You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Sure, human societies share baselines against murder and theft because societies without them collapse. But that’s just evolutionary pragmatism. A behavior that keeps a species alive isn’t a cosmic moral law; it’s just a survival mechanism. If a beehive kills off its drones to survive the winter, it’s not being “moral”, it’s just trying not to die.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
But let’s apply your own standard back to the actual topic: video games.
If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
binux@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Confusing them? No. We simply have different standards for what qualifies as objective truth. For me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong. Simple as that. I am acutely aware that there isn’t any universal moral standard when it comes to existence at large, but for my own and humanity’s purposes, those which help us get by better than others are the “truer” ones.
As with what I just stated, it doesn’t matter whether the universe itself cares or not. The universe can frankly do whatever the hell it wants (as it certainly does); reality to me and many others is that which I can sense and experience in my lifetime, and that’s all it ever will be. For any reasonable person’s purposes, the universe’s (as a personification) stake in their lives shouldn’t hold any stake in what they do or do not do. And that especially goes for their morality. Nihilism is equivalent to just being mindless and inert matter on a biological level, and that’s honestly just sad given what humanity and its qualifiers have been able to achieve.
Wrong. As with any complex systems we’ve been able to create in our societies, this will certainly be up for debate, but you’ll have to concede that not being able to own the things you purchase (as humans have done and have been able to do for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence) sets a frankly awful precedent for what these corporations and governments will feel they are entitled to do. To pretend it has always been like this is or it’s inevitable is fatalism, which like nihilism, is sad, and frankly pathetic. I pity that mentality.
And what are these “consumer inconveniences”? Because by your logic, the universe shouldn’t care about that either, considering that it’s a human construct and therefore abstracted from the “objective features” of reality. This is the main problem with your mentality. If morality doesn’t matter, then nothing does. And if nothing matters, then this topic is redundant. It’s nothing more than a spending of entropy.
Think what you want to think, believe what you want to believe. But if you’re seriously following the route of nihilism as if it will lead to some sort of peace of mind, I’ve got some bad news for you: It’s just going to make you feel worse. And with that, I’ve got a funny, albeit facetious image relevant to this conversation that I’ve been looking for an excuse to use somewhere. So here it is. Don’t take it too seriously. (Or do, I’m not your dad.)
Image
TimothyOilypants@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
You are attempting to mask a highly subjective, culturally specific worldview as an objective universal truth. Your entire argument rests on a foundation of ethnocentrism and philosophical contradictions, projecting your modern consumer habits onto the entirety of the human race.
You claim you are not confusing biological utility with objective truth, but then immediately define your standard for truth as: “for me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong.” That is not objective truth. That is utilitarian pragmatism. Gravity is an objective truth; if you jump off a cliff, it will pull you down whether it harms you or not. Reality does not bend to accommodate human comfort, preference, or survival.
By declaring that reality is only what you can “sense and experience in my lifetime,” you have completely abandoned objectivity. You are arguing for a self-serving, subjective moral framework while simultaneously trying to enforce it as a universal law for all of “humanity.”
The most glaring flaw in your argument is your claim that owning purchased things is something humans have done “for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence.” This is profoundly ethnocentric and historically illiterate.
You are taking a highly specific, modern, Western capitalist paradigm, the individual commodification and perpetual ownership of goods, and projecting it backward across all of human history and across all global cultures. For the vast majority of human existence, property was often communal, tied to land stewardship, or dictated by complex systems of patronage and social hierarchy. The idea that an individual has an inherent, natural, almost biological right to permanently own the intangible intellectual labor of another human being for a one-time transaction is a recent cultural anomaly.
When you claim that changing a software licensing model sets an “awful precedent” for humanity, you aren’t defending humanity. You are aggressively defending the modern Western consumer culture you happen to live in, mistaking your local economic norms for the laws of nature.
Finally, you are completely misusing the concept of nihilism to dismiss a legally and structurally accurate argument. Pointing out that a shift from physical to digital software distribution has zero impact on biological human survival is not “nihilism.” It is basic perspective.
Acknowledging that the universe does not care about End-User License Agreements does not mean “nothing matters.” It simply means that your inconvenience over a corporate software transition is not a cosmic moral tragedy. You can find profound meaning in human achievement, art, and philosophy without holding onto the delusion that you are morally entitled to permanently own the digital labor of a development team.
You are perfectly entitled to your subjective preference for physical media. But stop pretending your consumer inconveniences are objective moral imperatives for the human species.
binux@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Woah there, ethnocentrism is quite the claim pal. Especially when you have absolutely nothing to back it up with aside from my own personal opinions (which I certainly never claimed to be entirely objective despite what you seem to be asserting).
Now admittedly, I am defining objective truth through my own interpretative lens. However, you’re not exactly an angel yourself in that regard, which is precisely why I’m doing it in the first place.
To make my point clear, I’ll give a few examples of what you yourself had written earlier:
Despite my own opinions on the matter of whether the universe “cares” or not, this is an inherently subjective assertion. There’s no way to prove such a metaphysical claim.
Again, blatantly subjective. On what grounds is the shift to digital-only media not harmful? And even if you were to back it up, it would still be subjective regardless. There’s nothing materially concrete about any of your potential evidence. I realize I’m somewhat undermining my point here, but for the sake of demonstrating the folly of your handwaving of any viewpoint aside from your own with accusations of “ethnocentrism”, “philosophical contradictions”, “historical illiteracy”, etc., I’ll let it slide.
On that topic (of historical illiteracy) my point wasn’t that people could own goods for the majority of human existence and that was that. No, my point was that there has never been a system quite like this where consumers have been sold media under the impression of obtaining ownership when that isn’t the case at all. You can make all the claims you want about the past, but specifically regarding media it’s never been like this. You wouldn’t see digital enshittification happening in 10 000 BCE.
You’re also being bizarrely presumptuous of my understanding of property and how it’s been understood in the cultural zeitgeist. I’m inclined to believe you’re being disingenuous but for the sake of charity I’ll permit you the benefit of the doubt. I’m well aware that the concept of guaranteed individual rights (particularly from liberalism), especially with regards to property, are a very recent development in relation to human existence. My viewpoint comes from my own disgust with corporate entities dicking over people who by no means deserve it under any rational perspective regarding our current laws and establishments.
Additionally (and I know you know this), human society has never been so cut and dry as property having been strictly communal for the entirety of our existence until, say, 20 millennia ago. Obviously we’ve been in anarchistic societies for quite a long time as a species, but it’s not like you couldn’t own anything. That’s just ridiculous, even without modern liberal beliefs. Barter systems have been a thing for essentially forever (trading labour for labour by way of abstract ideals, far from a “recent cultural anomaly”), and aside from very select and overall arbitrary differences, humans in the Stone Age were essentially identical to ourselves now, ideas and all, however early in development said ideas were. This isn’t Plato’s Cave.
Forgive me, but I find this part in particular kind of funny if not really strange. First of all, it’s not as simple as “changing a licensing model”, and since I know that and I know you know that, I’m not even going to bother addressing that. What really gets me is this idea that I’m mistaking my culture for the “laws of nature”.
Says who? You? Because I certainly didn’t say anything to even suggest that. I’m certainly not “aggressively” defending it either, that’s quite a silly term to use for a dumb back-and-forth on the internet. I’m well aware there’s a difference between reality and culture (clearly).
It seems you’re mistaking my consideration of contemporary society and its innate relevance as a treatment of its doctrines as dogma. Which really couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m not a cult member of “Western society” as you seem to be weirdly painting me as. I merely believe that if people can reasonably come to expect one thing from society, and they get none of that as was promised, it’s hypocritical and thereby wrong. Now you can make all the claims you want about it being a “cultural concept”, but that’s theory, not reality. Theory doesn’t improve anything on its own, especially when applied so pretentiously.
Anyway, because your arguments are inherently broken by means of your assertion of the “subjectivity of my beliefs”, while you literally assert your subjective beliefs at the same time as reality, your entire point is just futile. You can’t deny the importance of a culture and its influence on the world while at the same time asserting your own beliefs as the singular truth. That’s nothing short of hypocrisy.
TimothyOilypants@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
You are cornered, so you are retreating into semantics. Let’s strip away the philosophical tap-dancing and look at the actual mechanics of your argument, which completely collapses under its own weight.
First, claiming that observing the universe’s indifference is a subjective metaphysical claim is absurd. It is the exact opposite. It is the empirical observation that inanimate matter and physical laws do not possess moral agency. Gravity and entropy do not have feelings or ethical standards. Acknowledging that physical reality lacks a moral compass is not a subjective belief; it is the baseline of objective science.
Second, you challenged the assertion that a shift to digital-only media has zero impact on human survival, calling it blatantly subjective. No, it is a biological fact. Human survival requires caloric intake, hydration, and protection from the elements. A corporation revoking access to an entertainment license does not deprive you of any of those things. To equate the loss of a digital game with actual harm or a threat to human prosperity is a massive category error.
Third, you argue that consumers were sold media under the impression of obtaining ownership and that society broke a promise to them. Who exactly made that promise? The software industry certainly did not. For forty years, practically every piece of commercial software came with an agreement explicitly stating it was licensed and not sold. The fact that millions of consumers ignored the legal text because they liked the feeling of holding a plastic cartridge does not mean a promise was broken. It just means the public was willfully ignorant of the transaction. A consumer’s failure to read the manual does not constitute a moral failing on the part of the creator.
Fourth, you bring up Stone Age barter systems to prove that ownership has always existed. No one ever argued that physical property did not exist. You could own a physical tool in the Stone Age, just like you can own a physical plastic case today. But you cannot permanently own the ongoing, continuous labor of another human being. Modern digital ecosystems require ongoing human labor to maintain. Demanding perpetual ownership of a live digital service for a one-time fee is demanding uncompensated labor.
You accuse me of asserting subjective beliefs as reality, but my entire argument is built on documented copyright law, the physical realities of server maintenance, and the historical text of software licenses. You are the only one arguing from a place of emotion. You are upset because the illusion of physical media ownership was shattered, and instead of accepting the legal and technical reality of how digital infrastructure actually works, you are trying to frame a standard licensing dispute as a hypocritical betrayal of human rights. It is not. You just didn’t read the terms of service.