Let’s start with a mundane example, before a tasting of etymological roots.
Suno updated their Terms of Service, saying, “Why we are making these changes: As our platform grows, limiting downloads will make it harder for bad actors to mass-export music.” A bad actor is commonly understood as a convicted criminal, or someone with malicious or ill-intent. Here, Suno suggests that downloading the music generated from a customer’s prompts is malicious or ill-willed. The changing of the contract says you are morally bad for downloading files, something that was taken to be a given when you purchased a subscription before the contract was changed. Will this shape our culture to assume that the outputs of processes you pay for are something you have no control over?
This is part of a long-running pattern. In a business sense, abuse of a product or service used to mean vandalism, theft, fraud, harassment, or exploits to break the law. Now it means something like, “you surprised our business model.” I get it, it’s very hard to predict the future. However, instead of a simple, “things changed, here’s how it affects our bottom line, and we need to protect it to provide you the service or business,” companies resort to many ways to say, “you, the customer, the user, are a bad user.”
You will not own anything, and you will only use what you purchase in the way we expect. Deviation, indeed, any sign of agency, is taken as abuse.
At least in software, the power user was once the most valued early adopter. Increasingly, the power user is seen as liability. What the power user reveals puts the firm in a bind that conflicts with existing binds it has with lenders.
Power users reveal technical & motivational debts, as well as the weaknesses of businesses that require cycles of external investment.
I know of an internet service provider who had a young power user, who stymied customer service with his problems. At some point, he got so frustrated that he sent an e-mail to the ISP, spelling out exactly what was wrong with the way they had configured their networks. The engineering team promptly pushed to hire this young man, and by 23 he led much of the network side of the business, and ended up tackling so many out-of-scope problems that a lot of the business still relies on things he set up today, years after he’s left. You’ve probably heard of Norio Ohga, a customer who complained about Sony’s tape recorder in detail. Sony took Ohga on as a consultant, then as President, and finally, as CEO.
Two dramatic stories to spell out the value of the customers who use your product or service in ways you would never have expected. Except perhaps what’s changed is that we no longer buy products or services in clear ways. Previously, it was the business owner’s problem to improve their business models. Now, it’s the custome- no, the user’s problem.
For some groups, there was a time when you might have gone to someone, given them some money for a product or service, and that was that. No warranty, no money back, but also you could do what you saw fit to do with it.
More now, you rent the right to…what? Whatever right you may have at the beginning of the contract, it will likely be changed as soon as a platform has enough mass to lock in a hidden monopoly.
It used to be that when you bought something, you were legally allowed to open it up and repair it. It was expected, even! And now we have the right to repair movement, in reaction to what happened with car manufacturers, and all sorts of planned obsolescences.
Increasingly, I encounter even b2b SaaS situations where companies don’t want the customer to export files, even if half the business use case is to be able to provide files to auditors and contractors.
Most of this happened little by little, one committee or meeting at a time. However, with Suno, we can guess at what pushed Mikey Shulman: Warner, Universal, and Sony sued Suno in 2024. They were all surprised when digitization first happened. Instead of pivoting, they decided to tell you that theft includes copying in its definition. Then AI came along, and they were surprised again. They saw these nerds getting filthy rich, and decided they wanted a piece of the pie. And now they tell you that training, that learning, that compression, is all copying. And remember, they told you that copying is theft. So they can ask mommy Columbia, who has the most guys willing to use guns at her beck and call, to give them a little snack for the upset they felt from the surprise. Not wanting to go the way of Napster, Suno agreed to a “licensed training” deal (what is this, CROSSFIT?). Settlements are private, but we could assume part of the deal was locking down exports.
Bobbs-Merrill Co v Straus suggested that once a book is sold, it is, well, sold. However it didn’t specify anything about contracts. Slowly, we’re changing the meaning of what it means to buy something.
I get it, it’s really hard to find a super profitable niche, and doing anything requires enough money to signal the status required for people to let you just do things. And nowadays you need to borrow more money from others, in a time when money creation has moved away from business loans & homes toward things like nondepository financial institutions, so you have to go to Venture Capitalists who get their money from them, so they can give it to you, so you can finally just do the thing, that’s the price, right?
You have to enter the Red Queen’s race to get anywhere.
So you need users, not power users. Renters (re- + dō, “give”, givers), not customers (someone you’re with enough to be used to). Serfs in your private demesne (guardians of the master’s house), not freeholders. Only the house (hide [as in skin] that functions as cover) wins, so get a house and make sure everyone after you doesn’t.
And every time there’s a surprise that you can’t find your way around, you’ve got to get the customer to stop surprising you, so that you don’t surprise the bigger companies and get sued out of existence, or surprise the Fed and have your niche given to someone else.
But can we shake the Red Queen?
It’s simple, really.
We use old definitions that fit the original context of whatever we’re trying to do. It takes several times as long to get anywhere because coordination has become more expensive. It’s more expensive in part because we keep redefining things. Theft is now copying, and some are saying that compression is theft. Suno, and many other companies, tell you that exports are something only bad people do.
I highlight this because it’s a current change. However, how many changes like this have taken place? Check the etymology of any word used to get other people to do this or that. You will find similar changes. Nietzsche highlighted good and evil, but many words have been contested like this.
Moral. Ethics. Virtue. Man. Woman. Kind. Gender.
Let’s trace a few of these, and see if it simplifies the Gordian knots that halt movement all around our modern world. We’ll start with Good.
good
*gʰedʰ-[1]
- to join
- to unite
- to suit
Good was what joined, united, suited, fitted. Interestingly, this gives you a different light on a phrase like survival of the fittest. When combined with the idea of Jesus-as-carpenter and normal (what fits a carpenter’s square), other things may line up. This Good is different from today’s definition, which is, “acting in the interest of what is beneficial, ethical, or moral” or “well-behaved,” conforming to standards of behavior.
Let’s look at those three: beneficial, ethical, and moral.
Beneficial, from bene (“well”) + faciō (“to do, make”). Made well. Something made well to join, unite, suit, fit.
Moral, from mōs (“manner, custom, way; law”), used by Cicero to stand-in for ethics.
Ethical, ethos, a habit, customer, manner, or way from the reflexive pronoun *swé (“self”) + *dʰeh₁- (“to put, place, set”).
Ethology, from ethologia, the painting of a character by gesture, as an actor or painter might do, also preserves this root somewhat, as it is defined today as the study of animal behavior. Their habits and ways of life.
Today, all these are mostly used to get people to refrain from doing things. So when someone tells you that something is moral or ethical, it is a way of saying, “do what I call moral or ethical.” Which gets us to a bind.
Who decides which manners, customs, ways, laws, and habits are good, and how do they decide? Look to the old definition of Good, and you might get: “why, whatever joins, unites, suits, and fits!”
Yet we are often told the greatest virtue comes from things that divide and don’t fit. Man’s nature, many agree, is evil (“flawed”, “imperfect”, if you prefer), and so doing anything that fits it would not fit, in Heaven, in the ideal, or in shareholder value. Nature itself, also evil, and so doing anything that fits it would not fit. What we are supposed to fit, everyone knows, but they have different answers.
And who decides what a virtue is? Some people say faith is a Virtue, others emphasize temperance, many current uses circle back to well-behaved, good behavior, like when someone tells you to be moral or ethical.
Virtue, from vir (“man, male”), husband, warrior, hero, possibly from *weyh, to chase, pursue, suppress, or persecute.
You’ve heard people tell you things like, “real men do X”, and so, even there, man gets redefined. Real men, everyone knew a few decades ago, smoked Marlboros.
You can look at surviving stories, and see the words displayed through the actions of characters in those stories. Few old heroes would have behavior that matches our definitions of good, and few displays of virtue are seen as virtuous.
Did Achilles or Gilgamesh seem like they would be what an elementary school teacher would call well-behaved?
Sure, you say, we’ve progressed since then. These new definitions are better. We’ve become moral, more virtuous, in the sense of doing less physical harm, even as we do less physically. And now we’re even better! We’re doing less emotional (to move out, move away, remove, stir up, irritate) harm, by moving less. Everywhere there is material abundance. An overflowing, except we flow less.
From all this overflow and plenty, we have fewer extreme experiences. Hard lessons of the past remain in the past, and elements of them we repeat without intent or will, because we cannot occupy older definitions, and so, older worldviews.
Let’s look at moral again. Proto-Indo-European *moh₁-, *meh₁- (“to intend or be intent upon, to be of strong will”) (though the more common meaning of “to measure” may be the original, with “to intend” as a semantic extension).
From strong will, “moral” has come to ask for a weak will. A weak-willed individual, after all, is much easier to control. Which means less harm! From a measure, we seek the unmeasured. A world that minimizes challenge, that files away surprises. Let’s de-emphasize standard tests, the measuring might be immoral. Let’s give everyone a gold star, the measuring might be immoral.
Without measure, we will somehow find what fits with what, to join, unite, and strengthen.
Change a measure mid-construction, change a definition mid-construction, and you will have a little Babel. The contractor said six months. Now it’s going to be six years, especially if you keep changing definitions.
So who are we building with? Whose work are we continuing? Again, it may be that you think that the only work worth doing is something conceived in our lifetime. The past was brutal, ugly, short, and evil, and so we must look forward, and build something completely new. Yet we fall into the ideals of men who died more than a hundred years ago, and the marketing of those who died a decade or three ago, failing to find any new way of looking at the world.
The only way we can find a new path, is to know what has been done, to build on the work of those who came before.
It is easiest to do this when definitions are frozen. Any programmer can tell you this! Though they cannot often extend it outside of a computer.
Let definitions change on the fly, and we spend more time on a civilization with halted construction. Like discovery in law from years before LLMs, and sovereign citizens babbling at law enforcement officers, we can come up with new definitions on the fly, and build elaborate Rube Goldberg machines, all to say, actually, we can’t try anything new together. We can’t build anything together. We can’t do anything together.
The best thing to do, the moral thing, the ethical thing, is to be a good kid and sit alone in your chair. Wait in line. Ask before you go to the restroom. Don’t do anything that surprises us.
All language comes from the body. I point at a bird and say, “bird.” The toddler’s eyes follow, associates the will of my body toward the bird, and the sound and creature are joined. United. If I keep this up, it fits with all birds. The child derives the pattern. The kind. That which is inherited from birth. The child reads a book, from someone long dead. It includes birds. The child looks at the birds in his life, sees how they move, and finds how they may move from the book. The next time he sees the bird move in the way written in the book, he now inherits some of the long dead individual’s experience. The adult uses it. Carries on life.
We have so much energy in what we’ve built, that we can afford to work against the body. The tangles of threads grow and grow, as bodies shrink from movement. Until you can ask a simple question like, “why does this cost what it does,” and get no answer. Instead they give you the equivalent of a dozen boxes of documents. Stocks and flows and systems, hundreds of nodes in a graph. They can recite all this, and say, “it’s nuanced”, or “it’s a really complex issue,” in something that we made, like housing, finance, or healthcare.
What you make is easier to understand than what you didn’t make. And in the rest of nature, you can usually point with your body to something.
What do these complexities we made point at that are so hard to understand? A tangle of dependencies, where someone can recite the entire flow, and not see the very simple reason something costs why it does. So complicated. So complex. Wow we really can’t untangle this mess. It’s impossible. We can’t do what any bower bird can do.
Redefinition is control technology. Generations of this over hundreds of years have resulted in problems with pieces we can’t point at. Intractable. Untouchable.
I find rectification has greatly simplified my decisions, and so, given me more time. For example, “is an LLM conscious?” We can check and find the word was introduced as an awareness of guilt. In that definition, well, not even I am conscious. The literal roots are to “know together.” Of course we know together! I ask something of an LLM. We work on this knowing together. So it’s conscious, in that definition. The rest is political & marketing entertainment I don’t have to spend time on.
The definitions set a limit, a bound, an end.
