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Comment by nozzlegear

3 hours ago

> Kill the capitalist in your head.

Who referenced capitalism? And do anarchists, socialists, communists, et al., never question the usefulness of a thing either?

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nozzlegear

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asdff  3 hours ago

The difference is those groups promote culture for culture's sake. Capitalism does not. Culture is only promoted if there is profit to be made off promoting it. As such what culture exists is severely inorganic and dependent on market forces rather than being some proxy of the actual ideaspace of the community.

  • mghackerlady  2 hours ago

    well, to be pedantic, stalinist tendencies of socialism (and leninist inspired movements as a whole), tend to prioritise culture as a way to communicate the ideals of the party.

    Capitalism, in its most pure form, puts profit before anything else in any form of work

    • asdff  2 hours ago

      It isn't as heavy handed as people might have assumed. I can't find the exact quote now but there is one from a filmmaker saying they had more creative freedom under the USSR than the US. In the USSR there were some things you couldn't talk about directly but subtext was often fine. In the US there was that going on as well, but you also had the need for the film to make money and merchandize other downstream products and businesses that lead to a loss of absolute creative control in favor of supporting these efforts.

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Matl  3 hours ago

I mean it's not hard to understand where the author is coming from. It seems like these days even a hobby project has to meet some kind of 'is there a market for it' threshold of justifying its existence.

So your parent may've taken the 'is it useful' comments to mean 'if not, why even exist' but I got the sense they're more from people who are considering an install, even if just in a VM.