That only works for a subset of things, namely those things that can be effectively crowdsourced at small increments. I'd also argue that Wikipedia is heavily indirectly subsidized by academia and government.
Large coherent software products and great works of art are by definition the products of individuals or small teams focusing intensely for long periods of time. That is inherently expensive. Only the independently wealthy or the otherwise subsidized can afford to focus for thousands upon thousands of hours and then give the product away... not unless they have another idea for revenue like freemium, SaaS, etc. (... and those don't work for music, movies, books, etc.)
... and "otherwise subsidized" takes us back to some of the pathologies I mention... propaganda, advertising, etc. driving art and surveillance/manipulation based business models driving software.
Do we really want a future where only trust fund kids and propagandists create art? Do we really want a future where software is created exclusively to monetize its users?
The Wikipedia model can only work for everything in a true post-scarcity society where the marginal cost of everything is zero and everyone can live with no real "income." Until someone finds a way to draw unlimited energy from the quantum vacuum, we are stuck with some form of economy where everything I said applies.
Another way of thinking about the pirate economy is as a deflationary spiral in which monetary velocity collapses and all kinds of pathologies emerge from that. Deflationary spirals are actually really great for uber-capitalists that already own lots of rentier assets, but they're bad for workers, entrepreneurs, and other non-rentiers. Sound familiar?
Wikipedia happens to be supported by a huge quantity of individual supporters around the world, both in writing and in funding the servers and development. They actively avoid reaching out to wealthy philanthropists and governments and get all their support from the general global community.
Wikipedia indeed requires a smaller dedicated team to keep the system running. But they are not subsidized in any pathological way. They are funded by large quantity of small donations. There's nothing wrong with that.
We don't need to reach a true post-scarcity world in order to better allocate the scarce resources we have. It's completely feasible to provide a basic income or other basic resources just like we do with clean water. We can have mechanisms to charge for use beyond the basic level. And we can have the community fund people to make the resources we want.
The "pirate economy" you talk about is the "freerider economy" (pirate is a stupid term here). Freeriding is a REAL problem. We can't live on a freeriding economy. But we can still have Free/Libre/Open resources if we can get people to fund them without compelling them through artificial restrictions. Wikipedia works because the scale is SO large that they get adequate support despite freeriding. There's also lots of ways to discourage freeriding / encourage donation better than we do now. The first step is to get everyone to STOP wasting their limited funds on proprietary products so that they actually can afford to better support Free/Libre/Open ones.
