A Writer's Worries

      Theft. When someone takes something from you that you worked hard for. That’s the thing that society says that I should be concerned about, that and the possibility that a new idea that I’ve been working hard to make will be published by someone else before I get a chance, meaning that they get all the credit, and I go down in history as a copycat. Society doesn’t want a writer to write for the joy they get from writing a good story with fun characters, they want you to make money from your work, to write something that someone else could, perhaps, turn into something that will make someone else millions. That’s not what I want though. 

     I’m a writer. Unless you’re an absolute novice with no meaningful skills, writers don’t worry about theft all that much, because there are a functionally infinite number of ways to arrange words on a piece of paper. Writers share ideas, plotlines, worlds, everything they can. If they didn’t, Tv Tropes wouldn’t exist. I write constantly, what ends up on the blog is only a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of my output, and my dream is to write a novel. Well, eventually I want to write a novel series. But I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not anywhere near good enough to do any book that I’d want to write justice. I can barely keep up the discipline necessary to write enough poetry to keep the blog going. 

   Recently, however, I’ve been seeing more and more people advertising AI services to do what writers have done for millennia. I know, it’s common to see artists complaining about art theft, copywrite, whatnot, but the truth of the matter is, I don’t think I should have to worry about someone, or something, stealing my ideas. Because the only reason I’m even remotely concerned about this is that I live in a world that expects you to make money, and views art through the lens of monetization before it sees it’s worth to the culture that made it. I can’t help but think that if we lived in a world where we didn’t need money in order to be granted the right to live by our overlords, things would be so much better. Not just because we would no longer be at risk for starvation. 

    I write about the Infinite last week, and the reason I did that is because everywhere I look these days, I see a world that’s in trouble. Whether you value imagination or not, you can’t deny it’s massive impact on our world and the lives of those within it, and one thing I’ve always thought is that most of our brain power goes towards picturing the world that other people want us to see. Increasingly, I hear people saying some variant of the phrase, “I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to see anymore,” or, “I can see what I’m supposed to want, but if this is where I’m supposed to live now, then I want nothing to do with it.” That isn’t a good thing. Whether you believe in the Infinite or not, we all know that society only exists as long as people believe in it, and right now most people don’t believe in the world we live in, and worse, they don’t have the tools they need to make a world they can believe in instead. When they try, what they end up with is something that would make their lives and the lives of everybody else worse. 

     People need to be allowed to create more things in order for us to have a future. Right now, because of our world, be it capitalism or the will of those who want power to remain theirs and theirs alone, the right to create the world of our dreams has been stolen from us. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take it back. If you at all think you can, I implore you to do so. Maybe you don’t have the answer, but one thing I know is that humans are, for the most part, not all stupid in the same way. If we argue, debate, and fight long enough, we’ll eventually figure out the answer. But we have to be willing to fight for it first.