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Comment by oldbbsnickname | Hacker News Reader

Although the Unabomber also correctly identified systemic problems anti-efficiency, anti-technology, and/or terrorism are absurd, immoral, and untenable reactions to antitrust, profiteering, automation, and/or worker exploitation.

One prescription, although not a panacea, is profit-sharing, worker-owned co-ops of tech workers. Confederations of co-ops by tech trade or area could rival or supplant MAANGs but without the perverse incentives of publicly-traded companies and their defenestration of ethics or mercurial abandonment of valuable employees.

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What problems do you think co-ops would meaningful address? Don't the perverse insentives still exist? Only who benefits changes.

I don't understand your question. Co-ops led by other values other than treating customers as the product to exploit. Do you not understand democratic socialism?

Co-ops just make the employees the shareholders, the shareholders still want to maximize profit. It might improve working conditions but there's still no hard incentives to treat the customer any better at the expense of profit. Currently companies already have a profit incentive structure in the form of yearly bonuses or stock options and that's not lead to greater concern for consumer focused policies.

> Do you not understand democratic socialism?

i only understand that a system which require altruistic behaviour will not be stable.

Yeah, that was kind of my point in asking the question. Handing over companies to the employees might improve conditions for the employees but it does little to change any profit incentives they have. We need regulation and/or other external factors that force the fiduciary duty of companies (whether they be private/public/co-ops) to prioritize health, well being, privacy and the environment of both the employees and the customers.

Why not user owned, or a nonprofit, instead of worker owned? It's too easy to imagine a worker owned advertising company that still wants to control everything.

Engineers typically already partially own their companies via equity grants, but we still have the whole landscape of enshittified tech

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