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Comment by vladgur | Hacker News Reader

How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?

Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation.

What is the alternative exactly

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It's basically impossible to not engage with any corporate products at all. It's trivially-easy to not engage with specific corporate products. I don't engage with Twitter, because I won't sign up and that makes it useless to me. I'm not missing out on anything I care about.

Just one example: Facebook is mandatory for school/university in large parts of Asia. You cannot trivially block them. They should be considered an utility.

How did facebook make its way into education like this? Can you explain to an outsider?

By being the first to offer a convenient solution, and pushing it heavily with ads and subsidies, I suppose. Then economy of scale kicks in and you're set.

> How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?

By not using it. Which is exactly why I don't use X or Facebook, and minimize my use of Google (I use DuckDuckGo for search, and as Maps continues to suck more I use it less).

On some level there is local/small businesses. They are less efficient and hence you usually have to pay more for less, but it avoids the a lot of the "power structure" that people have strong distaste for.

On a deeper level there is none. Overwhelmingly peoples complaint is that they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is, a shared annoyance that is just a fact of reality.

> they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is

FLOSS invalidates that statement.

Many people are happy to contribute to something greater than themselves. They also happily acknowledge they're standing on the shoulders of giants.

I'm not totally dismissive of FLOSS, but it's kind of a unique situation so you can't really extrapolate broad generalities about society from it.

Software basically has zero marginal cost, and is pretty unique in that regard. If baking 1 loaf of bread was identical to baking 10,000,000 loafs, we would have solved hunger centuries ago...

There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101), and one rung lower, an exercise in ego building ("my design runs on millions of computers daily" is definitely something a human would value). So I wouldn't call it completely selfless (we are now also at the boundary of the philosophy of "selfless acts").

But in short, there is a reason software is pretty much the only field with a vibrant "free/open source" scene. It falls off a cliff once more than pressing keys on a keyboard a few hours a week/month is involved.

> There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101)

Not all of it. Plus, we could say the same thing about the typical worker at the average modern company. Google's product graveyard is a popular example of this. Resume padding, job hopping and ladder climbing are the norm now. In that respect, I can see why you're so pessimistic about the average human.

Much of the dedication often found in modern FLOSS is reminiscent of how companies used to operate: valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.

The key thing to address is the near zero marginal cost part.

If the philosophy extended beyond a binary blob, we would have a whole parallel economy of free tangible goods, from workers using their expertise on their own time. But this basically doesn't exist because real costs are involved.

This thread started with me citing a counterexample to your wide sweeping attempt to lump self-interested corporations in with humans who tend to be generous under many circumstances. I've made my point, so I'm done here.

What about books or art or movies?

The electronic version of all those is also near zero marginal cost.

> valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.

And then it turned out that all that was a long con by the companies, who started reneging on all their promises of lifetime employment, good benefits, and retirement pensions as soon as the costs of those things began to exceed the profits available to them by using those promises to attract employees.

>What is the alternative exactly

There's not supposed to be an alternative.

To fully function within the system you need to be a corporation your dang self.

That doesn't mean you have to be a capital corporation, you can go forward without any of Other Peoples' Money and therefore not be an actual capitalist yourself. Even if you make more money per invested dollar that alone does not make you a capitalist, regardless of how much true capitalists can admire the returns. Without capital you would be merely an entrepreneur, sometimes that's a better choice, sometimes not.

Beyond that you still need to function in a capitalist market either way, no matter what because that's what dominates.

Which could be overwhelming too, and the kind of thing that would make a promising alternative seem very attractive also :\

The system is so totally dominated that you can't enumerate anything that is not . . . corporate-controlled.

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