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- cross-posted to:
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Seeing the rebirth of unions in tech companies might be one of my favorite things about this timeline.
Not nearly prevalent enough or fast enough, let’s gooooo!
As a decades-long Bethesda fan, I think this might improve product quality from what we saw in Starfield. It’s clear that somebody needs to be able to talk back to King Todd.
Maybe if they’re not so alienated from their work, we’ll see more of other people’s creative vision.
Starfield is Todd Howard making his Homer Simpson car. It’s a pile of shit no one wanted.
Congrats! Now you guys can use collective bargaining to ensure you’re paid for every single bug you code. This is huge!
Seriously though, unions are good for the industry, I’m happy to see this is continuing at ever more software companies.
Unions work in ancap just as well as IRL, thus I support unions.
Regulation doesn’t work IRL and doesn’t exist in ancap.
Why do people here hate ancap again?
If regulation didn’t work, corpos wouldn’t fight so hard to dismantle them every step of the way. If they didn’t work, we wouldn’t see things get markedly worse every time they’re removed.
And ancap just sounds like all the worst bits of libertarianism taken to their illogical extreme and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable so why do any people here not hate ancap?
Worth highlighting that, at least in my opinion, regulation by a state isn’t the only way to rein in corporate society-destroying impulses. If all “corporations” were worker owned and operated by the laborers you’d have lots of people “in charge” who like havingclean water and air in their community.
This is a critique of capitalism first and foremost, not of the “anarchist” part (again, admittedly debatable).
Absolutely agreed on that… Got a fair number of companies I’d like to see taken over by the people working them or the communities they serve
If regulation didn’t work, corpos wouldn’t fight so hard to dismantle them every step of the way. If they didn’t work, we wouldn’t see things get markedly worse every time they’re removed.
OK, they work, just both ways. Corps work to make them work more for them and less for everyone else. Since they have more power, they slowly succeed.
And ancap just sounds like all the worst bits of libertarianism taken to their illogical extreme and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable so why do any people here not hate ancap?
Ancap is one of the words for libertarianism.
and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable
I think a society valuing freedom and non-aggression above the rest in not that.
History is a great teacher. Without a powerful state to curb the influence of the owners of capital like when the US dismantled the standard rail in the early 20th century, what is going to prevent the natural concentration of wealth in the hands of an all-powerful lord, since accumulation is the endgame of capitalism?
What you describe can only ever become a nightmarish dystopia that would bring about a new era of feodalism. And nobody except a few sheltered idiots are falling for that shit.
And what you seem to describe in your other comments is actually minarchism and not anarchism, which handwaves the complexity of anarchism away for a flavor of “extreme economic conservatism but I don’t want to pay taxes”, which is incredibly shallow and selfish, on top of being actively against your personal interest.
Ancaps are like monotheists to anarchism’s atheism. You’ve given up MOST oppression and hierarchy but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism.
Abolish all hierarchy, end all oppression.
but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism.
We actually don’t, we worship voluntarism, taboo on aggressive violence and personal borders, the rest is up to free interpretation from these axioms.
Also it’s not monotheism, rather a system like Taoism in the wild.
But I’ll return to this:
but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism
There’s an issue with no evolutionary mechanisms in a society.
A person who doesn’t know how to survive and doesn’t get help from others dies. A person who knows or gets that help doesn’t. On this level there are no problems as we assume that people help each other, if we are talking about “usual” anarchism.
Now, people form communes. Communes require organization. We don’t want them to have hierarchy, but the situation where everybody respects the rights of others won’t hold by itself. If you expel those who make trouble, then a sufficiently intelligent sociopath may persuade the majority to expel those they don’t like. Other than it being the problem in itself, this will eventually make sociopaths more likely to be the leaders of communes, and form hierarchy. If you don’t expel those who make trouble, you’ll need hierarchy right away to re-educate or jail or punish and otherwise discourage them somehow. These are all with the assumption of common property.
But if we have private property and voluntarism, so every person is a faction in itself, as if they, pun intended, had sovereignty, - we have an evolutionary mechanism which reduces the advantage sociopaths have. It doesn’t negate it, but you may collect power, expressed in property, as an alternative to power expressed in social ties, and the existence of the latter you can’t abolish. So we prolong the life of communities.
And there’s another consideration - property can be collected both by honest and dishonest means, the former meaning someone’s opinion is more valuable on practical subjects. Power as social ties is usually of the “dishonest” kind. Even without private property, frankly, someone of more use for the commune has more weight, but private property allows to account for that more easily. When your understanding who is more useful for the commune and who is less useful for the commune is skewed, it’ll have smaller chances of survival.
And then how do you share resources with a commune part of which you don’t want to be? What will make them behave in the spirit of brotherhood and equality and such? Same if you are a smaller commune. Will they declare you antisocial or something, capture all those resources for themselves and leave you to die?
(With ancap to share resources and various devices of existence property is preserved, and other borders erected, and systems on basis of voluntary agreements are offered to prevent violence.)
Capitalism is inherently based on dishonesty. It routinely treats people as things in the employer-employee relationship. When the factual and legal situation don’t match, that is morally a fraud.
Postcapitalism would consists of various intersecting and overlapping voluntary democratic associations managing their own collectivized means of production. Within these groups, there would still be a notion of possession of the shared asset.
It routinely treats people as things in the employer-employee relationship.
No. A contract can only be signed by two equal sides. If you mean emotionally and in planning - well, do you treat your employer as people or as that thing, system, which allows you to get money in exchange for work?
Postcapitalism would consists of various intersecting and overlapping voluntary democratic associations managing their own collectivized means of production.
Does this mean that such an association is the basic entity? Because any system where a human is not the basic entity is unacceptable for me.
there would still be a notion of possession of the shared asset
Specifics? When I leave that voluntary association, what of possessions stops being managed by it? If I enter it with some “means of production” and leave it after some time, with what I leave?
How does possession of those means overlap between associations?
Does the described mean that a person can’t have property, but an association can?
Capitalism puts de facto persons into a thing’s legal role. Consenting to a contract doesn’t alienate personhood. As labor-sellers, workers are treated as persons. The issue arises with the workers as labor performers. The employees are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but get 0% of property and liabilities for the results of production. Instead, the employer has 100% sole legal responsibility.
Individuals are the basic entity. Groups’ rules vary
@technologyThe issue arises with the workers as labor performers. The employees are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but get 0% of property and liabilities for the results of production. Instead, the employer has 100% sole legal responsibility.
That’s true, but cooperatives can legally exist where workers share those.
It’s rather that dynamic of power makes bad behavior advantageous, but what would change this in “simple” anarchism?
Ancaps imagine aiming for maximal granularity and variability, so that the same kind of abusive behavior wouldn’t fit all cases and rules’ combinations (same as with epidemics) and there’d be market mechanisms functioning due to scale (things generally look better when there are, say, 100 microsofts instead of 1). They assume that those variability and granularity won’t be reduced through open violence (conquering of subduing jurisdictions with differing rules on something) and enforcement of monopolies (trademarks, patents, licenses and such), because of everybody being armed to the teeth and usually there’s still assumed some centralized state which will keep the situation from coming to open violence.
In case of “simple” anarchism I see contempt for ancap concepts of solving this, but what are the alternatives?
No anwer is too stupid for me, even new genetically altered humans (I’ve literally encountered an opinion that an anarchist society may require this to make humanity more empathetic, LOL).
Individuals are the basic entity. Groups’ rules vary
This doesn’t seem to be different from ancap+panarchy when described so abstractly.
And I doubt the studio will see the end of this decade under Microshit‘s umbrella. Nonetheless I applaud the employees. Their success might be short lived but it‘s a success all the same.
next up: microsoft closes bethesda game studio, reassigns all assets to other departments.
… still glad to see it though. i’d love to see tech giants brought low by all the workers just withdrawing their labor.
This is what’s next for Bethesda, but it’s smart of them to only unionize after Bethesda has started on their next “independent” project. It all depends on how ES6 does. If it isn’t a smash hit with decent reception, Bethesda will be absorbed into Microsoft I guarantee it
Considering the assholery that Obsidian went through with New Vegas, I fully expect the higher ups to do everything in their power to fuck up TES6 if it means the end of the union, one way or another.
If it depends on how ES6 is received they still have another 6 or 7 years
Good for them
Okay…but what about making a good game.