“Software is non-rivalrous but it is certainly excludable. (Copyright law and DRM are not perfectly enforced, but they exist.)”

I object on the first point that you cannot make a good excludable by fiat. Copyright law writers should look first at whether software is an excludable good by nature, and then consider how to design copyright law as a consequence. (Forgive me the optimism.) By analogy, if you order that ships without a proper Looking-At-The-Lighthouse License shall not be allowed to navigate by a lighthouse, you have not made the lighthouse an excludable good, you have made the law an ass. Software likewise makes an ass of such lawmakers, as fiat alone is insufficient, and the law cannot depend on DRM, as I shall get to now.

I object on the second point that DRM works neither in practice nor in principle. Practice you can verify at The Pirate Bay, and in particular with SPORE, which was heavily DRM-”protected” and the more heavily pirated, in part because pirated versions lacked nasty side-effects of the game’s digital restrictions management.
Principle because DRM depends on locking the user out of a segment of his own computer. Since the content the user wants to get at is on the computer, as is the DRM bypass mechanism, and a computer is transparent to inspection and modification, a sufficiently determined user can break arbitrarily strong DRM.

(Perhaps software would become excludable if all end-users only had dumb clients connected to Facebook, and software existed in the form of Facebook apps completely under Facebook’s control and not subject to inspection or modification.)

An army should only defend those that pay.
And anyone should only pay or be part of what they agree with. Let Communist live as Communistas, Social Democrats live as Social Democrats, Libertarians live as Libertarians, etc.

That is the only way to not have violence.

Market capitalism exists since first trade a man did.

I prefer “because the organization demanding payment HAS AN ARMY” as the answer to this question.

It troubled me as a teen when I realized that Asimov thought the former was an ideal society and the latter a dystopia, when most people seemed to think both were dystopias. Now I am troubled that the latter is seen as a Randian paradise by many.

Very few people are genuinely creative, and fewer yet are genuinely creative for more than a short segment of their lives, or even more than once. Asimov’s Spacers kind of suggested that — they amounted to generations of pampered country gentry whose estates happened to be on other worlds, and whose servants were machines. At best, some of their ancestors had been creative. Their society was actually parasitical on its own seed corn.

If the social system of the future is set up to stress creativity, there’s quite a culling coming, and it doesn’t happen only once.

Other questions that would need to be addressed might include:

How are different kinds of creativity prioritized in selecting for production and distribution or even for human reproduction?

How are the various subcategories of basic science, math, applied science and engineering, music, literature, or anything else to be ranked?

Will the members of each creative sub-class have mutual vetoes over one another? Will the computer engineers automatically assume the leadership and devalue all humanities by default?

There will be no “market” of consuming professionals, practitioners, users, scholars, teachers, let alone proletarians, to serve as a referee for the output of the creative. They will all be gone.

Or, before that comes to pass, there is also the more fundamental question when suggesting anyone is surplus to requirements. Whose requirements are those?

If software becomes less excludable, the problems the article hints at may become more serious.

(As regards software’s non-rivalrous nature, it may even sometimes be an anti-rivalous good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-rival_good )