On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 03:56:14PM -0500, Todd Walton wrote: > On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 12:14 PM, Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The whole picture, as I see it, is that an unintended side affect of the > > availability of home computers is that people are gaining the means to > > produce content of all kinds. > > It wasn't unintended. The internet was designed this way, but the designers were probably thinking of universities and government applications. Technology advanced, pcs and workstations won over mainframes, common people got computers, and the internet grew. The designers of the internet are not the same people who sell computers and internet service, and the battle over net neutrality proves that the internet as it is today is not the internet that the corporations would like it to be. That is why I think the internet, in the public sector, at least, can be said to be an unintented development.
> Capitalism != Consumerism No, but they are intrinsically related. That is, however, besides the point. The fundamental rule of capitalism is competition. When people become producers, whether free software hackers, independent musicians, or whatever, their golden rule is often cooporation. They collaborate on thier works and release thier products under terms that allow future ideas to be built off thier efforts. The two are polar opposites, and its not surprising that its often hard to integrate the smaller cooporative communities into the competitive framework of our economic system, to make money with GPL'ed code, for example. > Community is profit. Care to elaborate? Profit is the difference between what the employees of a company are paid and the value they produce. This difference goes to the 'owners' of the corporation to which the employees belong, people who, because of thier legal position, did not have to do any work to recieve that surplus value. These owners are, in a sense, robbing the community. Even if that value was not taken from the people who produced it, the objective of the corporation is not the benefit of the community, the sustainable production of its goods and ecological preservation, or any other lofty objective. The objective is money, and any benefit to the community that arises from its pursuit is unintended, incidental. A corporation would just as easily destroy the world as save it, deliberating by means of a cost-benefit analysis. -- Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key ID: 2B01DD81 Keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
