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I'd like to point out something my sibling commenters seem to be missing; nopenopenopeno never suggested that the _government_ run these services instead. They

I'd like to point out something my sibling commenters seem to be missing; nopenopenopeno never suggested that the _government_ run these services instead. They said that private companies were incapable of doing this, and that competition was not a suitable mechanism for achieving the necessary outcomes. It is quite possible that neither the state nor private industry can do this, and that we need _something else_. I don't know what this is, it seems apparent to me that Mastodon-style, self hosted solutions are not tenable either, or perhaps their time has simply not come yet. But let us not limit our imagination to two broken options.

hutzlibu 5y ago
Non profit organisations could fill that gap. If proper financed directly by its users, otherwise they will go down the same path, if they get their money directly or indirectly from advertisement.
nopenopenopeno 5y ago
I appreciate your comment and I don’t mind putting my cards on the table: I am a Marxist. I believe in democratic institutions by the people and for the people. Capitalist states will never suffice. Social democracy is good, but unsustainable. Soviet Communism was a failure, but a single failure. Capitalism is a necessary step in human progress, but it cannot last. Libertarian solutions, as you propose, are no more idealistic than mine, but I don’t put my faith in them because ultimately we are social beings. We all live in a society, and we must attend to it as such. We need institutions by the people and for the people, and the great leaps in technological developments made by capitalist state funded programs in the past century (private companies did very little in comparison) give us a chance to reimagine a new future, but that can only happen by acknowledging the old one is dying, and already dead for for an increasing proportion of the working class. My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate. If if can’t work for all of our society, it can’t work for our society. Period. So, if we can figure out how to make it work for everybody, then it sounds like the answer to me. I suggest we start by fighting for a national universal healthcare program to undermine the first of the private interests that control our public goods. It will also incentivize development of democratic institutions of the working class and save millions of lives.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  We disagree a lot but I really like your post. Capitalism is a natural behaviour which emerge in human interactions. As you say, we're social animals and we interact with one another. The problem lies with the "capitalist" states which are not capitalism but crony capitalism, aka just socialism with extra steps. When a state with regulatory monopoly and a monopoly of violence exists, you can't have pure capitalism. Big businesses will just corrupt the government and you'll end up in a system where the top dogs can keep everyone else poor and under control - while still believing their democratic vote is worth anything. I don't think Marxism is a solution, for the simple reason that human beings are not perfect: they are corruptible and as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption. Marxism is great in theory, but in practice it just devolves to the same system we live in where top dogs eat small dogs. The shift we really need is decentralisation. No centralised governments. People trading with people and exchanging services and goods with no third parties stealing a part. Healthcare and protection (and private protection agencies offering different sets of laws) being sold and insured like any other services. Voluntary charity to help those in needs instead of mandatory taxes. We need to have the smallest entities possible so that there won't be someone far away deciding what you can and cannot do. In a world without taxes, big companies won't have ways of avoiding taxes and shift them to the upper middle class, they won't have someone to corrupt to prevent innovation. The answer for social networks is, again, decentralisation. The systems we have now (eg. mastodon) are still immature but, unless Facebook pay some government to introduce even more laws to comply with (GDPR comes to mind), a good decentralised competitors is going to come up, eventually. Everyone should have their own server with their own data and communicate with other users on their own servers.
  - thethrowaway87 5y ago
    Are you an anarchist? That sounds a lot like the ancap proposal, and I think this was one of the best pitches I've read for it. Respectful but also pretty convincing.
  - cheschire 5y ago
    "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." How do you create a self-reinforcing decentralized system that actively prevents centralization, to the point where no individual nor stand-alone complex can rise up? We have so much fiction produced talking about the capacity for life to find a way around limitations, artificial or natural. I cannot imagine anything other than utopian fantasy where full decentralization succeeds long term.
ajb 5y ago
Absolutely. As engineers, we don't reduce the world to a choice between two mechanisms, to be battled over with no hope of improvement. We are not divided into mongoites and postgresists, we are interested in new solutions and improvements. We should think of institutional design in the same way. How do institutions work? What are the options and how do they fit together? How do they affect the affordances and limitations of each? Politics should be limited to goals, it is a crap way to decide about methods.
- nopenopenopeno 5y ago
  Yes! But analyzing private companies is little use because ultimately they are authoritarian. That will somehow have to change.

hutzlibu 5y ago

Non profit organisations could fill that gap. If proper financed directly by its users, otherwise they will go down the same path, if they get their money directly or indirectly from advertisement.

nopenopenopeno 5y ago

I appreciate your comment and I don’t mind putting my cards on the table: I am a Marxist. I believe in democratic institutions by the people and for the people. Capitalist states will never suffice. Social democracy is good, but unsustainable. Soviet Communism was a failure, but a single failure. Capitalism is a necessary step in human progress, but it cannot last. Libertarian solutions, as you propose, are no more idealistic than mine, but I don’t put my faith in them because ultimately we are social beings. We all live in a society, and we must attend to it as such. We need institutions by the people and for the people, and the great leaps in technological developments made by capitalist state funded programs in the past century (private companies did very little in comparison) give us a chance to reimagine a new future, but that can only happen by acknowledging the old one is dying, and already dead for for an increasing proportion of the working class. My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate. If if can’t work for all of our society, it can’t work for our society. Period. So, if we can figure out how to make it work for everybody, then it sounds like the answer to me. I suggest we start by fighting for a national universal healthcare program to undermine the first of the private interests that control our public goods. It will also incentivize development of democratic institutions of the working class and save millions of lives.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
We disagree a lot but I really like your post. Capitalism is a natural behaviour which emerge in human interactions. As you say, we're social animals and we interact with one another. The problem lies with the "capitalist" states which are not capitalism but crony capitalism, aka just socialism with extra steps. When a state with regulatory monopoly and a monopoly of violence exists, you can't have pure capitalism. Big businesses will just corrupt the government and you'll end up in a system where the top dogs can keep everyone else poor and under control - while still believing their democratic vote is worth anything. I don't think Marxism is a solution, for the simple reason that human beings are not perfect: they are corruptible and as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption. Marxism is great in theory, but in practice it just devolves to the same system we live in where top dogs eat small dogs. The shift we really need is decentralisation. No centralised governments. People trading with people and exchanging services and goods with no third parties stealing a part. Healthcare and protection (and private protection agencies offering different sets of laws) being sold and insured like any other services. Voluntary charity to help those in needs instead of mandatory taxes. We need to have the smallest entities possible so that there won't be someone far away deciding what you can and cannot do. In a world without taxes, big companies won't have ways of avoiding taxes and shift them to the upper middle class, they won't have someone to corrupt to prevent innovation. The answer for social networks is, again, decentralisation. The systems we have now (eg. mastodon) are still immature but, unless Facebook pay some government to introduce even more laws to comply with (GDPR comes to mind), a good decentralised competitors is going to come up, eventually. Everyone should have their own server with their own data and communicate with other users on their own servers.
- thethrowaway87 5y ago
  Are you an anarchist? That sounds a lot like the ancap proposal, and I think this was one of the best pitches I've read for it. Respectful but also pretty convincing.
- cheschire 5y ago
  "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." How do you create a self-reinforcing decentralized system that actively prevents centralization, to the point where no individual nor stand-alone complex can rise up? We have so much fiction produced talking about the capacity for life to find a way around limitations, artificial or natural. I cannot imagine anything other than utopian fantasy where full decentralization succeeds long term.

ajb 5y ago

Absolutely. As engineers, we don't reduce the world to a choice between two mechanisms, to be battled over with no hope of improvement. We are not divided into mongoites and postgresists, we are interested in new solutions and improvements. We should think of institutional design in the same way. How do institutions work? What are the options and how do they fit together? How do they affect the affordances and limitations of each? Politics should be limited to goals, it is a crap way to decide about methods.

nopenopenopeno 5y ago
Yes! But analyzing private companies is little use because ultimately they are authoritarian. That will somehow have to change.