> It's why I can't stand the 'information wants to be free' argument. Where the hell do you think that intellectual labor required comes from, the aether?
Assuming your goal is to understand - yes, that thinking is a product of time when people were altruistically publishing very high quality content on the web. The time before adspam, blogspam, llmspam, etc. You could punch queries into search engines and find no-nonsense sites with detailed information, not trying to sell you anything but rather just wanting to be the most complete resource about a certain topic.
I'm not saying that ethos works for million dollar movie production. But on the other hand the ethos of people needing to be paid evidently doesn't work for high quality informational content, given that it has all but disappeared in the torrent of commercialized/intermediated spam.
Assuming your goal is to understand - yes, that thinking is a product of time when people were altruistically publishing very high quality content on the web. The time before adspam, blogspam, llmspam, etc. You could punch queries into search engines and find no-nonsense sites with detailed information, not trying to sell you anything but rather just wanting to be the most complete resource about a certain topic.
I'm not saying that ethos works for million dollar movie production. But on the other hand the ethos of people needing to be paid evidently doesn't work for high quality informational content, given that it has all but disappeared in the torrent of commercialized/intermediated spam.