Cultural Abundance - by Matthew Steiner - Proliberal

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Markets<br>Cultural Abundance<br>Unlocking the Stories That Build Civilization

Matthew Steiner<br>Jun 07, 2026

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The most recognizable character in American popular culture today isn’t a politician, an athlete, or even a movie star. It’s a digitally rendered green infant from a franchise that debuted nearly five decades ago.<br>Grogu — better known to most people as Baby Yoda — is everywhere. He appears on lunchboxes, T-shirts, plush toys, and magazine covers. He is undeniably charming and perhaps the heart of the Star Wars franchise today.<br>His success also reveals something strange about contemporary culture. In the most technologically creative era in human history, many of our most important cultural touchstones remain tethered to stories created decades ago. Hollywood’s biggest bets are sequels, reboots, cinematic universes, and endlessly recycled content. There is remarkably little drive to create something new.<br>Most explanations for this cultural malaise focus on obvious culprits: risk-averse studio executives, engagement-optimizing algorithms, fragmented attention spans, and the economics of streaming. Each captures part of the story.<br>But these are symptoms, not causes. Beneath them lies a deeper structural constraint on cultural renewal.<br>Today’s cultural landscape suffers from the same kind of artificial scarcity that plagues housing. Just as zoning blocks housing supply, intellectual property law encloses culture — converting what was once a living commons into a gated estate, where the price of admission is a licensing agreement and the penalty for trespassing is a lawsuit.<br>The case for reforming our intellectual property regime isn’t a niche legal argument. It is, at its core, an argument for abundance — for a culture as dynamic, competitive, and generative as the best version of our economy.<br>The Narrative Operating System

The true cost of this enclosure becomes clear when we recognize a fundamental truth about human societies: civilizational continuity isn’t merely biological. It’s also driven by narrative.<br>Every society survives by passing down a code: stories about heroes, villains, justice, sacrifice, and the collective ideals worth striving for. These narratives aren’t just decorative entertainment we consume after a hard day’s work; they are the foundational software of society — the operating system that dictates how we cooperate, think, and dream.<br>Human history has always treated this operating system as open-source. The Greeks didn’t sue each other over iterations of the Trojan War.1 The medieval world endlessly remixed Arthurian legend, adding regional knights and magical flourishes across centuries.2 Renaissance writers treated classical mythology like a public sandbox.3 Virgil riffed on Homer.4 Dante cast Virgil as his literal tour guide through the afterlife.5 Shakespeare pilfered from historical chronicles and Italian novellas without receiving a single cease-and-desist letter.6<br>Human creativity has rarely emerged from a vacuum. It’s always been an intergenerational relay race of inheritance, reinterpretation, and renewal. One generation receives the code, patches it, adds their own flavor, and passes it forward.<br>This open-source evolution is how cultures stay alive.<br>The impulse to participate in this process has never disappeared. People still inherit stories and make them their own. Fanfiction communities expand fictional universes. Internet memes endlessly remix familiar characters and narratives. Online creators reinterpret existing myths for new audiences and new eras.<br>Yet much of this activity exists in a strange legal twilight. It survives not because our institutions encourage cultural participation, but because enforcement remains imperfect and selective. The cultural commons has not vanished entirely, but it has increasingly been pushed to the margins — tolerated in practice while discouraged in principle.<br>The danger is not that cultural inheritance disappears overnight. It is that a society gradually forgets that participation is supposed to be the norm. When we freeze a story in place and forbid people from altering it, we transform a living myth into a sterile museum exhibit — admired, perhaps, but entirely disconnected from the present. A living culture demands active participation, not passive preservation.<br>The Corporate Enclosure of the Imagination

This organic chain of human creativity ran smoothly for millennia — until it slammed headfirst into the modern legal machinery of intellectual property.<br>The original American framework for copyright was relatively modest and deeply pragmatic. Its goal was simple: to grant creators a brief, temporary monopoly so they could financially benefit from their labor and feel incentivized to make more. The U.S. Constitution explicitly states these exclusive rights are to be granted only for a “limited time.”7 Historically, once that brief window closed, creators...