Comment by timepiece | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timepiece | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, programmers/coders/hackers/developers are "proletarians" and not bourgeoisie since they trade their labor for monetary compensation.

I don't know from where in my reply did you get this notion that I was implying that we developers are/should be classified as capitalists.

Anyway, what's important is for you to distinguish between the concepts of labor as a commodity and the commoditization of labor.

These marketplaces start out as facilitators in the market to bring more efficiency and vibrancy, increase overall transaction volume and value but over time they tend to get parasitical and feed off every "host" they could infect.

So, basically my comment was a protest and critique of this specific business model of marketplaces and not to debate whether programmers have to join ranks with the bourgeoisie or not.

But if you wanna debate capitalist societies, technological unemployment and the alarmingly increasing income inequality and the overhoarding behavior of resources by and with the aid of the bankers worldwide, that's a whole new thread to engage in.

You're right, I misunderstood.

Could you explain what you mean when you say these marketplaces tend to get parasitical? I'm not sure I understand what that process entails.

What I mean by "marketplaces" is the likes of TaskRabbit, Fiverr, 99designs, Freelancer, Uber, Airbnb, ..etc.

I think you get the picture by now.

Ah. Yeah, I agree with you that the more efficiently people can be hired for grunt work and nothing more, the less valuable the work will be. If you need something difficult, you still hire a full time person, but now if you need something easy you can get it much more cheaply, which shifts the overall distribution of the value of X-type-of-work lower.

But one might make the point that all this means is we were paying too much for grunt work before these marketplaces showed up...

Yeah, you could argue that competition is good for the end consumer and I must concede but you have to look at the bigger picture that we keep exchanging labor for more and more shrinking "real" wages and these recent technological developments would accelerate this trend even further and make their implications more pronounced in society.

Wage slavery, the illusion of labor and career derived self worthiness, the quasi monopoly of labor and the pursuit of monetary gain as the principal ideals providing meaning to life in this age, and finally holding our whole lives hostage to increasingly harsh labor conditions just for the capitalists to increase their wealth and consolidate their power over us, all of these notions must be re-opened to discussion in society given that capitalism is entering a new soul-crushing phase that is gonna leave many victims in the world that sadly would have been saved if not for our complicity in one way or another to demand and fight for our rights and our fair share in resources on this planet.

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