Every human enterprise — a family, a company, a country — runs on some shared sense of purpose. When that purpose is obvious, no one needs to talk about it. When it isn’t, people start holding meetings. Anyone who has endured a corporate “mission‑statement rollout” knows the dread of that moment: the sudden realization that the organization has forgotten what it’s for and is now trying to remember by committee. A country is, in the end, a very large group of people attempting to move in roughly the same direction. It needs a reason to do so that’s bigger than paperwork or habit. When that reason is strong, disagreements behave themselves; they stay in the background, like the hum of a refrigerator. When the reason fades, the hum becomes the whole soundtrack. The result isn’t necessarily hatred — more often it’s a kind of national restlessness, a search for meaning that leaves people unusually susceptible to cynicism, tribalism, or the comforting simplicity of blaming one another. F...
Copyright law was built for a world that no longer exists. When the first modern copyright statutes emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, creative production was slow, scarce, and largely controlled by professional gatekeepers. Books required printing presses. Paintings took months to complete. Music circulated through physical scores and performances. In that environment, it made sense for originality to be judged by human experts—art historians, lawyers, and judges—who could manually compare works and decide whether one meaningfully borrowed from another. But today, this human-centered system is buckling under the weight of digital abundance. Millions of images, songs, and designs circulate daily, and the institutions meant to protect creators can no longer keep pace. The result is a copyright regime that is both overburdened and unevenly enforced. Large corporations can marshal legal teams to defend their claims; independent artists often cannot. Determining whether a ...