RE: Is Steem a global common or a decentralised for-profit P2P?
I have to disagree that p2p is an alternative to capitalism, which I define as market activity. There is a lot to say about this but the thing that should stand out was that 'capitalist' was originally an insult, the latin root 'capit' means to grasp. The french had a more friendly word 'entrepreneur', which means 'to grasp between'.
So I would say that in fact the p2p revolution is in fact a more perfect expression of capitalism than any before. Capitalists rely on information gathered from movements in the marketplace, and p2p systems allow this feed to be less filtered by big media players and their controllers who want to push an agenda that benefits them.
It is a common misconception that capital has anything to do with authority. In fact, this has to do with a mis-spelling, the word Capitoline was the name of the hill in Rome where the government was based. Over the years it has been muddled up and that is why people are confused about it. Capital means a stock of surplus resources that you have accumulated for future investment into some kind of enterprise. Yet they call it 'capital punishment' when they kill you for a crime. But one is the government and one is your own decision to not spend your resources in order to enable you to do something productive in the future.
P2P is indeed not an alternative to capitalism. It's more a new kind of capitalism in which knowledge is not owned by a company but is freely available. I guess you could say that it is an alternative to neo-liberal capitalism.
Thanks for your comment!
Capitalism is technically anathema to 'intellectual property' anyway. It cannot exist without a monopoly to enforce its overreach into the physical property of those whose property bears an imprint of this IP. It is however still fraud to copy someone else's work verbatim and claim it as your own, but that is easy to prove especially with computers and search engines, indeed we see here on Steem that anti-plagiarisation bots post when you copy too much of other people's original work from anywhere spidered by Google.