Tony Gilroy, creator/showrunner of (among many other projects) of the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, said in 2023 that he planned to release the show’s scripts for fans to read. Last week, he explained why he hasn’t: He doesn’t want those scripts read by artificial intelligence. “Why help the f***ing robots any more than you can?,” he told Collider.

Meanwhile, more than 400 industry entertainment figures recently appealed, in an open letter to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, against letting  AI models read from, and train on, Hollywood’s output:

“America’s arts and entertainment industry supports over 2.3M American jobs with over $229Bn in wages annually ….  AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music, and voices used to train AI models at the core of multi-billion dollar corporate valuations.”

There’s nothing new about demands that government deny tuition and reading material to whomever or whatever might threaten the interests of a powerful economic class.

“Allow our slaves to read your writings,”  pro-slavery advocate James M. Hammond wrote to British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in 1845, “stimulating them to cut our throats! Can you believe us to be such unspeakable fools?”

In most southern states prior to the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery, teaching a slave (or, in some cases, anyone with dark skin) to read and write was punishable by fine or imprisonment if the teacher was white, flogging if the teacher was black.

As relatives of antebellum slaveholders go, the jealous beneficiaries of “intellectual property” laws aren’t especially distant. The former claimed to own their subjects’ bodies first, and secondarily, as the anti-literacy laws demonstrated, minds. The latter merely reverse those priorities.

Nor are their reasons dissimilar.

Slaveholders believed that, absent a property rights claim on other bodies, their plantation-based economic model would collapse.

Copyright holders believe that absent a property rights claim on other minds, the journalists, novelists, screenwriters, and actors of the world might have to find other jobs.

As a practical matter, the former were only temporarily right (agriculture produces more, both more profitably and at lower prices now than it did then), and I suspect the latter are just wrong.

As a moral concern, such claims of ownership over the bodies, minds, or both of others are repugnant.

In both areas, the “open letter” smacks of the Charlottesville marchers’ “Jews will not replace us” chant.

Those who don’t want “the robots” to read and learn from their creations are, as Gilroy notices, free to simply not publish those creations — but if they DO publish them, they’re not entitled to demand that certain people or entities not notice and learn from them.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On March 14, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order reducing “statutory functions of unnecessary governmental entities to what is required by law.”

Among other institutions, the order targets the United States Agency for Global Media and the broadcast media it operates and funds: Voice of America, Radio and Television Martí, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

At less than one 6,750th of last year’s $6.75 trillion federal spending, USAGM may seem like small potatoes, but as the late US Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) reportedly said, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” And good reasons for wadding up the agency and tossing it in the dustbin of history go far beyond the financial.

What are the agency and its outlets, really? In a word, propaganda.

Their entire purpose is and always has been to regale the world — especially that portion of its population ruled by non-US-approved governments — with the US government’s take on every event and every issue.

While that approach never seemed very much like what America advertises itself as, it may have made at least a little sense during the Cold War when Radio Moscow and China Radio International likewise spread their regimes’ messages via the airwaves.

Now, though, in addition to not reflecting supposed American values (you know, free speech and free press instead of government propaganda), those state-operated broadcast media are beyond redundant.

These days, US “mainstream private sector” media — print, radio, television, and Internet — go toe-to-toe with competitors (state-operated and “private sector” alike) worldwide, reaching far more people than their USAGM predecessors.

And, for the most part and in most respects,  those “private sector” platforms have long since brought their editorial lines into compliance with the US regime’s every whim.

Yes, American media tend to segregate along partisan lines, but they’re generally all MURKA! (as defined by Washington, DC) all the time, from Fox News on the “right” to MSNBC on the “left.” Each of those outlets, and many others, dispose of budgets several times that of USAGM while serving as, effectively, government stenographers without tax funding from Congress.

I’d personally prefer a more combative and inquisitive American press to “private sector” government propaganda mills, but that ship has sailed. Why continue paying government to do what it’s managed to cow the “private sector” into doing for it? Give USAGM the ax.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“House Democrats erupted into apoplexy,”  Axios reported on March 14, “after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he would support Republicans’ stopgap government funding measure.”

With their surrender, Schumer and nine other Senate Democrats enabled passage of a “continuing resolution” that kicked the government’s budget and debt cans down the road yet again, this time through September 30.

Schumer’s case for a yes vote was both practical  (without the resolution, the federal government would have gone into a fake “shutdown”  and its “non-essential” functions would have been shuttered until a deal was reached) and political (Schumer feared that Democrats would receive more public blame for the shutdown than Republicans).

The Democratic case against that yes vote was likewise both practical (the resolution contained several elements most Democrats oppose) and political (if Democrats won’t stand up to Donald Trump and the Republican Party, why would they expect people to vote for them in the 2026 midterms?).

But let’s not fall victim to confusion here. The Democrats objecting to Schumer’s surrender don’t, for the most part, offer any attractive alternative to the GOP program. Like the Republicans, they’re fine with insane levels of government spending, continuing deficits, increasing debt, and onerous taxation.

The whole thing is half Off-Off Broadway theater and half what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences,” wherein similar people with similar ideas lose their minds over trivial disagreements.

For those of us who aren’t in the tank for either  party, it’s less complicated.

First, if a government function is “non-essential,” why is government doing it in the first place?

Second, if we’re going to bother putting ourselves through the recurring ritual of electing supposed representatives to guard whatever we perceive as our interests, shouldn’t we expect those representatives to actually fight for those interests?

The answers to those questions explain the current situation.

Political government itself is “non-essential” and then some, at least to normal people. Its sole purpose is to transfer wealth and power from the productive class to the political class. It’s only “essential” to the preening, posturing sociopaths who sit in, or visit to lobby, offices on Capitol Hill.

The purpose of all the electoral pageantry is to help us convince ourselves that we need them. We don’t.

The federal government shouldn’t just be partially and temporarily shut down. It should be totally and permanently excised and thrown in the biohazard bin like the cancerous tumor it is.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY