D. G. Fitch (@dgfitch@kolektiva.social)

146d

SF writer @KarlSchroeder with a thought experiment on robots and shoplifting: https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/should-a-teslabot-shoplift

this frame may help you think about #capitalism, property ownership, the commons, privacy, and who benefits from laws.

under capitalism, it's always been punishable to steal to survive, but there's never *really* been punishment for ramping up oppression to maximally extract from people, aka steal from people. [see wage theft for example...] we need to think hard about this problem and act to change it, and uh, MORE PUNISHMENT is not the fix!!

(also, if we step outside of Thought Experiment Land, I will be truly shocked if autonomous robots work well enough and are cheap enough to produce in my lifetime that non-elites will own them as anything beyond a toy or attempted status marker, but you sure never do know)

Edited 146d ago

1 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original

146d

@dgfitch @KarlSchroeder

A lot of people view the cruelty of capitalism as just a straight forward consequence of market incentives: profit maximization, arbitrage of information asymmetry, etc.

This is definitely true, but it's also a consequence of the unholy marriage of markets to (state-enforced) property rights. A straightforward view of market incentives under capitalism necessarily reveals that capitalist competition involves expanding the domains under which property rights apply.

Snippet of a draft blog post about capitalism. The author expresses that capitalism and markets are not the same thing. Markets are about distribution and capitalism is about ownership of the means of production.

ALT

1 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original

146d

@dgfitch @KarlSchroeder

“Enclosure” is one of the default modes of capitalism. Capture or otherwise subject some space to the logic of a specific set of private interests so that rent (or profits) can be derived.

That's what's behind #enshitification, #DRM creep destroying the #righttorepair, the growth of #arbitration, and the explosion of the "access" and #gigeconomy

Only solace is that this is very much so a political project and not the natural state of things. We can fight back.

0 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original