A lot of people think that mastodon/the fediverse and capitalism are in opposition. In my opinion, capitalism is a requirement to create mastodon and the fediverse. That's why it was produced in a capitalist country, like virtually all open source software.
The thing is, capitalism is private ownership and wealth and the means of production and freedom to trade.
Sometimes, this means that rich sociopaths do every evil thing they can to extract the maximum amount of wealth from a thing before leaving it a useless husk. There's no debating that. It surrounds us.
On the other hand, for some people that means they take their resources and use it to produce common goods like open source software, because people are more than just a series of economic requirements.
This freedom is the source of the technologies we're using to discuss this. Large companies were perfect happy making money off of corporate and government contracts for mainframes, so they didn't care much about the idea of personal computers. Individuals who saw the potential for a personal computer quit their jobs at those companies and created new companies like MOS who created the famous 6502 which in contrast to Motorola was aimed at being low cost for home users, and companies like Apple and Commodore that produced personal computers when if you asked a central planner if you could make these things and give them out then they'd say no -- we know this because that's exactly what happened.
We've also got this entire ecosystem within capitalism of people spending the resources they personally control to create common goods they want, the fediverse is a perfect example -- I've got regular users on the FBXL network sites, and they're happy to be using the sites and I'm happy to have them, and I'll never make a penny from them because that's not the point. I'm sure that the instances you're on is largely the same, people who have private control and ownership of their own things going out and using that ownership to make the world better. The programmers who write open source software even the organizations that contribute to it (and there's lots of big companies that contribute) are all contributing privately owned capital to these commons, and that's pretty awesome.
The fundamental thing here, is that they were free to own and control the capital means of production (as in the computers they used). If they had to go ask a commissar then it's likely none of these projects would have happened. Capitalism isn't the driving force behind these projects, but it's the framework that allows individual people with ideas to go out and spend resources that might otherwise be spent on something the state or the tribe wants on what an individual wants.
Right wing capitalists tend to believe that people are generally bad and need to be civilized. Left wing utopians tend to believe that people are generally good and need to be unobstructed from making them bad, and both are wrong. In each of us we have a whole library of things we could be built into our DNA. Memories of being successful by being antisocial, and memories of being successful by being prosocial. Both are built into our capacity as human beings, and so when we are free to engage in what we would engage in, we generally do both.
The thing is, capitalism is private ownership and wealth and the means of production and freedom to trade.
Sometimes, this means that rich sociopaths do every evil thing they can to extract the maximum amount of wealth from a thing before leaving it a useless husk. There's no debating that. It surrounds us.
On the other hand, for some people that means they take their resources and use it to produce common goods like open source software, because people are more than just a series of economic requirements.
This freedom is the source of the technologies we're using to discuss this. Large companies were perfect happy making money off of corporate and government contracts for mainframes, so they didn't care much about the idea of personal computers. Individuals who saw the potential for a personal computer quit their jobs at those companies and created new companies like MOS who created the famous 6502 which in contrast to Motorola was aimed at being low cost for home users, and companies like Apple and Commodore that produced personal computers when if you asked a central planner if you could make these things and give them out then they'd say no -- we know this because that's exactly what happened.
We've also got this entire ecosystem within capitalism of people spending the resources they personally control to create common goods they want, the fediverse is a perfect example -- I've got regular users on the FBXL network sites, and they're happy to be using the sites and I'm happy to have them, and I'll never make a penny from them because that's not the point. I'm sure that the instances you're on is largely the same, people who have private control and ownership of their own things going out and using that ownership to make the world better. The programmers who write open source software even the organizations that contribute to it (and there's lots of big companies that contribute) are all contributing privately owned capital to these commons, and that's pretty awesome.
The fundamental thing here, is that they were free to own and control the capital means of production (as in the computers they used). If they had to go ask a commissar then it's likely none of these projects would have happened. Capitalism isn't the driving force behind these projects, but it's the framework that allows individual people with ideas to go out and spend resources that might otherwise be spent on something the state or the tribe wants on what an individual wants.
Right wing capitalists tend to believe that people are generally bad and need to be civilized. Left wing utopians tend to believe that people are generally good and need to be unobstructed from making them bad, and both are wrong. In each of us we have a whole library of things we could be built into our DNA. Memories of being successful by being antisocial, and memories of being successful by being prosocial. Both are built into our capacity as human beings, and so when we are free to engage in what we would engage in, we generally do both.
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I tend to think of western European economies as capitalist, even though they do tend to have more robust welfare states. Perhaps less capitalist than they could be, but on the balance still capitalist.
I tend to agree that these businessmen won't be remembered well by this generation, but recall that Nobel, Cargenie, and Rockefeller are remembered for their philanthropy more than for their cutthroat capitalism, history has a way of changing the story in ways we don't expect.
I tend to agree that these businessmen won't be remembered well by this generation, but recall that Nobel, Cargenie, and Rockefeller are remembered for their philanthropy more than for their cutthroat capitalism, history has a way of changing the story in ways we don't expect.