I'm in.

Well done, Trey.

"Trey wrote:
As I mentioned previously, Roddenberry's utopia was made possible by the existence of replicator technology, which made energy and resources limitless.  In a world where you can get a chicken sandwich by walking up to a machine and saying "chicken sandwich, please" and it simply appears without any effort on anyone's part - that's a world where you can do away with capitalism.  And then all humanity can be free to explore the galaxy - or do whatever else they desire - because everyone's basic necessities are covered without any effort."

You don't seem to see that Roddenberry's replicator exists for digital items right now. In Star Trek, Pickard can walk up to the replicator and order 'Earl Grey Tea'. Now, is he stealing the intellectual property of Earl Grey, the author of the recipe for Earl Grey tea? Potentially, in our world, at least. Is he stealing from the tea-pickers who would otherwise be making a living by picking real tea that he is just copying from the internet, or wherever it comes from? Yes, it seems that way. Is it a bad thing to have eliminated scarcity? I think so.

The same technology exists today. I can go to my replicator (bitttorent) and say "Mary Shelly's Frankenstein", and moments later the digital file is on my e-reader. It's the same, it's just that we only have the replicator for digital goods. Understand that Pickard cannot ask the replicator to come up with an original work, a new cocktail for example, there is still some author somewhere programming the machine with recipes. It just makes copies.

When the capitalist model of society has been replaced, the capitalist model of media production will be on the table. Until then, content creators need to eat and pay their rent, and I can assure you nobody takes YouTube hits or download stats as currency.

And there are also alternatives to the entitlement culture that says you deserve to have anything just because you want it.

I don't think there's actually any disagreement that you owe something, but the question could be 'what do you owe'? Just throwing this idea out there, I'm not saying I know the answer or if there even is one.

Obviously, our economy is way too complicated, and our lives too overburdened, to have a reciprocal service scheme (AKA you make me a spear and I'll sew you a wolfskin cloak). What did the communists do? Were all accomplishments just put in a well and then anyone could retrieve from that well whatever else they needed? I'm not sure welfare is practical given the size of populations these days...