The Current Situation
Global income taxes account for around 30-40% of all tax. As AI and robots begin to do more work, this is the proportion of tax revenues we stand to lose whilst global capital grows almost exponentially. Global taxes derive from incomes including wages and value added processes as well as ownership rights. But shared ownership of digital assets is currently only practised in the form of private trusts, which is, in itself, a new development and largely about tax avoidance rather than tax or shared wealth accumulations. The idea of public ownership of intellectual property rights to generate tax income is - outside of CultureBanked - more or less unheard of. But as most wealth now as in the future will be based on intangibles and IP rights, we need to change.
What there is absolutely no precedent for is the use of intellectual property as a tax good in and of itself: “This song is your bin collection; that painting built that bridge” are statements of wild fantasy - and yet Live Aid and Captain Tom Moore became household names.
Envisioning Rights as Taxes Means Taking Responsibility
Nearly all real economic wealth (and income) is produced under some form of proprietary ownership rights. This applies to digital as well as tangible wealth. It follows that such ownership rights can be used for directing private contributions to public causes - as taxes or in lieu of taxes. As digital culture, including blockchains, Non Fungible Tokens (NFT’S) crypto-currencies and other tools, enable fractional, shared ownership of assets and wealth, these tools also enable greater democratic possibilities. For example, decisions about conditions of labour, social and distributive justice, due process, as are presently made through representative means but could be made more deliberatively. New digital forms such as social media and so called artificial intelligence use, like traditional industrial sector activity, public knowledge and wealth in accruing private wealth. Currently, ‘the public domain’ as exemplified by the approach of Laurence Lessig with Creative Commons, is excluded from charging for its collective supply goods (eg, knowledge, attention etc). The phrase 'taxpayer funded capitalism’ has been coined in reference to this phenomenon. In order to redress this, CultureBanked seeks to develop new flows of digital rights and assets based on shared ownership, conferring greater interoperability and collective power to the public over what are undeniably public goods. Examples of this phenomenon are already in operation in initiatives such as sovereign wealth funds based on shared assets like gas and oil deposits. As we all try to assert our many identities online, we may forget that we are also creating externalities and costs while supplying the 'platforms' we use with our attention and our 'content' - which actually means our time and assets - for free - ie, without considering, or covering, the costs. Those costs (and benefits) can be huge when dealing with platforms that have over 2 billion users. The potential to influence and select our representatives through our creative rights is immense. Few natural rights are more powerful than the rights afforded to us as owners of what we produce. By managing our vendors instead of being managed by them and creating our own interfaces online, we can pool and assert (some of) our rights to ensure that those few 'dot com giants' begin to comply with our rights in the public interest. The wealth the public crate can also then be used to finance public works.