Cultural Desert for America

I know this is an imminent event with the way we are headed as the attitude "information wants to be free" cultivates our mainstream culture. The fact that the movement works to ingrain this idealism into our society as a whole, and even globally, justifying theft of creative works by authors and artists should alarm us all. In nations that agree to make a pact with each other to protect copyrights of existing original works, there seems to be a lack of active enforcement.

Now, why is that? Just why is it that the rights of writers and artists alike put at such a low priority?

Before anyone puts an answer to these questions, please consider the Pythagorean angle on how this petulant movement came about, where it all began: the internet. The digital age of technology gives us a sense of falsehood in terms of knowledge with free information shared across the globe. The fact that "fair use" has been hijacked by so-called neo-corporate gurus famed for their single-million dollar success stories indicates white-collar crimes pay. And it pays well. At a time when our country runs the risk of open civil war, you bet it pays, because that means our rights are being ignored. Laws are broken. Our own civil liberties are violated with theft and damage to property, of which are not limited to the physical world, but includes the digital extension as well.

Why Is It So Goddamned Hard to Make a Living as a Writer Today? Doug Pearson (The Writing Life via The Authors Guild) asked the question what a writer like me has been wondering.

Pearson's article discusses the dangerous roving trend of free content on the internet in the wake of technology blooming for globalization. The attitude of self-proclaimed entitlement to other people's property has seeped into our society as a whole. It extends to intellectual property on a massive scale when giant corporates like Google and Amazon usurp a loop hole, claiming "fair use" to the works of writers and authors for so-called "educational purposes" in the crusade that "information wants to be free". Seriously, that is what's costing the income of writers. When 90%-98% of your work is available to the users of Google just for the taking, makes you wonder just where is the desire to fund your book writing where credit is due? This in effect drives writers into other industries and discontinue new writing. No new books to be published, because the literary industry reneges from supporting writers. Not that traditions are being broken, but the faith of literary income no longer promises security for writers.

I feel these companies do it with the backing of government turning the other way due to kick-back favors in using their inside technology that monitors everything we do over the internet. In other words, spying via internet which includes but not limited to phone conversations, chatting, texting, location, internet search usage, sharing pictures or whatever else content electronically----everything and anything that is related to the internet is up in the cloud storage server ready for the picking even though that may be illegal to retrieve. Yes, I know I sound like a nut case for writing this, but the price of free content must come from a tab somewhere. Who pays for it and why? Advertisements? If that is true, then why has Google pushed for their Adsense so much? How often do people buy on impulse anymore when the economy was on its way to slump into depression?

While people are protesting or demonstrating in the streets demanding "justice" at college campuses propagating targeted censorship of free speech, the cultural revolution has already begun under our noses. Just think of how Google's search engine limits our freedom to the content we want. Can you imagine the enormity in that ability?

If nothing is done to reverse the effects of these things, we are headed to the brink of a cultural desert. There will be fewer books to be written. We will be set back a generation or two, maybe three reading old material floating around the vast internet that egregiously shares copyrighted works currently.