this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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You're heart is in the right place, but your conclusion is wrong. It's entirely possible to build a passive income without involving anyone else's labor. Without even getting into things like investment income, which I'm assuming you'll still attribute to someone else's labor in the most abstract sense, there are still plenty of ways to do this. I personally lived off mostly passive income for several years when blogging was big. I created a bunch of blogs myself, did all of the development and design myself, managed the servers myself, and wrote all of the content myself. Then I put a few non-intrusive ads on the sites. When they started generating pretty good money, I mostly stopped working on them. They continued generating decent money until social media killed blogging. I still have one of them, and I receive around $60 per month from it despite the fact that I haven't touched it in over a decade. So, how exactly was/am I stealing someone else's labor?
Sure sounds like labour to me.
And there is no requirement for labour to generate income immediately. A majority of labour is front-loaded, with income being back-loaded.
Server maintenance and updating code to work with current releases is still “labour”. Because sure as shit you’ve been doing these things… no hosting provider is going to let you go 10 years with zero updates or patches to the website or the underlying framework that allows the website to run. Because failing to do that is how entire hosting platforms get rooted and infected with malware.
Yes, my labor, which resulted in passive income. Nobody is saying that passive income is a magical thing which you just acquire without effort. You invest the effort, and then you sit back and reap the rewards.
By your definition game development (in the old style) is also passive income... so is art... so is building a house or a car or pretty much any form of manufacturing.
These activities all involve building something with no promise of selling it - then trying to find a buyer... in each case you, the producer, are investing up front in a venture which may or may not succeed and then hoping someone will pay you for it.
Homebuilding would be active income, since you can only sell each house once. Game development would be a good example for someone like the Minecraft creator. He invested a bunch of time creating this cool game, and then he sat back and got rich. It's passive at that point (assuming no maintenance, bug fixes, etc.), since he continues to gain sales, despite only doing the work once. The digital realm is full of opportunities for passive income, or at least it used to be. Corporations have essentially shoved individual creators out of the market.
Edit: I'm aware that the Minecraft creator sold the game, but was using his earlier experiences as an example. I read an interview with him once and he said "I think I was already rich by the time I thought 'holy shit, I'm going to be rich!'".