Comment by throwaway13337
1 month ago
It's about control.
Our tools are an extension of us as humans. When someone else is in control of those tools, it is alienating.
Modern software is built to make us not masters of our own tools. Like your hand sometimes works for a corporation against your will. I guess that same pattern is also called a job. But the worst kind of job. The one you do without choice.
A happier future is one with humans in control over their own tools and their own livelihoods. That's software with the user's choice at the center and independent work that connects us to eachother by being in genuine service to one another.
I think this manifesto is getting to this idea but from a different angle.
It's the extractive rent seeking monopoly playbook that seeks to undermine it. Only in captive, monopolized markets are companies able to force the use of tools we don't control.
> A happier future is one with humans in control over their own tools and their own livelihoods.
People should own the product of their work and owning companies should be illegal.
Every good product starts as somebody's weekend project or and experiment with a buddy in the garage. Then they start getting users and making money. And then they sell it and the new owner ruins is.
Molecules form cells, cells form humans, humans form organizations. Slavery is illegal, yet it's legal to own a group of humans, replace parts against the group's will and order the group to do something against their will. Owning companies is just an abstraction built to replace slavery with enough indirection that people don't object.