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Anyone reading history or following world news will be well aware of that "power corrupts." Period. Capitalism is merely the modern fast means to power but even

Anyone reading history or following world news will be well aware of that "power corrupts." Period. Capitalism is merely the modern fast means to power but even so its far from the only one. Kings are morally corrupt, politicians are morally corrupt, click bait thought leaders are morally corrupt, cult leaders are morally corrupt, etc, etc. There is always some proxy for social status and power which people will quiet literally kill for. Nowadays it's mostly money or at least it's the most accessible one.

EGreg 3y ago
So the answer is to distribute power and not let it concentrate. The best is a gift economy with no profit motive. It creates more value for the world than its capitalist counterparts: 1) Wikipedia vs Britannica, Encarta, et al 2) VoIP vs Telcos 3) Linux vs closed systems like Sun, etc. 4) World Wide Web based on open protocols vs AOL, MSN, Compuserve They beat them within a decade. Gopher was good but started trying to use the government to control its licensing. It lost. Now, if you need an accounting system, that rewards ecosystem participants for storage, hosting, uptime/availability, computation, security, translating, moderating, whatever, then use decentralized crypto utility tokens based on open protocols. Micropayments can be done peer to peer via trustlines. It’s the proper use case for crypto. And it beats the current system of financing projects because the end result is more like 1) Ethereum for business logic 2) IPFS for storage etc. vs Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other centralized things. The rest — realtime chats, video, endless doomscrolling feeds it’s all gimmicks designed to get you addicted to centralized control. It’s not good for healthy society. Frankly, neither are celebrities who can tweet to 5 million followers at 3 in the morning. In true gift economies like Science, Wikipedia, Open Source software etc. people actually have to run the gauntlet of peer review for the privilege of having their ideas reach the public. That’s how it should be. Not polluting the public with mindless advertisement and smut and one sided news stories radicalizing them to hate and wars. Think about it. https://rational.app https://rational.app also goes into more detail on the economics of how we got here and how to get out.
- deleted 3y ago
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- marcinzm 3y ago
  Reddit and Wikipedia both get complaints for the abuse of power by power users or mods. They both work (well up to now for Reddit) because there's an absolute admin group bound through a corporate governance structure to step in when needed. Without that you get shit. >Science There's a reason for the saying "science moves forward one funeral at a time." Those with power block those who do not have power from competing with them until they literally die of old age.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    Also, peer review is not something people go through for the joy of it. Academia and many corporations will literally not hire or promote you unless you go through it. Publishing and conference entities will not publicize your finding unless you go through it and historically without the internet that was the only real way to get publicity. In other words corporate power structures are forcing you to play the game or they will effectively block you from being able to do science professionally. So that seems a pretty poor example of non-corporate power structures.
ziftface 3y ago
I agree with you, but I think when people complain about "capitalism" today, what they mean essentially is "greed", meaning profits above all other concerns. Obviously that's not the precise definition of capitalism, but I see that as an example of spoken language evolving over time.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  My point is that greed always exists with or without capitalism. Many attempts over the last 150 years have been made under the assumption that "capitalism" is the problem and they all failed because "greed" is the problem. If you remove "capitalism" then people will simply find a new means to satisfy their "greed" because people are rather clever actually.

EGreg 3y ago

So the answer is to distribute power and not let it concentrate. The best is a gift economy with no profit motive. It creates more value for the world than its capitalist counterparts: 1) Wikipedia vs Britannica, Encarta, et al 2) VoIP vs Telcos 3) Linux vs closed systems like Sun, etc. 4) World Wide Web based on open protocols vs AOL, MSN, Compuserve They beat them within a decade. Gopher was good but started trying to use the government to control its licensing. It lost. Now, if you need an accounting system, that rewards ecosystem participants for storage, hosting, uptime/availability, computation, security, translating, moderating, whatever, then use decentralized crypto utility tokens based on open protocols. Micropayments can be done peer to peer via trustlines. It’s the proper use case for crypto. And it beats the current system of financing projects because the end result is more like 1) Ethereum for business logic 2) IPFS for storage etc. vs Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other centralized things. The rest — realtime chats, video, endless doomscrolling feeds it’s all gimmicks designed to get you addicted to centralized control. It’s not good for healthy society. Frankly, neither are celebrities who can tweet to 5 million followers at 3 in the morning. In true gift economies like Science, Wikipedia, Open Source software etc. people actually have to run the gauntlet of peer review for the privilege of having their ideas reach the public. That’s how it should be. Not polluting the public with mindless advertisement and smut and one sided news stories radicalizing them to hate and wars. Think about it. https://rational.app https://rational.app also goes into more detail on the economics of how we got here and how to get out.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
marcinzm 3y ago
Reddit and Wikipedia both get complaints for the abuse of power by power users or mods. They both work (well up to now for Reddit) because there's an absolute admin group bound through a corporate governance structure to step in when needed. Without that you get shit. >Science There's a reason for the saying "science moves forward one funeral at a time." Those with power block those who do not have power from competing with them until they literally die of old age.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Also, peer review is not something people go through for the joy of it. Academia and many corporations will literally not hire or promote you unless you go through it. Publishing and conference entities will not publicize your finding unless you go through it and historically without the internet that was the only real way to get publicity. In other words corporate power structures are forcing you to play the game or they will effectively block you from being able to do science professionally. So that seems a pretty poor example of non-corporate power structures.

ziftface 3y ago

I agree with you, but I think when people complain about "capitalism" today, what they mean essentially is "greed", meaning profits above all other concerns. Obviously that's not the precise definition of capitalism, but I see that as an example of spoken language evolving over time.

marcinzm 3y ago
My point is that greed always exists with or without capitalism. Many attempts over the last 150 years have been made under the assumption that "capitalism" is the problem and they all failed because "greed" is the problem. If you remove "capitalism" then people will simply find a new means to satisfy their "greed" because people are rather clever actually.