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Well, yes. Marxists also try to identify and solve these coordination problems, and their analysis is fundamentally one of class analysis. My claim isn't that t
by dannyobrien 1y ago
Well, yes. Marxists also try to identify and solve these coordination problems, and their analysis is fundamentally one of class analysis. My claim isn't that they aren't pursuing the answers to these problems: it's that there attempts to do so have notoriously failed. Which is fine: these are not easy problems. The best models for successful coordination, as you've described, all have negative externalities.
The point though, is that you really can stream off a laptop: we had BitTorrent; we have WebTorrent. We've built peer-to-peer infrastructure that works. In the last 25 years we have built great collective works with minimal capital outlay -- so minimal that we saw an explosion of capital investments because the returns to low capital were so high. Heck, you're using one of those low-capital, capital-adjacent artifacts right now.
In the class of problems, scaling up peer-to-peer collective action is (I would suggest) difficult, but not as difficult as it would have been to coordinate peer production in the 19th century. We've just barely begun to explore their potential.