Comment by martin-t
1 day ago
It's actually not rhetorical - I really wanna know what leads to this to-me-obvious contradiction.
One answer is obvious - every organization's primary goal is its own survival. So a democratic state will indoctrinate ("educate") children into believing democracy is the right way. But no school teaches about corporate power structures and cooperatives are so rare that they have little influence on the curriculum.
What I absolutely hated was for example when Microsoft opened an extra curricular program for students to teach them some tech skills and some soft skills and (in exchange?) they were allowed to hang posters promoting their products at school. Linux does not have the money or organizational capacity to do this kind of thing so the entrenched players have a massive advantage.
> The VC era
As a gamedev, this reminds me of how the metagame shifts as the collective playerbase learns the rules of a game - what works and what doesn't. Step 1) IRL you need to build something valuable and you get paid according to how much value you produced. 2) Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work. 3) And now people realized when you have enough money you can just buy those power structures from step 2 wholesale. Oh and you can buy up housing and take a third of someone's salary too.
A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce. This would completely invert those power structures. Need marketing? You as a positive-sum worker hire those zero-sum workers.
But we're heading in the opposite direction instead. All intellectual work has now been stolen and it being resold to people who produced it in the first place.
And then you straight up have people who wanna replace even physical workers with robots. And they sell it to people by claiming they will no longer need to work, which sounds great. Until you realize that up until that point the rich zero-summers at least still needed positive-sum workers. Even governments needed humans to oppress other humans...
> tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs
Yep. "We" (technically long before I entered the workforce) had all the power and slowly gave it away because we were interested in the cool tech we were making and not the power struggle that the people who only extract value from us are so good at.
> building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value
I'd like to see a graph of the percentage of people whose work is positive-, zero- and negative-sum over time. Because I suspect the latter two are growing rapidly.
> Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work
This is just a classic mistake: failing to account for risk as a significant input. Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their money to get it going, possibly long before any profit is made.
> A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce.
If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?
> Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their money to get it going
Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here:
a) Rich but not obscenely so - you can save up enough from normal work to get enough runway to start a small company which grows organically - you get a few really good people (who might even accept a lower salary than they could command it a corporation just because they want to work on something meaningful for once) and/or you do a lot of the work yourself. Then you keep building until you get income or run out of money. Factorio is a great example of this approach succeeding - but even they needed to use Indiegogo at one point and were close to not making it.
b) Those obscenely rich - those who have more money than a single person could make from positive-sum work, no matter how skilled. (Art/sport/showbusiness are interesting exceptions but are they really positive sum?) These people have so much money they don't care if they lose it sometimes, as long as they multiply it sometimes. If you fund 10 companies, each with 10% chance of success, only 1 needs to make it and give you >10x return on investment. If you own an apartment complex with 30 people and take a third of each person's salary, you can afford to fund a company of 10 people indefinitely.
As a result, the obscenely rich get a much higher chance to succeed, in turn owning more companies, in turn getting more rich.
> If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?
Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should. It should be distributed based on the amount of work, skill required, competence, etc.
It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.
> Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.
Of course they are; if someone's going to get money from VCs they risk their reputation in asking for it.
> Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here: (Rich/obscenely rich)
No - lots of VCs represent large pools of money including pension funds that service giant numbers of people. Your "rich" company example, Factio, is about the silliest example I can imagine of a capital-intensive business. Your "obscenely rich" example isn't really about money any more, but so few people are like this it doesn't really affect anything.
> It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.
It's impossible to tell if it's worse, as you haven't described it yet. It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.
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