The middle class has never been involved in creative IP in huge numbers. What they were involved in is a lot of officework which has been automated away, and union-protected jobs that have now disappeared. Stuff like designing presentations now done in Powerpoint, typing up reports now autogenerated, doing typographical work now completely removed, manning and stocking a shop you can now bypass with Amazon, distributing products to such shops which are now gone, raising ads for now-dead newspapers, managing factory processes that are now in China, working for local authorities now so cash-strapped they're literally bankrupt...
The IP industry actually boomed in the late '90s, as the Internet was booming. We now produce more IP content than ever before, selling to the entire planet. I don't see any relationship whatsoever between IP and middle-class crisis, tbh. Disintermediation simply kills people in the middle. Some of those middlemen might have been IP-related, but they were few.
He was mainly talking about how hard it is for individuals to capture value they create online. For example, it's very difficult to make money off of a viral video, popular Pinterest page, or a niche blog. Basically, only the biggest silos have reasonable monetization options, and the individual users who are creating value get screwed.
I agree there's a technology gap there, as would anyone watching the adblocker war. My biggest criticism is economic: there are so many people online that massive supply dwarfs demand, pushing prices to zero (Exhibit A: journalism). Conveniently, zero is the only price you can really charge online, and you get a feedback loop.
Patreon is my favorite answer to this problem so far.
That problem is entirely disconnected from the concept of IP. Draconian enforcement would kill Internet virality, not enable anybody to make money from it.
The real problem is to incentivize payment. As Valve says, piracy is a service problem. First your service must be wanted, then it must be valuable enough to pay for, and payment has to be easy too.
The IP industry actually boomed in the late '90s, as the Internet was booming. We now produce more IP content than ever before, selling to the entire planet. I don't see any relationship whatsoever between IP and middle-class crisis, tbh. Disintermediation simply kills people in the middle. Some of those middlemen might have been IP-related, but they were few.