The value of things increase as they are shared

[aethernaut@mastodon.art]

The value of things increase as they are shared.
A lawnmower sitting idle in your garage is worthless. If neighbors use it while you’re not, it has greater utility.
A story that stays locked down under IP ownership is fine, but it others are allowed to retell and expand and embellish, it becomes much greater.
And obviously when it comes to science, technology, and academia, shared knowledge leads to more and greater discoveries.

[eishiya@mastodon.art]

@aethernaut Worth keeping in mind that sharing requires responsibility from all parties as well.

Using a lawnmower without repairing damage the user causes or without refueling reduces its utility to others.

Divergent retellings can direct unwanted and unwarranted attention to the source's author. Correct attribution helps avoid unnecessary drama.

Junk science can set whole fields back for decades. Honesty, scepticism, and diligence are important.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@eishiya

can I *please* boost this 8-D

@aethernaut

[eishiya@mastodon.art]

@oblomov Seems you already did xP

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@eishiya oh ffs, I thought I had boosted the upthread 8-P, unboosted

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@aethernaut

I would put it in terms of “fruition” rather than share. This is more clear with stuff like e.g. your daily shoes or anything else that is unlikely to have significant “downtimes” outside of maintenance periods. This also fits with what @eishiya mentioned, since e.g. if sharing leads to reduced total lifetime for the object due to poor maintenance, the usefulness may actually decrease instead of increase simply because better maintained it would have seen more use.

1/n

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@aethernaut for art, I wrote a seed of related thoughts when I wrote about Continuous Content Generation and LLMs in <https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/continuous-content-generation/>:

> The irony here is that what makes art truly valuable isn't restriction on consumption (making it inaccessible); in fact, it could be argued (but I don't want to get into a philosophical discussion about what makes art art) that art achieves its peak value when it reaches the widest audience.

This also fits with what @eishiya wrote:

2/n

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@aethernaut @eishiya

Retellings, spinoffs, parodies etc increase the value of the original only insofar the original is properly cited, otherwise it's just sparkly plagiarism and that *detract* values from the original, even if the plagium ends up being more successful than the original (in which case it's arguably “stolen value”, if you will).

3/3