this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
1422 points (95.3% liked)
linuxmemes
21304 readers
719 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudo in Windows.
- No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's a route of exploitation. FOSS developers aren't often paid for their labor, and what they produce is often commodified by capital. Products of people's leisure are exploited basically, and they justify it through this moral framework, but no class dynamics are impacted and actually the opposite, they become reified even more.
If Linux or foss had the ability to impact political economy in some communist way we'd have seen it by now, so this is like a deus ex machina myth for tech hobbyists to elevate themselves, an evangelical tech religion. As a Marxist myself this stuff just makes me laugh, the irony of a creature like Bill Gates calling something communist and embracing it with pride.
If you want to put faith in technology and the internet changing the world for the better, just realize since the dawn of all this stuff wealth inequality and economic stresses have only increased until a full blown crisis in 2008 of the consenting economic model. Now as these stresses turn inward we see it culminating in what we might call neofascism.
Capitalism subsumes, that's no surprise and that's a function of it, it's nothing specific to technology, you can buy Das Kapital at amazon.com now and you could buy it in a book shop run by capitalists before. Disco Elysium while fiction - has excellent commentary on this as well when it comes to critiques.
Technology is value agnostic, more obvious than ever with information age era tech, but at least in my experience, it has done way more good than bad, I don't think I'd be alive without the internet honestly and the efforts of FOSS and the culture of information sharing and all of it has been to the detriment of both cultural and capital control.
The thought that I'd pay for media is something scary and otherworldly, the thought I'd be gatekept from accessing certain information instead of just being able to find info I'd be dead without.
Just as income inequality has widened (which is not as a consequence of any specific technology anyway turn of the 20th century was far worse) , and the reactionaries get more brazen, we see global class consciousness on a scale previously unseen and the openness of the average person to progressive ideas and critiques of the establishment.
Gates didn't embrace Linux, MS did after him and their "embrace,extend,extinguish" approach failed massively, for every FOSS project that gets taken over by capital there are so many more that don't and can't.
We're on one right now, I would like to believe. Time will tell of course. But your doomerism while entertaining is counterproductive. I think it's okay to be indifferent, but to actually actively advocate FOSS as politically useless is just doing the capitalists' demoralization for them.