I’ve been thinking more and talking with my partner more about the copyright “debate” lately that’s been happening on Twitter. In a lot of ways, it’s not fair to argue or parry those people’s pitiful attacks, because they are nearly intellectually unarmed. They know no history, have no grasp of scholarship in the field, and are wholly unsuited to looking beyond their very narrow parochial interests.

However, they hold sway, and have an army of sycophants at the ready to spread their historically-dunderheaded and ill-sourced opinions. Since that is alas the case, something must be done to combat them, as distasteful is the task of suplexing mental three-year-olds might be.

Lately, I’ve been calling what these types broadcast anti-knowledge, because what they dispense mimics the silhouette of knowledge but doesn’t have any actual thought, scholarship or understanding backing it. It’s the same as the “knowledge” that the Trumpists have — it resembles the results of perception and judgment, but in fact is purely based on feelings. In this case, their feelings on how copyright should and (they believe) does work is just such a sentiment-based illusion of knowledge. It’s no different at all than the Trumpist’s feeling that the election was stolen, or that the vaccines don’t work, and it’s just as useless for reasoning about how society should function or even how it actually operates.

There are legitimate debates to be had about copyright. I’ve participated in many of them over the years, especially when one of my older blogs was much more popular. But it’s impossible to debate with anyone who believes the ethos should be, “Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are grabbing as much as they can, so I should be able to as well.” That’s not a position that anyone reasoned themselves into, thus it is impossible to reason them out of it. It’s not possible to form a better society with such people, because they literally cannot imagine it. Too much propaganda has filled too little brain-space. In the end, they just must be defeated.

There’s much more to say about this, but anti-knowledge is becoming more common now as polarization has increased. I think anti-knowledge back in the 1990s was about 20% of all “knowledge,” and now it’s about 70%. That has caused the discourse to deteriorate to an extent that most thought you find is based on nothing more than propaganda and wishful thinking.