this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Reddit would probably never have existed without capitalism...
Yes because people never communicated over the Internet before Glorious Visionary Entrepreneurs from the Great Private Sector took hold of it and gave us all these Valuable Products, they just sat on their ass wondering what to do with such technology like complete idiots.
I swear free market ideology is the dumbest shit you can possibly believe in, I'd sooner become a fucking Mormon.
How would you have communicated without someone owning a server and paying for it? Reddit and other centralized platforms emerged for some reason... You would have to literally make that illegal, i.e. make it illegal to host your own server and let users use it.
You can't just imagine some fantasy utopia, and compare that to the current system.
You do realize the Internet first started being used by universities and the military, not the private sector, right? I see literally no reason why Internet infrastructure couldn't be publicly owned. It could function pretty much like any other public utility.
And would it have grown into more than that? Into something that everyone, and not just military and scientists can use?
Why not?
Sorry I just don't buy into the ideology that the free market has this kind of "magic sauce" that makes everything innovative and better.
The early Internet was filled of people doing all kinds of cool things for free just because it was interesting to do, the only thing the private sector did is provide the base infrastructure, this is something the state can easily do too. All kinds of communities, FOSS software and media popped up and none of them had VC funding or expected any money out of it.
It was only in mid-late 2000 that capital really sank its teeth into the Internet properly.
It did though? I don't know what point you think you're making but the internet did in fact grow from a technology limited to universities and the armed forces to a publicly accessible network, mostly off the back of publicly funded researchers and various techies that started their own neighborhood ISPs.
I'd probably have posted on one of the many voluntarily run forums that existed before reddit swallowed everything.
How would you have communicated without the telemasts installed and maintained by the state, which are now privatized and slowly falling apart?
A world without capitalism or Reddit. The sheer thought warms my heart. 🥰
The internet wouldn't exist without socialism lmao, and you wouldn't be able to type that idiotic statement without the state funded infrastructure that supports your internet connection.
The "free" market doesn't innovate, at the very best it creates redundancy.
Reddit itself began as a passion project made voluntarily, inspired by and built upon other similar projects.
Competition drives innovation. And capitalism has the most competition. This is not to say that socialism and capitalism are mutually exclusive though. The US, for example, is too capitalist for my liking but the free market there certainly does innovate.
A "social market economy" like Germany has it is pretty spot on IMO.
There is no proof for this, it's just something we like to say. There is also no real way to test it - Non competing versus competing? We can however look at historical and current examples. The Soviet Union led the space race, the Soviet Union made many innovations without the need for competition. Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the us and a stronger healthcare sector. China leads in published scientific journals. Both the Soviet Union and china eliminated famines. Both the Soviet Union and china drastically increased industrial productive capacity in decades - something that took capitalists more than a century.
Even if competition led to innovation, it also leads to incredible redundancy and waste. The idea that two people working against each other creates a better product than two people working with each other, is absurd. It has no basis in reality, it's just a vibes based thing we like to say. At best we end up with two similar products. Had they people collaborated we would have had the same amount of manpower focused on making one project - typically meaning higher quality, faster innovation. We highlight the times people choose to go against competition (The three-point-seatbelt, the Polio cure and insulin) as "good things" that had an immense influence. It is not a coincidence that when we choose to go against this competetive nature of capitalism, the gains are immense.
Competition drives specifically innovation that increases profits, which generally means making things more shit. Jeff Bezos innovated how to fuck over his workers so they could work harder for less. Uber innovated how it could fuck over taxi drivers. The tech firms innovated how to make walled gardens, and the hardware world at large innovated "planned obsolescence".
Germany's "social" market has a high amount of homeless people. It also has a high amount of underpaid immigrants being exploited for their labor. It relies - like all western capitalist states - on the exploitation of the third world as well.
They were very much competing (against the USA) in the space race, why else would it be called a "race"? There may be no proof for my statement about competition driving innovation but would you just innovate for the sake of innovating without any rewards? I would not...
Also, I do notice that monopolies tend to be less innovative than multiple competing businesses in a market.
2.Agreed but if something is completely redundanty it will die out in a capitalist market and more importantly, what would be the incentive to innovate at all if we had one monopoly?
Because it doesnt work like its supposed to, but from a theoretical point of view, they all have the right to food and shelter and everything they need to keep their dignity...