and many of us have a possibly subconscious belief that
God or the force of good or whatever you want to call it is with us.
Even when we recognize our society's faults, we still believe that we're generally doing the best we can
and other people have maybe even stronger beliefs, consciously believing that God actually takes
sides and that God is literally on their side.
And that by living their life in a certain way, they are literally carrying out the will of God.
So these are two assumptions that I'm making in this thing.
Okay, so my postulate, we think the capitalism is great because it's produced modern wonders, right?
We've got medical stuff, we've got great military stuff, we've got technology that we all
certainly on Hacker Public Radio love, but we ignore that we're where we are today after hundreds
of years of, say, imperialism and feudalism and theocracy and more imperialism, communist Russia,
after all, was the first one to reach outer space.
But we downplay that because the USA created an arbitrary milestone.
No, no, the goal was to get to the moon, first one to the moon wins, and so we get credit for that.
The end results don't justify the means or else we would have to be okay
with all the systems that came before us.
It's easily arguable that if American brand capitalism had popped up in ancient Rome,
it would not have produced the microchip, right?
So capitalism didn't do that, it was something else.
Now here's my observation, hopefully that'll bring all of this other stuff into perspective.
I think we have capitalism sort of reversed, mirror image, upside down, whatever.
Capitalism is constantly striving for a singularity.
The goal of any entrepreneur is to be the single best seller.
There can be only one and everyone wants to be that one.
In tech, we appear to have room for maybe three.
You know, you can look at the tech scene and you can kind of see the three big ones,
and they kind of change who the three big ones are from every 10 years or so.
And you can kind of, you could say that that's fine that there are a three and it's kind of like
this holy trinity thing, or you could say, well, there are three, but they're infighting to try
to be the best of the three, whatever. It doesn't matter.
Point is, the goal of capitalism is destruction of anything seen as competition,
because the goal is always to have the most money.
Capitalism wants 80% to your 20% or 90% to your 10, or the very minimum 51 to your 49.
Do we have existing examples of systems that do not strive for this,
and yet also succeed? Well, I've got a couple.
So first one that's freshest for me because it's the newest discovery is gaming culture.
So if we look at Wizards of the Coast, the publisher of Dungeons and Dragons,
which I've been talking about a lot on hacker public radio lately,
the owners of D&D, a company called TSR famously crumbled,
fell apart before being rescued by Wizards, which owns it now,
because essentially they were publishing too much content.
They were flooding their own market. The threat persists today, in fact,
and Wizards of the Coast publishes D&D content at such a rate
that a lot of players fear that the system is going to get bogged down.
And the company's response to this? Use what you want and ignore the stuff that you don't want.
In other words, they recognize that the power to formulate the one true version of their product
lies ultimately with the users. They don't limit their users.
So when I started playing tabletop RPGs,
I discovered that there are lots of tabletop RPGs,
not just Dungeons and Dragons, which I'd grown up with.
In fact, D&D, which adopted an open license in 2001,
has even been forked into something called Pathfinder.
And that's the sort of the D&D version,
or that is to D&D what, like, or the Mate desktop is to GNOME 3.
It's kind of the co-existing alternative.
I also discovered a fruitful D&D RPG scene online with hundreds of games,
created and published by players all over the world.
And that's not all. There's a homebrew scene, too,
with dungeon masters from all over the world publishing stories and worlds and environments
with modified rules for everyone to try.
So at some RPG conventions, I got to play a bunch of different systems
and kind of realized that these were hundreds of different games
that were actually different from one another.
They weren't just Dungeons and Dragons skinned with different heroes and monsters.
The games were tangibly different,
like the way that you rolled the die and when you rolled them
and what the die meant, that sort of thing.
Simply put, the tabletop RPG scene is a fractured mess
and it's incredibly liberating.
People come up with their own rules and they share the rules and they share their worlds.
They put them online, they distribute them.
Tabletop Gaming has the advantage that its reach is inherently microcosmic.
So what you play and how you play it matters to you and your friends that you play with.
There's no advantage, necessarily, in getting other people
to adopt your rules and ideas.
There's no need for a singularity.
Another example, obviously, for Hackerpull Radio listeners,
Linux distributions.
Linux operating system benefits from exactly the same kind of havoc.
Anyone can create a bootable Linux OS.
And as a result, there are literally hundreds of them.
I think it's a stupid way, personally, to customize an OS.
I don't actually like it.
A standardized set of scripts and packages,
I think would be a lot more sensible and a lot
purer to sort of the philosophy of Linux.
But nevertheless, it happens and people are happy with it.
Why?
Because even though the entire internet exists and there are millions of people
using and wanting to use Linux,
the only Linux that matters to you, personally,
is the one that you actually use.
Yet another example, open culture, creative culture, creative commons.
There are plenty of communities online.
I'm pretty heavily involved, I guess, with OpenClipArt.org and FreeSound.org.
People publish snippets of art, whether it's drawings or music,
depending on which site you're talking about,
or they change someone else's art and re-upload it as a remix.
And it's this big pool of assets and resources.
So that if you as an artist sat down one day to cite where your work had appeared,
it would basically be impossible to do.
It would be a mess.
But you could definitely have confidence that your work has been used.
So open technology, culture and gaming,
disproves the adage for me.
That financial competition is the sole motivator for excellence.
It disproves the older adage
that obligation to a divinity or an emperor or a God emperor
is the only motivator.
I don't think we as humans know yet what the motivator is,
but I do think that we are seeing now such an abundance of collaboration
leading to unexpected innovation and friendly competition.
That eventually we might just recognize that, at best,
we got capitalism wrong.
The key isn't to destroy all of the competition,
but to foster it.
What do you guys think?
The talk of collaboration makes me think of Hatsune Miku
if you heard about this characterization.
No.
This is a Japanese aduror or an animated singer.
And it was started by a company that made this artificial voice
that could sing in many octaves.
And to actually push a point, they made it,
it's a computer-generated voice.
They actually made it such a way that a human trying to do those notes
and those octaves would actually wear out their voice
before they could finish anything meaningful.
They wanted to make it superhuman.
And to market it, they created an anime characterization
called Hatsune Miku.
And this female animated character
became a subject of international collaboration
where people would send snippets and do fan art of her
and then they would animate her singing with this voice.
And the collaboration level is just amazing
and became well-known enough for her likeness being licensed
by Google for their online collaboration efforts.
Interesting.
No, I've never heard of that.
Yeah, Google at some time.
Actually, I didn't recognize the name,
but I recognized the story as you were going on.
And she, we'll use that term,
she is not the only figure like that anymore.
There's actually kind of a thriving fan base for that,
mostly in Japan.
But a lot of anime fans have grown to,
you know, their favorite singer is a singer
that doesn't actually exist at all.
You know, they're quite a few of them like that.
However,
however,
back at the point.
These, yeah, well, no, you know, close to the point, actually,
is that while there are fans who are creating their own versions
of things like this,
we're actually, we're not talking about a person.
Obviously, we're talking about an algorithm,
we're talking about a program
and that's wholly owned by a company
as their intellectual property.
And it's exploited that way.
I'm not sure that the future,
let me, let me jump back.
Let me jump back.
I wrote a couple of points that I wanted to mention
based on Kletto's presentation.
Regarding gaming,
the RPG tabletop market is limited.
And I think they found that out the first time
when TSR imploded.
There was also, as I recall,
at the time, there was also a fair amount
of mismanagement at that time.
There was a lot of upper management wars,
Gary Geigax was kind of despised
by a lot of people around him from what I heard.
There were other cultural influences on it,
but the market was very limited
and they hit that limit hard.
As Kletto pointed out, they did flood the market.
It was everywhere for quite a while.
I remember Barnes and Noble
when they first started bringing in RPG materials,
they dedicated a huge amount of shelf space
for RPG content and almost all of it was the indeed stuff.
It was really saturated.
And that caused part of their market to collapse
and then the company collapsed.
They overextended themselves.
It's pretty classic, I guess.
However, I believe it still is.
I believe that there is only ever going
to be a certain level of popularity
for tabletop gaming.
Whereas certain markets,
they balloon and they become much bigger.
So that's why video gaming is much bigger
than tabletop gaming.
Even though tabletop gaming became mature
much sooner than video gaming did.
I remember at the tail end of my D&D experience
back in the day, I began looking at things.
And the only place I could find to migrate to at the time,
and this was the 80s was the very, very tiny war gaming
or strategic gaming things.
Like Napoleon and Waterloo, stuff like that.
It was played on weird boards with geometric shapes
trying to plot out invasions and stuff.
Rob playing games specifically D&D,
which was the first one, came from war games.
It was an expansion of various war games
that had come before him.
And Guy Gex and a couple other people
published a game called Chainmail
that came just before D&D.
And Chainmail, if you read the rules for Chainmail
and I have, I actually have or had a copy of it nearby.
If you read the rules for Chainmail,
you can see the antecedents of role playing games.
That doesn't it actually even depend
that you had a copy of like some other game
in order to even play Chainmails?
That I think I read that somewhere.
Well, at least the version I had,
there was an appendix that allowed you to expand
into role playing if you wanted to.
It would have been limited by what we would consider
modern role playing games today,
that the rules.
Anyway, there were virtually no rules.
But there were ideas floated in this appendix
about how you could take it in that direction.
And then actual Dungeons and Dragons came about
like just a couple of years later,
like one or two years later, D&D first appeared.
But when it comes to the capitalist element of gaming,
I think that when you have a market that's very limited
but that's very passionate,
you're going to see a tremendous amount of innovation
surrounding that because it's going to be,
even if it's flooded by a particular flavor
or a particular manufacturer,
and it could be anything, it could be snowboarding,
it could be gardening,
whatever the market happens to be,
when you have a limited market,
even if you're flooding it with a particular flavor
that could serve that market.
So in this case, D&D,
you're going to have a tremendous amount of innovation
because an intrinsic part of D&D is creativity.
Not just for the gaming part, but for creating games.
And therefore, people aren't necessarily going to be happy
with that single flavor that they're getting.
So I believe there's always going to be a great deal
of non-commercial experimentation's the wrong word,
non-commercial exploitation of that market
centering around its users.
However, when you start getting bigger and bigger,
you still see an awful lot of that,
but you see it's a much smaller percentage
of the user base, right?
So when you start getting into video gaming,
there is a great deal of non-commercial innovation
structured around video gaming,
an awful lot of it, in fact,
and there's an awful lot of the sharing,
the type of sharing that Klettu talked about.
However, it is a much, much smaller percentage
of the overall market than it would be,
say, in tabletop gaming.
My son, I call him Little Bronx,
my son, Little Bronx, is an active part.
There's a program put out by MIT called Scratch,
and they have, oh yeah.
Yeah, you know about Scratch, okay?
Yeah, my partner teaches it all the time.
Okay, so MIT, they used to be able to,
the earlier version you could download
and it was a desktop tool that you could work with,
but now the modern version, the latest version,
is hosted by MIT.
It's on their servers.
And if you go there, that is such a rich source
of innovation and collaboration.
The type of thing that Klettu was talking about
regarding the clip art and, you know,
people just borrowing content
and constantly swapping content.
And yes, some of it is probably copyrighted
and some of it isn't.
And you could never, you could never sue anybody.
You could never even find where your content went
necessarily.
I mean, it's actually a little easier in Scratch
because a lot of times they have a thread
you can follow as to where your content,
you know, if someone remixed what you did
and came up with their own program, their own game.
But even so, it's nearly impossible
to find out where all the assets came from
and something like that.
And that's very, very rich.
And that's, I mean, it's really, really expansive
and really big, but compared to the overall
video game market, it's like it doesn't exist.
It's like, do on a blade of grass compared to the ocean.
It's so small.
In other words, it's not commercially viable, right?
That's, I guess, my point I'm getting to.
And I can draw parallels to the early hip hop movement
where voice sampling and music sampling
was very, very common.
And I think we probably, the three of us are old enough
to remember when that became a legal issue in the 90s.
And the major labels were suing hip hop artists
because they were sampling their music
without their permission.
You know, just like a tiny piece of this thing,
but they wanted a cut.
And why?
Because that market was big.
Hip hop was growing.
There was millions and millions and millions of dollars
in there, and that's why they wanted a piece of that.
That was a huge market.
There was a massive, massive market.
And yes, there's tons of innovation.
Tons of people doing hip hop, doing their own little thing,
or their own little thing.
But it's a drop in the bucket compared
to the larger audience that's using it.
I mean, hip hop spilled out of the urban environment
out of the largely African-American environment
that was spawned into common culture.
Now, hip hop is American.
It's American music now.
It's just part of the American music scene.
The actual innovators who are mixing and sharing
in that type of music, it's a tiny, tiny portion
of the larger music market.
I think my point here is that I don't necessarily
see capitalism as being irrelevant to all these things.
I think that the markets are best served.
If it's a smaller market, it's best served
by a non-commercial, a non-capitalist sort of structure.
But as you get larger and larger and larger,
I think that becomes a much, much smaller segment
of those markets.
What I would like to apply these ideas to is telecommunications
and monopoly pricing versus unmonopoly competition.
Because when telephone system was being developed,
it was an actual explicit monopoly.
And they would invest in the network
and that entiled them to a mock-up and a certain profit.
They were the sole provider for a geographical location.
And so it turned out that the system enabled
a great deal of investment in infrastructure.
Now that we have multiple telcos and areas,
there's a rush to deplete infrastructure
and not reinvest in it to increase profitability
because profitability is no longer guaranteed.
And I'm wondering about these ideas of capitalism,
how they apply to whether or not the underlying investment
is increasing or decreasing.
Well, the underlying investment in what?
I'm not sure if I follow the question.
Well, in one case, the underlying investment
and infrastructure itself was a minimum infrastructure
investment and does leaving a competition scenario
mean that you have to limit your investment.
On the other hand, all major companies
have some sort of research and development going on
trying to find the next thing.
I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
So if we were to take that question
and apply it, say to tabletop role-playing games,
do you feel that it would be possible for, say,
wizards of the coast or some sort of coalition among publishers
tabletop gaming publishers to expand that market
more than they have and that they're artificially limiting it
to maintain profitability?
I don't know if they're artificially limiting it.
I don't know that they have geared up
as much as other industries probably have
in terms of spreading it around.
I have no, I don't underestimate modern marketing.
And you know, I mean, honestly, if we were doing this show
maybe 10 years ago, maybe a little bit longer,
would we have said that video gaming was going to become
like everyone plays them?
Like it's obvious.
Like I don't know that we would have.
I think we would have said the same thing about video gaming
that we're saying now about RPG.
Well, I mean, I'm not going to try to prognosticate.
I mean, I certainly have no idea
what the future is going to bring in the entertainment industry.
And video gaming is the single biggest point
of the entertainment industry today.
It's bigger than film.
It's bigger than anything that's ever come before.
And tabletop role-playing games while they are part
of the progenitors of that entire industry,
that industry also arose in parallel,
as I think we all, you know,
because it arose from computing and everything else, right?
So it rose temporally.
It arose at about the same time, home computing, I mean,
and elements of tabletop gaming were applied to video games,
thumb video games anyway.
And it helped boost the idea of these large MMORPGs.
And many of what they would call a AAA game today,
you can see the parallels that were pulled
from tabletop gaming.
So tabletop gaming has informed that massive industry,
yet it still remains a tiny,
I mean, the market for it is probably,
I don't even know if it's expanded much since the,
you know, the last time I was playing it back
in the early 90s.
It's definitely bigger than when I first started,
but of all the people gaming,
I don't think that that percentage has grown
very much at all since that time period.
So to me, that means that market is very small
and probably always will be.
I don't know if Wizards of the Coast
or anybody else could expand that market.
It may be saturated as it is.
So I don't know.
I mean, do you think that their philosophy
that they could just shotgun this market
and it doesn't really matter?
Is it because that printing costs
or production costs and distribution costs
have dropped almost nothing due to the internet?
Or because I mean, when you have to stock gaming chops
with physical copies of things,
now you're talking dollars and cents.
Do you think that's had an impact?
I guess I'm my point is,
I don't think it's ever gonna get much bigger than it is.
It's always gonna be around.
So I was gonna be people loving it,
but is it gonna ever expand and become something bigger?
Yeah, I mean, maybe not.
Maybe this also sort of unexpectedly ties
into what I was saying in my last info underground episode
where I was saying that I think it was,
you know, the state of independent art was that,
or the way that independent art can combat
sort of being taken over by the machine
is to actually, yeah, remain happily, I guess, small
and not worry about becoming the only answer
to this outlet, you know, sort of like,
we don't need to seek to conquer everything else.
And I know that there's a drive to do that
because you do have to stay economically viable
or whatever, so you do have to get big enough
and powerful enough to earn that person's dollar,
like when they're standing in the bookstore
or whatever, and they have 20 bucks
and they're gonna spend it on either your product
or that other person's product.
But I think in smaller markets,
I think that the competition is less brutal.
And I mean, even like Deepi was saying
about the telcos and stuff like that,
like back in the day, like again, I guess the 90s,
I guess we all love the late 90s now.
I remember, you know, there were local ISPs
and you went to your local ISP
and got a little chunk of the internet
and that was how it was.
And there were lots of ISPs.
There were lots of ISPs in my town.
It wasn't even like every town had its own.
Every town had several.
So I think this is healthy is what I'm saying.
And I like the disparity and the dispersal
of these resources.
And I think that it works better
than what we tend to gravitate towards,
which is, nah, there's gonna be one.
There's gonna be, you're gonna get Comcast
or you're gonna get nothing, you know?
Or if Wizards the Coast said,
okay, we're going to battle now and from now on,
you're gonna get Wizards the Coast RPG and nothing else.
And if you get anything else, then, then, you know, whatever.
So yeah, I think it's good to share, I guess.
Ultimately, when there's a lot of money,
that's when you start getting people
who either want a piece of it or want to control it.
In other words, when a market grows,
that's when you start having commercial
and capitalistic tendencies that,
I think the gist of this conversation anyway
is that those things are negative on that market.
Oh, yeah.
Those influences are negative.
How do you feel there's a way to combat that
while still growing in size?
In other words, say you wanted tabletop gaming to grow,
right, you wanted it to get bigger.
How do you expand that without it becoming
something unrecognizable?
I think that's the way that I would love for things
to grow is to grow outward rather than upward into a pinnacle.
And I don't think that when something grows into a pinnacle
of this is the answer, it actually answers
a lot of people's problems or desires.
So I think that if something's going to get big,
then it does serve the user base or whatever
the customer base to expand and kind of grow out
and become fractured and fragmented.
And we usually say these things is a bad thing.
We say that a fractured market is unclear and difficult
to navigate.
But I actually think it's a huge benefit.
I think it's a positive thing to be as fractured
as you possibly can, because that means
that everyone is getting their needs served
and they're feeding into this thing,
but it's not necessarily one thing that's being fed into.
Now, unfortunately, I'm not a business major
and I don't know what that would mean
for the individual publishers.
And maybe that would be a problem.
Maybe it means that they're economically not viable.
But then I see that as a problem of capitalism.
I don't see that as my problem.
I think that's their problem.
I think that if we can't figure out how to deliver things,
entertainment, that is custom made tailored
for each individual, then that's a problem.
We need to make that something that is economically viable,
even if it means resorting to socialism.
Bum, bum, bum, or communism.
The problem I have with the current situation in America
is the health care situation, right?
Yeah, OK.
And right now, America, the only industrialized country
that does not have a national health care system.
Yeah, I mean, sure, you can get any service you want
if you have the cash, if you're a member of the elite.
This is not a good distribution system.
Agreed.
OK.
And I don't think socialism, you say,
what's the alternative to capitalism?
Well, the alternative to capitalism
is some form of collectivism of socialism.
Well, there is a bunch of different kinds of socialism.
Some are just taxation schemes to fund systems
that we think should be basic.
Some of them involve central planning.
Some people hate central planning.
Some people think something should be centrally planned.
So I have a problem with people who say that capitalism
is the answer, because I see myself
as being deprived by capitalism of something
I could very well might need to save my life one day.
Well said, sir.
On the same note, if there are many kinds of socialism,
are there many kinds of capitalism?
I mean, I think there might be.
Yeah, I don't know.
I actually don't know me neither,
because I don't know that do we have a reference for that?
The system we have in America is not pure capitalism.
It's really what you would call crony capitalism
or aligarchy.
It's actually a fixed number of people
who essentially have ownership control,
although we don't really say that, but that's the case.
And there's people competing to get into that club,
and there's other people who are getting born into that club.
And then the laws are written in a way
where a doctor's son doesn't really think about,
doesn't really have to think about these things,
because the environment has been engineered
so that he stays in the same level his father was.
So that's certainly not what I ran meant
when she wrote about capitalism
in the fountain head and that was shrugged.
That was a pure driven merit-based thing
and sure they love to use the word meritocracy,
but that's not what you have
when you have dynasty families in the country,
like the bushes, these really connected families.
The air is the doors of the American Revolution,
the air is of this and the air is of that
that are just unbeatable because of where they're started.
That's not a pure competitive system by any chance.
Yeah, and that's after I said,
I don't know if there are other forms of capitalism,
I realized that I don't live in the US
and actually I live in a capitalistic society here in New Zealand
and it's very different than the US.
I think by US standards,
you would probably call New Zealand a socialist country
and I think that would shock people
who are native to New Zealand
because they would just be like,
well, we don't have socialism
or maybe they would be okay with that term
and that's why I made those assumptions at the beginning
because I didn't want to get into like,
well, what socialism and how do we mean socialism?
You know, it's whatever.
Point being that it doesn't have to be as cutthroat
and I am witnessing that a little bit in New Zealand.
I'll admit.
Yet people from all over the world
in different quote unquote capitalist societies,
many of them are beating down the door to come here
in order to pursue ideas or innovations that they have
that they find their own markets, their own countries,
their own societies are very, very difficult places
to get innovative ideas going.
You hear it all the time,
people from different parts of Europe
want to come here because you could work your butt off
all of your life and never get the opportunity
to rise, quote unquote rise, okay?
Doing a lot of quoting here, air quotes.
And many people come here because the perception
is that you can make it here
and I think possibly doing a riff on what Deep Geek
was saying that there is a club
and there's competition to get into the club
and I think the thing about America
is that it is possible to get into this club
if you're ambitious enough, if you're smart enough
and in a way, if you're ruthless enough,
you can muscle your way into this crowd,
whereas in other societies it is literally impossible
to do that.
I mean, if you could work your butt off in many countries
no matter how hard you worked,
you were never going to make it the way you could here.
Now is that necessarily a reflection
of how things are going right
or going wrong in America?
I'm not, I don't know.
I can't make a judgment value
and that because I'm not one of those people.
But it's something I've heard before.
I think that's a really, that's a good point
and I'm sure in some countries,
yeah, you cannot make yourself,
you can't get yourself into the club.
I do think that one unique thing that America has
that I think we underestimate a lot of times
and I didn't see it till I moved to New Zealand
but is it size?
It is a very, very large country
with a centralized government
and so there's a demand for practically everything.
If you think about it in America
there's probably a demand for it
and I mean, there's certainly demand around the world
for a lot of stuff too
but there's not the unification there.
There's all kind of artificial borders
that we've put up to make sure that people can't
sort of share a bunch of stuff across national borders.
So I think, I don't know that we know yet
how to account for the size of America
and how what that does to affect going to America
and saying, hey, I've got this great idea
who wants to fund me
because there's just so many people in America
and you're bound to find some group of people
who want the thing that you are going to develop
and I don't know that you get that anywhere else in the world.
Well, isn't that what something like the European Union,
the EU was designed to kind of compensate for.
You had all these states
and collectively the EU is actually not so small anymore.
You know, it's actually pretty big.
I don't know how successful they are
in allowing this sort of innovation to flourish over there
but I've heard personally, I have met people from Europe,
from Greece, from Italy, from Spain
and Portugal and countries like this
that have said over and over that
you try to get your business off the ground
you try to get things going
and you'll get a lot of people that say
that's a great idea
and then you'll get nothing out of them.
You'll get nothing because there's just this
either the market isn't big enough
and you don't get enough people who share your vision
or there's this general perception
that nothing's ever going to change
and there are a fair amount of people
that come here thinking that in my country
nothing ever changes.
You work hard and yet nothing ever changes
whereas over here if you work hard
you can make a difference.
You can make change in your life.
I think the size of the country is big
because that directly relates to the size of your market.
You can come over here and if you have a great idea
say a computing idea.
You have an idea for some sort of maybe a device
because if it was purely digital
you couldn't do that from anywhere in the world
but if it was say a device that required
a manufacturing base
it required designers to design something
and then probably it would be built in China
or some other industrialized country
where it was cheaper to get labor literally
but you try to find someone who is going to bankroll
your concept in some other country
there are many people that come here
because they can't find that sort of support where they are
and they'll come here because they can find that support
they'll find investors
they'll find these venture capitalists
who are looking to get a piece of that
because they're always looking for the next thing
that sort of thing exists here
and I think it might be yeah
it might be the size of our country
and in other words the size of the market
going back to what I was saying about tabletop gaming
the size of the market allows for innovation
but the actual innovators
that's a very small amount
and free innovation
free sharing of ideas and of assets
I think that becomes a much smaller part of the larger markets
that's only my opinion
yeah but you know what there's the flip side of that maybe
is how we have in America
all of the I mean heck in America
you can make a startup with an idea
for something that already exists
you know you got Uber reinventing a taxi cab
you know like that wasn't a startup
that needed to happen
but it's huge now
you've got Airbnb moving apparently
from what I've read I don't know if it's a joke or not
but they're apparently moving into
rentable rooms that you can go to
it's a hotel
but they put their name on it
Airbnb and now it's being funded
you know I mean you've got things
there's such a market in America
that we are funding things that don't need to be invented
because they already exist
well you could look at something like say Uber
and you know many people see Uber
as having completely shaken up
the transportation industry
and all this other nonsense
and you're right it is just a taxi
but it made taxing much more convenient
for a lot of people
they didn't have to actually go out in the street
and try to flag these
you know in a lot of ways
it was an industry that was really ripe for shakeup
because they had to come
it was really really ripe
so I wouldn't say that there was no need
for something like it
now you could argue that Uber has made
a whole bunch of missteps on their own
and they're already becoming ripe to be upset themselves
but when I lived in New York
if you want to catch a cab up town
it had gotten to the point in the 90s
where that was a crack shoot
you didn't know if you could even get a taxi
a lot of times you know
depending on where you were in the city
you didn't know you know
I might have to walk three four five blocks
before I can get anyone to even stop for me
and if you were a person of color
forget it
you know the idea of taking taxis was a lot of times
you just never even considered it
because they're never going to stop for you
you know
I had a friend in New York in the 90s
he was from India
and he had a dark complexion
and he said I will stand on that street corner
for 15, 20 minutes trying to flag down a cab
and none of them will stop for me
and they're all being driven by people from my own country
my own people won't stop for me
because of the complexion of my skin
that was an industry that was ripe for upsetting
because it was destroying itself
and you know so I wouldn't say that
there was no need for that
I think there was a very very big need for that
I don't think an industry can be upset
unless there's something inherently wrong for it
there's a need that isn't being filled
you know going back to game
I'm sorry I keep jumping back to gaming
but I do have some personal knowledge
of the gaming industry from the early days
the market was small back then
and I think the market is small now
I don't think it's ripe for upsetting
that particular market because it's
I don't think it's ever going to be big
I think I can draw a parallel
with these smaller markets
maybe overseas a country where the market is very small
and it's very hard to get anything done
to something like tabletop gaming
where you could try to come up with a whole new company
that's going to take on wizards of the coast
and I think you would have a very tough time
trying to do that because the market just isn't there
so I think capitalism
I don't know what am I drawing a parallel to
I'm not sure
deep geek do you see any relation to the type of capitalism
that might exist going into something like crony capitalism
where things are really really can be the the amount of abuse
that can occur in a system like that
do you think it's market dependent
the size of a market or not?
I think market size or even geographical size
not talking about you know the dollar size amount
is vital to the ability to have again
enough of a critical mass to create innovation
and the reason I say that is because
I remember noticing that at a certain point
in warfare
naval powers emerged as a dominant factor
and they were all of a certain size
there was a colonies
was the British Empire
and there was Japan
and they had a certain population size
and so they could
well it thinks necessary to become a naval power
and every time you say that
I think of this I think of having to need a certain size
not necessarily a size in the market
but just having a size in the country
and in the geographical location
to have enough critical mass
to have enough resources to pull something off
the only country I can think of that's really really tiny
and is an innovator is Cuba
and the industry to fight cancer
that is the only exception I see to that
I'm wondering is it possible again
going back to the original point
is it possible to have a truly open environment
with a free sharing of ideas
something that is possibly highly fractured
a market essentially
that is highly highly highly fractured
and is of a very large size
do you think that those things are impossible?
Because in my opinion
if you have a large market
a large user base
even if it is highly highly diversified
if someone can see that there is a lot of money there
that person will bend their intellectual powers
their talents
and their charisma
towards harnessing that marketplace in some fashion
and I believe that's how you get things like Facebook
and the Googles and all of these essential monopolies
on a particular thing that should
conversation
there shouldn't be any single way that you could harness conversation
and yet the telecoms before them
and then things like Facebook have been able to do that
so that the conversations of billions
billions of people can now be harnessed
and I don't think that there's any way
that something of size
can remain truly free and open
because there's going to be money there
there's always going to be money in there
and if there's enough
you're going to have people that are going to figure out
how to make money out of it
in a capitalist society as was described
that means control
that means holding on to it
well what I think of over this is
I think of the marketplace for media
I mean it is fractured or has dominant players
as it's so-called mainstream players
it's big producers
big slip commercial producers
but there's still always room for an independent
that wasn't always the case though
I mean the independence
were really adjuncts to the major players
until the internet came about
and I would argue that media is still
in its overturning phase
I don't think we're quite sure
how that's going to play out just yet
yeah agreed
but you go back before the internet
and you had major major dominant players
in the entertainment industry
and a bunch of tiny small independence
who were all trying to get a piece of that pie
they all wanted to be picked up by a major distributor
they all wanted to make money out of it
very few of the independence back in the old days
very few if any
were really what I would consider freely open and sharing
the way we understand open culture right now
you know
there were innovators but those were artists
and they were specifically attempting
to do something completely different
but I wouldn't call that open and freely sharing
what about samu's dot
I don't know what that is
well it actually has its birth in Russia
but it's been replicated in ways
in the times of print media
where you had major newspaper companies
and major book publishers
there was actually a scene of self-made Xerox newsletters
in eastern Europe called samu's dot
and this was taken over and adopted
and became the zine culture
of the 70s 80s and 90s in America
and when I say independent
that's what I'm thinking of
is something of that size
and oddly enough it relates to
and podcasting
whereas Hacker Public Radio
is a bunch of
individual independent creators
nothing like
say BBC's podcast outreach
well I agree with that
I was part of the zine culture
of the early 80s myself
I had a couple of zines that I put out back then
by god I want some
so to why I don't think I have any of them anyway
you know I'm terrible
I never hold on to this stuff
I get rid of it all
but I had one that as I said before
I'm from a town called Waterbury, Connecticut
and Waterbury is also
its nickname is the brass city
because it was a heavy industry city
and its major industry was metalwork
and specifically brass
it was known for its brass work
so it became known as the brass city
I did a zine called city of brass
that I put out when I lived there back then
and then I did another one
when I lived in New York in the 90s
so I'm familiar with the zine culture as well
and it was pretty lively
and there was an awful lot of
sharing of culture and freedom
but one major element of the zine culture
is the fact that many of these were dedicated
to a very particular activity
or a particular scene
very often like there were a lot of music zines
and a lot of them were dedicated to a particular music scene
in other words they were serving very very small markets
and I think my point still
at least in my mind my point still holds
that the smaller the market the easier it is to share
information freely but the larger it becomes
the more money is inevitably involved
and the more likely you're going to see predation
or at least control of that market
I mean I don't understand capitalism
or socialism hardly at all
so I'm just talking off the top of my head
but flat two do you feel that a large market
some you'll like say video gaming
do you think video gaming could realistically become as vibrant
for home brewers as tabletop role-playing gaming?
Yeah probably not
and stay economically viable
of the way that we do things now
because I mean obviously we already have a vibrant
indie video game scene I mean if you go to itch.io
you can find all kinds of cool little indie games
and and it's there it exists
and it probably has for a long time
but that's not what you mean right I mean you're talking about like
could there be lots of big games that take lots of resources to make
and you have actors and motion capture
and all this other stuff original music
you know with full orchestras
well again by its very nature tabletop gaming
you can get the same experience or a better experience
rolling the entire thing yourself
then or as you would if you bought a complete package
printed package from a major tabletop gaming publisher
in other words indie production of that content
of that material is inherently rolled into that experience
and yet the market is very small
if it got bigger and bigger and bigger do you think that
level of innovation
and free sharing of ideas do you believe that that would stay as an important
and baked in aspect of role-playing games or do you feel that most people
do not want to do that
most I just want to be entertained
okay yeah I mean maybe I don't know
I like to think that yes it could it could it could it could remain
but I could be living in a bubble of lots of little indie projects
that have vibrant communities built up around them
yeah that might be my bias
and I feel like in the long run or at the end of this episode as we are
I guess I feel like we've come back around to the last couple of episodes
that we've done where we've been talking about the state of art
and how to fund art and all this other stuff
because I feel like that's where we've come back to
but I don't know that it was my point all along to solve that problem
I think the the idea that I want to to communicate to
to people is that maybe we need to re-look at how we're distributing
the financing and even just the markets of lots of different industries
and I love the idea that DeepGeek brought up about the health industry
you know being just completely wrong-ended
it's ostensibly there to serve everyone and yet it serves just
such a small amount of people and and most people seem to be okay with that
in America anyway and it's done completely differently in other places
so I kind of do get the notion that there's a way to do this capitalism thing
in a different way than say America is doing
I don't believe that any of us are economists
enough to really detail how that would work but I think if we look around
there might be other ways to manage this and still have
some level of innovation and progress
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