Ask HN: Any Leftist/Socialist/* Techies Here? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any Leftist/Socialist/* Techies Here?

5 pointsbjourne3 comments

In honor of the day (yesterday in some time zones), May 1st, International worker's day, I want to ask if there are any of the above mentioned on HN?! :) I'm "kind of" a Socialist, but I disagree with many traditional Socialist views. Always hard to put a "label" on your opinions. Those views are one of the reasons (in addition to love for programming) that I like free software. Always hoped that fs would make the world more egalitarian. But it has not happened. In fact, perhaps free tech is making the world more unequal? If there are any other Leftist/Socialist/* techies I wonder what your perspectives are? Not only on fs but also in general.

* - The star is because there are so many different labels so you can't enumerate them all. Choose which one you like.

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I am a mix.

Sometimes the profit motive and market dynamics work against what are civilized, just and humane outcomes. The incentives run in conflict with ethics and morality. (In general)

Health care, at least primary care, is an easy example. Fire, police, etc. Are others.

Socializing these things makes great sense. Our poor outcomes and insane cost and citizen risk exposure stand easily in support of those ideas being strong.

Things like utilities, water, power, vary. I have seen excellent private examples and where I live, public examples are working well. There are poor examples all over the place. More work and better priorities are needed, IMHO.

I favor public infrastructure too. The Interstate highway project served us well. That model applied to the needs of today would pay us again, just as nicely.

Markets are awesome! Where we do not have those conflicts, we should use them.

Where it is a luxury, light regulation makes sense.

Where it is more necessary, or there are clear risks, incentives or problems with competition, more regulation makes sense.

I do not like big monopolies, sans strong regulation. Rent seeking and low value for high dollars do not make sense.

There you go. A rough lay of the land, from one tech minded persons POV.

I'm a left-anarchist.

I tend to find a lot of political & economic perspectives I see on here naive: folks have a faith in market solutions without a coherent understanding of how markets operate and under what circumstances the things markets optimize for conflict with the functioning of healthy societies; folks also have a pretty warped understanding of what certain things mean. (For instance: it's perfectly possible to have a fully communist society with free markets, although there are some issues with the stability of any system that uses markets.)

My support of free software has little to do with my political leanings, other than it being a product of a general absence of the kind of counterproductive overconfidence endemic to the right (i.e., the stuff I write in my free time doesn't have a wide enough audience to constitute a profitable business, so there's no benefit in not giving it away, especially since I can ignore patches or feature requests).

Free software has a political & economic impact, but it's more complicated than people generally admit: large companies are subsidized by the free labor of individual hobbyists who have been conned into shaping their personal projects in ways that make them useful to those large companies. (My personal projects are not just fringe but also idiosyncratic -- they are useful mostly only to me -- so nobody's liable to profit off them even if they have a stable of other projects to synergize them with.)

Software design & software engineering can be an important component of good praxis. I try to reflect my ideals in the software I write.

Ideology is no match for entropy. Best response I can come up with is to be still and rely upon providence.

Software is another tool. Regardless of the initial intentions, it is only a matter of time before a Zuck or a Parker picks it up and uses it to abuse people.

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