I'm a left-anarchist. I tend to find a lot of political & economic perspectives I see on here naive: folks have a faith in market solutions without a coherent

I'm a left-anarchist. I tend to find a lot of political & economic perspectives I see on here naive: folks have a faith in market solutions without a coherent understanding of how markets operate and under what circumstances the things markets optimize for conflict with the functioning of healthy societies; folks also have a pretty warped understanding of what certain things mean. (For instance: it's perfectly possible to have a fully communist society with free markets, although there are some issues with the stability of any system that uses markets.) My support of free software has little to do with my political leanings, other than it being a product of a general absence of the kind of counterproductive overconfidence endemic to the right (i.e., the stuff I write in my free time doesn't have a wide enough audience to constitute a profitable business, so there's no benefit in not giving it away, especially since I can ignore patches or feature requests). Free software has a political & economic impact, but it's more complicated than people generally admit: large companies are subsidized by the free labor of individual hobbyists who have been conned into shaping their personal projects in ways that make them useful to those large companies. (My personal projects are not just fringe but also idiosyncratic -- they are useful mostly only to me -- so nobody's liable to profit off them even if they have a stable of other projects to synergize them with.) Software design & software engineering can be an important component of good praxis. I try to reflect my ideals in the software I write.