The New Socialism
wired.com
wired.com
- You work for free, and should work for free.
- You sharing your programming is equated with sharing whatever non-sense on Flickr and Twitter.
- Collective action and sharing is always positive, even if it erodes privacy and strictly gains commercial 3rd parties, because it's "culture".
In short, your ideals and ideas are being co-opted by large businesses and pundits, and in return you get to be part of "a movement" that might not benefit you.
Please be aware of that when large corporations "warm up" towards open source, or when pundits proclaim that, in effect, you should be more "pragmatic" and go with the flow or miss out on the revolution.
In contrast, Free Software, even if considered crusty and old-fashioned, is about one thing: respecting the freedoms of users.
That single thing can facilitate making great, fun communities; it can create a solid basis to boost commerce and enhance capitalism; it can serve to prop up your libertarian Utopia. It can help with all these things and many more, but it is none of these things.
That just isn't feasible most of the time for Free Software. If you want to profit from Free Software, you have to design both the software and your business model around the license. With liberally licensed software, you just use it.
And yes, it certainly benefits other companies, but is that really the bad thing? I'll work on something if it benefits me, and if it benefits someone else too, that's fantastic. I don't care if it nets me hundreds while netting someone else millions, I'm still getting hundreds.
I used to build stuff to be "part of the community", but that's less important to be now than building stuff because it benefits me. There are a million projects I could involve myself in, so now I'm just a bit more selective on what I contribute to.
Graffiti isn't socialist just because it's done gratis and relatively collectively. In fact, it could be considered as capitalist because it's essentially advertising (in many cases). Donation-based museums aren't socialist because they offer free entry, they're still run by a small, exclusive group and have essentially decided on a different business model.
Likewise, open source and free software isn't necessarily "socialist", and it may not even necessarily be collectivist. Essentially, open source software gives up state protections and adds limitations of its own. In that sense, I'd argue that open source and free software are more laissez-faire than collectivist, since their license terms are often what you'd get if there were no government providing copyright protections (especially for liberal licenses like MIT).
Any software project could be collectivist if it chooses, but that has more to do with the organization governing maintainence of the codebase than the license it uses. For example, RedHat is very centralized and commercial and Debian is very democratic, yet they both use the same GPL license. Likewise, the Go project is very centralised and the Rust project is a bit more Democratic, yet they both use liberal licenses.
So no, socialism is not a good word to describe open source or free software licenses or even the community as a whole, though it could be a decent term for specific projects.
"Socialism" is notoriously challenging to define, but you can't have it mean whatever you want it to mean.
* Please talk to the US Republican Part and tell them to stop lying.
When someone (especially a Democrat) brings up universal healthcare, the GOP says "that's socialism!". When free tuition is brought up: "that's socialism!". Universal daycare: "that's socialism!". Carbon pricing: "socialism!". Higher taxes on upper income to pay for social programs: "socialism!".
The GOP has thrown the word "socialism" around as a boogeyman to the point that it is now meaningless in the US:
* https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/defining-s...
This isn't the 1950s anymore.
The problem is not with the author's (Kevin Kelly [1]) use of the word, nor necessarily with the policies that are being proposed by some (left-leaning) politicians, but with the fact that the GOP (as a party) does not participate in US politics in good faith.
* [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_(editor)
Edit: Case in point, McConnell called granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico “full bore socialism” in a Fox News interview just this week:
* https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mitch-mcconnell-dem-d-c-sta...
Do the Rs really think that, or do they simply say "socialism!" because they've trained their base and some independents to think (socialism = bad)?
Centrailly planned economies generally don't work, and I wouldn't want actual socialism for most things where I live. But if you don't like a particular policy, argue the pros/cons of that policy instead of trying to 'slander' it.
A lot of people in the US want affordable health care, and there are various ways to implement that, but if you label them all as "socialism", then people will end up "wanting" socialism.
Sure. And my argument/thesis is that this confusion is a deliberate tactic by Right-leaning politicians. McConnell called granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico, “full bore socialism” in a Fox News interview just this week:
* https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mitch-mcconnell-dem-d-c-sta...
WTF?
I don't know what "full bore socialism" means to him, but socialism in general has a different definition for politicians than academics. For example, I'd consider the US to be more socialist (in the academic sense) than Scandinavian countries in many ways, yet people like Bernie Sanders use the term to describe policies they'd like to adopt from Scandinavia.
Both sides get it wrong, with the right labeling everything they don't like with it, and the left trying to make the term more palatable, yet they both use it completely incorrectly. For some reason, when most people say "communism" they mean "socialism" and when they say "socialism" they mean "progressivism". Likewise for the opposite end of the current spectrum, where by saying "fascism" they mean "nationalism" and/or "protectionism", and by "nationalism" they mean "patriotism". Basically, they'll say whatever will get the biggest emotional impact, even if it's completely false (but has been used similarly in the past).
Neither side cares about actual definitions of words, they just care about how the public feels about them.
I wish we could change politics to be more of a "roundtable discussion" with the discussion topic being some tangible problem, and each political group promoting some solution with a list of pros and cons. You'd them vote for candidates based on their ability to make rational arguments, not party affiliation.
But no, we don't live in a reasonable world, so we'll have an ongoing mudslinging match where occasionally good policy gets passed. In this world, I hope for a deadlock in Congress because we get good policy so infrequently.
I am not arguing for/against socialism, nor am I arguing for/against particular policies. I am simply saying that Right-leaning politicians have been throwning around "socialism" to the point that in the US, for the general public, it's basically lost its meaning. This has been going on for decades:
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/20/republica...
> In particular, it analyses conservative Republican rhetoric and the strong emphasis associated with the socialist label, especially how the socialist label is employed as a critique against the New Deal and its ongoing political legacy – the modern American welfare state. I compare the difference in how conservative Republicans employ the socialist label in the context of being the majority party, as well as of being the minority party.
Why exactly do you want people to 'come at you'?
I'm saying that the GOP has thrown around the term "socialism" for so many things that the term has become confusing when it comes to American political discourse.
The technical meaning has not changed ("public ownership of the means of productions"), but the day-to-day definition in regular conversion has become next to useless.
It's not that one "should feel bound to that definition", but rather one is bound to that definition unless you, in the middle of a conversation, make sure you clarify what you mean by that word. Because otherwise Joe Plumber and you will be talking about two different things, even though both of you would be using the same word.
It's kind of like talking about "feminism": it means so many things to so many people that, unless you define terms at the beginning of a conversation/debate, it's probable that folks will be talking about completely different ideas when invoking the word.
I'm guessing they use it because the public doesn't really understand the term. It's like "communism" was anything that happened in Asia that related to the USSR and "socialism" is anything the Democrats want that they don't, when it's more correct to say that the stuff that happened in Asia was socialist (under a communist ideology), and the stuff Democrats want is progressive (shifting taxes more toward the rich) as opposed to regressive (shifting taxes more toward the poor). However, "progressive" is too close to "progress" and obviously Republicans don't want to be seen even more as "going backwards", and that's certainly the message you get from the left.
I just wish politics focused on the pros and cons of a policy, not on name calling and getting support because the other side is "worse". I like a lot of policies from both sides of the aisle (and likewise hate a lot from both), and I just want to know why a candidate supports a given policy and whether they've put in the time to know whether it would help or hurt their constituents (rather than party image/unity).
I could not live off my website being free, I have a day job.
And as the author says, open source advocates tend to be more libertarian.
And also as the author said, using 'socialism' will make people cringe. Yes, because the author is trying very hard to find 'digital' socialism.
Socialism and Communism are specifically to do with shared ownership and control of capital resources. Feely choosing to give things away isn't socialism, or inherently anti-capitalist. It's simply the exercise of one of the freedoms of private ownership of one's goods or labour - the freedom to share it or give it away.
Yes, but know-how of all sorts - including both the freely-available content of sites such as Wikipedia and the institutional frameworks that are themselves embedded in the computer code of e.g. MediaWiki, Mastodon, PixelFed and PeerTube - is a form of capital, too. In a way, the article is not exactly wrong; it's just that this instance of socialism - along with a few others, such as socialization of basic, monopolized "platforms" on a rigorously neutral basis - postal services, roads, railways, power-grids etc. etc. - is the only one that can possibly work as part of a wealth-creating society. "Communal ... shared spaces" are capital in the "capitalist" sense, as much as a privately-owned factory is.
Political and economic socialism is predicated on the principle that individual ownership is immoral, because resources should belong to society. This is why socialists are against the individual, or even collective ownership of companies by shareholders because that's still private ownership. For them the sole legitimate owner is 'society' as a whole, which in practice means the state.
That's what genuine socialists believe in and campaign for, which would of course threaten the freedom of individuals to build something like Wikipedia. That's because they would not have individual ownership of the capital resources contributed towards it. The decision about allocating those resources would reside with the state, not individuals as free agents. Paradoxically, universal collective ownership dramatically limits freedom to organise collectively without state sponsorship. That's why you see communist and socialist countries cracking down on grass roots movements. They challenge the legitimacy of the state.
(Monopoly platforms are in kind of an intermediate position where what we want to avoid is simply for "the decision to allocate these resources" to be subject to the sorts of favoritism, opportunistic behavior and inefficiency that tend to come with monopolized private ownership. In practice, this is a weird case where public ownership turns out to work quite well; especially if the monopolization can be efficiently kept to a very local level, so that users are still incented to "vote with their feet" for the very best provider. All in all, it's not that different from capitalistic provision while avoiding some really obvious pitfalls of entirely-private models.)
Capitalism has provided a structure to create and sustain such services, while socialism fails to do so, or even follow in it's tracks. Buy why so? It's one of the fascinating characteristics of actual socialism that it's universalist ideals turn, when faced with the problem of practical implementation, into a centralising and therefore monopolising force. That applies to information just as much as capital, because ultimately all individual freedoms threaten a centralised authority that claims sole legitimacy to speak for society.