on similar (I think) line of thought, but further along,

the reason to have property (also a tool, or social-technology to be slightly more precise), i.e. ownership over things is a byproduct of having a marketplace in which we can trade.

In this view, the marketplace (or trade, depending on your outlook) is THE WAY to come together and put all our skills together in order to co-create (con-struct) something much larger.

Alas, capitalism means that only a very few chosen elites (which are, by this point, mostly autonomous corporations) get to decide what we all work together to co-create. We as human individuals are only able to participate in this figurative "marketplace" (understood as a social-technology) as the part of merchandise, specifically as 'commodity'-style labor.

Do you have an alternative to suggest? Under most of human history the chosen elites inherited their positions from an ancestor who won an important war. Capitalism may not be an even playing field but the process that lets Elon Musk build landing Rockets is an order of magnitude more even than the process that let Kuresh build pyramids. Is there a model that might be more even still?

my gripes are about the stupidity that I see in refusing to accept that digital assets work different from all other physical ones.

I like this quote (paraphrase) of Byung Chul Han, "capitalism is not a political question, but a force of nature to be tamed".

My larger point being that capitalism "applied" to digital assets is NOT the way forwards. So I don't have a complete 'constructive' alternative. But I'm absolutely sure of what I don't want and believe should try to avoid i.e. the path we are on (digital rights, intellectual property, and so on).

Totally agree. The idea that ideas/bits can be owned is a slippery slope with bad policy at the bottom. Maybe it was once necessary as a sort of training wheels for innovation, but it has long since become more of a drag than it's worth.

Ah, that's fair. I formulate a similar observation by saying that digital assets inhabit a post-scarcity economy which doesn't work the same as a resource-based scarcity one, and using the same money for both requires more suspension of disbelief than most of us are capable of.