/tech/ - Technology

>>12886
>all jobs and technology seem geared towards making the capitalist class richer
That's true in every industry.
I imagine you had to study quite hard to be a software engineer, so at least reward yourself by enjoying a few years of working from home on a good salary. You can start doing the unabomber thing in your 30s.

>>12886
>I graduated as a software engineer but all jobs and technology seem geared towards making the capitalist class
Automate your work-task, put the secret sauce on a server only you control and don't tell anybody. Basically double insurance, by not telling as well as making sure that the capitalist can't use the technology you made without you. Then make technology that's useful for the progress of humanity on company time.

>should I become a unabombing tech hater
That doesn't do anything, also you'd still be weaponizing technology, so it doesn't even work as a political statement. Ted kaczynski, made some correct observations about the harm that capitalist control of technology has caused, but ultimately he undermined his point because he too ended up using his knowledge of science and technology to harm people.

If you want to be more aggressive: If they start making robots or cyborgs for controlling the population, you can try to reprogram that and make it turn on the ruling class. If you get tasked to make a surveillance system, give it a blind spot so they don't see the revolution coming.

>>12887
>at least reward yourself by enjoying a few years of working from home on a good salary
I wish I could but my dumb brain insists that I have to do something useful for the world. Not even literally bombing shit, just something. It's just been so hard for me to even feel confident enough in my skills to apply for jobs and it feels like shit when it's all just useless. I hope I can get over it soon.
>>12888
Thanks, at least that's something. We'll see how it goes

>>12889
>Thanks, at least that's something. We'll see how it goes
Don't blindly follow my random brain-fart. I assumed you were talking hypothetically. I don't want to be responsible if your life gets screwed up.

Try to read your employment contracts and consult with lawyers to see what you can get away with. Be strategical, don't sacrifice your self, if you want to manifest change in the world you have to be alive and free to do it.

Also consider that this site can be read by anybody, if you didn't connect to this site via super secure hacker opsec, maybe don't rush into stuff.

>>12889
>my dumb brain insists that I have to do something useful for the world
Sounds like the opposite. It sounds like you are looking for a reason to not work and not feel guilty about it.
<all work is inherently unethical therefor it's my moral duty to stay home and play video games
This is why freedom and socialism are mutually exclusive and gulags are essential to any serous socialist regime.

>>12889
Just fucking get the money and then use it for something useful then. Make monthly donations to revolutionary parties and militias, use it to pay for combat training, buy guns, buy books, etc.

>>12907
/thread also just pick up a useful skill like welding in your spare time. pay for a class or something

>>12906
Anon complains
<capitalism does not let me do meaningful work
Your response
>you have a moral flaw if you don't enthusiastically lick the boot of the ruling class

>>12909
>capitalism does not let me do meaningful work
The implication being that the work assigned to you by the politburo, which you can't pick, can't quit and don't get paid for, that will be meaningful somehow?

>>12911
>The implication being that the work assigned to you by the politburo
The plan is to do heavy industry in a similar way as the Soviets did it, as in state run/directed industries, because there doesn't appear to be a viable alternative. Ad-hoc free association of people isn't capable of doing that. Since you don't need that many people for running large industry anymore, there isn't going to be a need to coerce people to work on this, you'll find enough volunteers. You know, because you get to play with gigantic powerful machinery.

However the rest/most of the economy will be workplaces set-up and controlled by the workers. Not too different from worker owned cooperatives. The only real difference is that the central planner calculates prices, and instead of money accounting there will be labor-time-tokens and material-balances. The benefit of calculated prices over market prices is: no more crisis cycle (boom bust,recession shit)

>which you can't pick, can't quit and don't get paid for
I get that the Soviet Union wasn't a paragon of preserving personal liberties, and you are welcome to criticize that. But what you are spouting here is a propaganda trope, even during war-time communism, which is the "bad-times" in Soviet history, it wasn't really like that. It's not possible to control 150ish million people with terror.

>that will be meaningful somehow?
The promise of socialism, is improvement, not perfection. We'll do better, as in significantly less drudgery and more meaningful activities for more people. People know what's meaningful to them and will gravitate towards that, you'll just have to build the system that has the correct feedback mechanism to let that happen.

>>12913
>The plan is…
Authoritarianism is great when you're the one in charge. Imagine for a second that you won't be though. You're not going to be Stalin you're going to be one of the millions of peasants eating tree-bark to survive the holodomor.

>what you are spouting here is a propaganda trope
A centrally planned economy means you won't be at liberty to pick what you work on. The planners pick what you do. Is that not the case?

>The promise of socialism, is improvement, not perfection.
It won't be better though. Currently you have way more freedom than any of your ancestors to work on whatever you want and you still can't find "meaning". And you're saying that losing all that freedom and being forced to do work you can't pick, can't quit and don't get paid for, somehow that will give you meaning? You are either delusional or have literal slave DNA.

>>12914
<A state run heavy industry
means
>Authoritarianism
>eating tree-bark
This is pure ideology, if you create a state-run heavy industry, that'll be a desirable gig, with good working conditions, reasonable pay and interesting work. You will get enough people choosing that freely.

The brutality in creating Soviet industry came from doing it under extreme time pressure to get military industry ready for the world war. Not because it was state run industry.

>the holodomor.
Was a massive famine caused by insufficiently mechanized agriculture, grain reserves and slow transportation infrastructure. The Soviets fixed all this (not gracefully, but still) and created good food security for their people. Such a dishonest talking point.

>A centrally planned economy means you won't be at liberty to pick what you work on. The planners pick what you do. Is that not the case?
NO. Why does everybody always think that ?

The central planner, replaces the market mechanism for finding prices for commodities, that's it. Instead of capitalists reading market signals to know how much they can charge for a good or service, there will be computer programs that calculate the optimal price, using direct information from the production sector. The starting model for price calculation will simulate a market-economy in perfect equilibrium (no price fluctuations). Later people will improve the model based on their experience. Ironically socialist central planning starts out as perfect market capitalism.

The planning system allocates labor power and resources in general, it can't allocate tasks to specific people, for the same reason capitalism can't do that. Workers choose to join an existing workplace or start a new-one.

Central planning can do 0 unemployment, while markets always create lots of unemployed people. Capitalists need unemployed people to be able to start a new business, and it needs obsolete business to go bankrupt to make place for new and better stuff which casts workers into unemployment. A planned economy can stream-line the process. When an obsolete work-place gets shut-down it gets time to co-inside with a new an improved work-place opening up. You'll never be forced into "in-between jobs".

>It won't be better though.
Yes we can do better than this.
>Currently you have way more freedom than any of your ancestors to work on whatever you want and you still can't find "meaning".
There are more degrees of freedom because superior technology opened up more options in occupation. That is a necessary condition for liberating the masses from meaningless grinding. Capitalism does get credit for enabling that. But it is not sufficient. Work will continue to feel meaningless because it's production for sale, instead of production for use.

Stone-age people made a stone-axe to use it for cutting wood, and because of that use, making the stone-axe was glorious purpose. We can have civilization and put loads of extra steps between making stuff and the use of stuff, and still have glorious purpose. Capitalism simply fails at that because capitalism makes stuff to sell it, not for using it, and therefore: no glorious purpose. It would take a million years of capitalist barbarism to evolve a homo-capitalist, and the fact would still remain that producing things in order to use them, is the most rational choice.

>And you're saying that losing all that freedom and being forced to do work you can't pick, can't quit and don't get paid for, somehow that will give you meaning?
No i'm not saying that, you are, to tear down a straw-man unrelated to socialist economics. Even the Soviet system which can be criticized as too inflexible, didn't even come close to your BS cold-war propaganda. Modern Socialist economic planning theory has advanced leaps and bounds beyond the soviet model and allows for molding the system to adapt it self to the people instead of bending people to fit the system. It will offer order and direction for people who seek that sort of thing, and a empty canvas for those that don't.

>literal slave DNA.
There is no slave DNA, every single slave in all of history hated slavery.

>>12886
>should I switch careers
No organize your workplace, join or start a union.
>become a unabombing tech hater
No don't do stupid shit like terrorism. It'll just cause more state repression.

>>12915
<Authoritarianism
<eating tree-bark
>This is pure ideology
Actually it's historical fact.

>Was a massive famine caused by insufficiently mechanized agriculture, grain reserves and slow transportation infrastructure
Of course you believe that because you obviously can't admit that an ideology you simp for caused untold amounts of human death and misery, that would make you evil.

>Instead of capitalists reading market signals to know how much they can charge for a good or service, there will be computer programs that calculate the optimal price, using direct information from the production sector.
Yes I've read Cockshott too. The computer scientist thanks that computer scientists can plan the economy better than economists. Color me surprised.

>Later people will improve the model based on their experience.
Who is "people"? Because you are not a computer programmer and even if you were they are not giving you a commit bit. Throwing computers into the mix doesn't change the fundamental fact that socialism is concentrating all economic power in the hands of a very few elites who have zero incentive to use that power for the benefit of the people.

>The planning system allocates labor power and resources in general, it can't allocate tasks to specific people. Workers choose to join an existing workplace or start a new-one.
You can't have it both ways. If workers can do what they want then the planning system is irrelevant. And if all workers want to paint post-modern feminist poetry with vaginal fluids instead of back-breaking agricultural work then how quickly are the gulags going to arrive. You guys act like this shit hasn't already been attempted a dozen times. We know what happens.

>Yes we can do better than this.
Yes we can do better than this. But the answer to a centralized authoritarian bureaucracy is not a centralized authoritarian bureaucracy with different people in charge. In case you missed my point it doesn't matter who is in charge because it will never be you or somebody who cares about you.

>There is no slave DNA, every single slave in all of history hated slavery.
Then why have you admitted you want to slave to a computer program? The only other explanation is that you don't understand the full implications of what you're saying.

>>12917
>Actually it's historical fact.
What pure ideology does to a mofo. Dude pretty much every country that has a large heavy industrial base bootstrapped in the public sector.

>Of course you believe that because you obviously can't admit that an ideology you simp for caused untold amounts of human death and misery, that would make you evil.
Looking at the facts again:
In the Soviet Union life expectancy doubled within one generation. foodsecurity went from frequent famines to none in one generation. You're the one doing ideological copeium. The Soviets were better at raising living standards than comparable capitalist economies.

>Yes I've read Cockshott too. The computer scientist thanks that computer scientists can plan the economy better than economists.
You make an argument from credencialism fallacy, what's right is right, no matter what titles or lack thereoff the truth-teller holds.
Mainstream economism has been reduced to manufacturing ideological justifications for whatever interest groups that pays them wants to do. And it's mostly sophism at this point. This isn't even an authority you can appeal to.
Also Cockshott is both an economist and a computer scientist. So you're also technically wrong.

<people will improve the model based on their experience
>Who is "people"?
You can do trial and error with model modifications to see whether people like it better or worse.

>You can't have it both ways. If workers can do what they want then the planning system is irrelevant. And if all workers want to paint post-modern feminist poetry with vaginal fluids
If capitalists wanted to do nothing but "paint poertry", capitalism would fall appart as well, but it doesn't because this is a implausible hypothetical for onstructing ideolgical gotchas.
Unless you are projecting and think people need to be cajoled ?
>the gulags going to arrive
The word "gulag" is Russian for prison. And the irony is that the US private prison system has currently locked up more people than the Soviets ever "gulaged", by a significant margin.

>Yes we can do better than this.
well at least we agree on that.

>But the answer to a centralized authoritarian bureaucracy is not a centralized authoritarian bureaucracy with different people in charge.
This is just your strawman argument to avoid engaging with the actual proposals.
It's ok to treat heavy industry like public infrastructure and run it via the public sector, it's not going to cause political repression against the population. This has been done before lots of times without any problems, even in capitalist countries.
The other sectors in socialist economies can be worke-places managed by workers.

>slave to a computer program?
when nobody said that
>the full implications
<of cybernetic socialism
A very democratic society
Low economic inequality
Great economic performance (from the perspective of the masses)

>>12886
non law enforcement public sector.

>>12919
Using sage to avoid getting a response. How cowardly. Too bad for you I was digging for a different thread.

>Dude pretty much every country that has a large heavy industrial base bootstrapped in the public sector.
Socialist countries were the only slave based economies in the 20th century.

>In the Soviet Union life expectancy doubled within one generation.
Hitler also made massive gains for his people. It's not hard to lift a country from rock bottom. Hitler also murdered millions of people. And somehow lenin and stalin managed to murder even more.

>You make an argument from credencialism fallacy, what's right is right, no matter what titles or lack thereoff the truth-teller holds.
Mainstream economism has been reduced to manufacturing ideological justifications for whatever interest groups that pays them wants to do. And it's mostly sophism at this point. This isn't even an authority you can appeal to.
You're trying so hard to use smart words you forgot to make an actual point. Anyway when a scholar of X says that scholars of X should run society then you should probably take that with a grain of salt.

>You can do trial and error with model modifications to see whether people like it better or worse.
Who is "you"? You the poster will have zero control over this system once it is in place. What makes you think the people who do control it will ever give 2 shits about your wellbeing? Anything besides wishful thinking?

>Unless you are projecting and think people need to be cajoled ?
Under capitalism people are materially rewarded for doing useful work. Under communism there is no private property so there is no way to reward people, only "cajoling" as you put it, or gulags is how I would put it.

>The word "gulag" is Russian for prison
What pure ideology does to a mofo. You sound like a national socialist who thinks that auschwitz was a summer camp because you are too scared to confront ugly realities about your ideology.

>cybernetic socialism
>A very democratic society
Why is this so hard for leftists to understand. You will not be stalin. Once you have given up all your political and economic power to the system your "vote" will be worthless. Whoever controls the AI will be your slavemaster.

>>12944
>Socialist countries were slave based economies
No.
are you making outrageous claims to get a reaction ?
>slave based economies in the 20th century.
technically speaking it took some US states until the 20th century to formally abolish Slavery

>Hitler also made massive gains for his people.
The Insanity intensifies.
People who gained from WW2 were weapons dealers, the holocaust gas producers, maybe some bankers who stashed the Nazi gold and so on. Are these "Hitlers people" you speak off ?
Hitler certainly didn't benefit the Germans, you have to realize most of the Jews he ordered genocided were German nationals, all the people who died as soldiers didn't benefit, and for those that survived they had to rebuild the country that Hitler had wrecked. If we make a class analysis about the Nazi economy, wages declined and the general public got expropriated by privatizations. Hitler also caused financial ruin with hyperinflation.

>You the poster will have zero control over this system once it is in place.
You the other poster has zero control over the current system.
If we are talking cybernetic socialism as the alternative to capitalism, that does grant the citizenry significantly more influence over the allocation of surplus. There will be a democratic polling system that allows people to set the economic priorities for the system.

>Under capitalism people are materially rewarded for doing useful work.
You're trolling me ?
When Wallstreet crashed the financial system in 2008 they got billions of bailout money as a reward for blackmailing the world economy with collapse. That's not "useful work" that's called a protection racket.

>Under communism there is no private property so there is no way to reward people
-Private property is what big capitalist corporations own, that will get phased out under socialism.
Large capitalist corporations stake their privatized property claims with lots of coercion, work isn't what's being rewarded.
-What most individual people own is personal property, that will get better protections under communism.
-Then there's also public property, basically the stuff the government manages, that'll be similar.
-For most people socialism will translate into getting more rewards for their work.

sageing because you tried to conflate socialism with nazism

>>12945
>No.
Read a book. Stalin introduced forced labor camps as a necessity after reversing lenin's disastrous collectivized farming initiatives in the early 1920s. The national socialist regime in germany also used slave labor throughout world war 2.

>technically speaking it took some US states until the 20th century to formally abolish Slavery
The allies never stooped to implementing slave labor even britain in their darkest hours. That is more down to christian values more than anything else though.

>are you making outrageous claims to get a reaction ?
A person who believes a lie will always be angered by the truth. It is unavoidable.

>People who gained from WW2 were…
You're not an idiot so you obviously know hitler didn't become leader of germany the day before WW2 started. He actually had more peaceful years than wartime years and that's what I was referring to. A german citizen was significantly better off in 1935 than 1925. That's not to say that hitler was some kind of genius it is merely proof of how fucked up germany was before he took over. The same thing applies to russia and the bolsheviks. Raising a country from rock bottom doesn't validate your ideology it just means it's not the absolute worst.

>Hitler also caused financial ruin with hyperinflation.
No the hyperinflation happened in the 1920s and was caused by the winners of WW1 extracting as much wealth as they could from the defenseless germany. I don't mean this as a personal attack but you clearly don't know anything about basic history. That's probably why you fell for marxism in the first place.

>You the other poster has zero control over the current system.
Under the current system I only lose 50% of my income to the socialist bureaucracy.

>When Wallstreet crashed the financial system in 2008 they got billions of bailout money as a reward for blackmailing the world economy with collapse.
When the government does stuff that's called socialism. You know that. Under free market capitalism the government has no jurisdiction to steal tax money from the workers and use it to bail out friends of the regime. In 2008 the insolvent banks should have been forced into bankruptcy and the assets of all executives and major shareholders should been liquidated to give the people their money back. If that is not enough then we start throwing them out of helicopters until we get all our money back or we run out of bankers. That is the capitalist answer.

>What most individual people own is personal property, that will get better protections under communism.
What you're saying is that enemies of the regime have "private" property which is bad and needs to be confiscated and friends of the regime has "personal" property which is ok to keep (for now). Again, your support for communism rests entirely on this assumption that you will be part of the privileged class who is treated well by the system and there is nothing that even suggests that will be the case let alone guarantees it.

>sageing because you tried to conflate socialism with nazism
That's because you don't know anything about nazism.
https://arplan.org/2022/04/18/fundamentals-of-national-socialist-economic-policy-feder/
Nazis are just racist commies.

>>12948
>camps
The Soviets had prisons. Calling it camps is what spooked ideologues do.
The Soviet prison system was progressive for it's time, they were the first that tried to rehabilitate people. Capitalist countries of the time didn't even conceive of that, their idea of prisons was containment and punishment. Soviet prison conditions were comparably good if you exclude the WW2 related period. They payed a inmate-workers 90% of the regular wage. Can't say that for privatized prisons in the US for example.

>>12916
the ruling class actively looks for excuses to take advantage of the average person and put surveillance equipment up our asses. another unibomber would lead to another patriot act honestly

>>12954
I hate this revisionism of history.
They weren't as bad as people in the US day they were but they were still hellscapes in frozen tundra

>>12959
>the ruling class actively looks for excuses
>for surveillance
Yeah it feels very pushy, creepy and predatorial. Idk, should we consider privacy to be violated until organizations (state and private sector) prove that they're not collecting personal information ? Would that help? Should we change our conception of human rights as something that has to be created ?

> another patriot act
Yeah we have to figure out how to defeat fear-exploitation politics. I read a scholarly analysis about Osama Bin Laden, and apparently, he intended to make western society afraid of terror attacks in order to induce self destructive behavior by chasing after security. The reaction to 9.11 could have been "fuck you we're not afraid of you" and the WTC could have been rebuild in record time in the shape of the worlds largest middle finger. Why wasn't it ?

From a rational point of view terrorism is a negligible contributor to mortality, and it doesn't make sense to worry about it. Maybe we need to direct the irrational fear into a more useful direction. Maybe the energy that goes into surveillance, can be redirected into inventing something like a material-scanner. That type of instrument can be used as a weapons detector to foil terror attempts, but more importantly it's not limited to that kind of application. It can also be used to scan stuff for scientific reasons, or for finding mineral deposits and what not.

By the way surveillance as a mechanism to suppress a population is based on creating behavioral prediction models. If People just begin making random choices it stops working. Investing in material-scanners has the advantage that it generates objective data, surveillance can only produce correlative data.

Every culture has a fascination with primitive random number generators, like dice, coin-flips, there's a praxis of dropping a bunch of short sticks on the ground to count how many sticks end up overlapping each other. It's extremely common and I wonder if random decision making was an adaptation for avoiding predators. If you consult the magic sticks, flip a lucky coin, or role a dice of good fortune in order to determine what path you should take to get back to your village, the predator that wants to eat you has a much harder time ambushing you. The Cultural praxis that lead to fewer people falling to predators probably was a big advantage.

There are communities like the Amish that reject all but the most basic technology. Maybe it's worth creating communities with medium level technology acceptance, in addition to that. Maybe that can defuse some of the tension. Obviously the real solution is to stop abusing technology, but we're a long way from ethical tech.

>>12961
My most unpopular opinion among normies is that I possess is that knowing Bin Laden wanted to destroy the country by turning it into a surveillance state so that means Bin Laden won years before we pulled out of Afghanistan. We did so much to erode freedom and privacy in the name of counter terrorism that we no longer have the "freedom" we use to have.

The only bright side that very few people saw coming that is just now coming out is the wide brush painting Islamic "extremists" are now being used for christians under the guise of going after Christian nationalists. I look forward to future Christians talking about their make believe Judgement Day and getting put on a homeland security list. When you really think about it, a lot of them do reach a criteria similar to how a lot of Muslims did and still do

>>12886
I suggest you cultivate friends in low places who do illegal shit. There are plenty of those types of people on the darknet. Make money with cybercrime and contribute it to the causes you want. Bring other comrades into your criminal circle.

>>12976
Illegalism only works when the state becomes too puritanical. Like during the prohibition, Unions cooperated with the moonshine smugglers. They gained political capital because the masses never considered booze-bans legitimate. As far as theory goes, if authorities make laws that overwhelmingly get rejected by the masses, that counts as direct democratic override by the true sovereign.

At the moment there's nothing like that going on. The only substance-ban that might have resulted in a similar dynamic was perhaps cannabis, but most states realized they weren't going to get away with banning that so there's lots of legalization going on. Can't have illegalism if the state doesn't play along.

The next trend that likely will produce prohibition style underground activity with the potential of gaining loads of political capital is likely going to be biohacker stuff. Like designer bacteria that colonize your teeth and gums to keep them clean and shiny. Pharma-porky will try to make people pay enormous sums of money for that, they will also put in a bacteria-shut-off-timer to make it a recurring medical expense. So there will be a underground bio-hacker scene that makes low-cost drm-free dental-bacto. Same thing for deodorant, stinky-feet-cures, hair-dies, allergic-suppression, food-intolerances, skin-bronzing/paling, perfumes and loads of other stuff. The economical side: Bacteria only need nutrient fluids to produce more, so cost of commodity re-production are extremely low. Large corporations are going to use their monopoly power to charge monopoly-rent prices, and that will drive the underground activity.

Be mindful that none of this is a viable revolutionary strategy. A Underground only comes into existence because a state makes something illegal, no ruling class will make that their hill to die on. If the underground becomes influential enough, bans will get revoked to extinguish political challenges to the status quo, like at the end of the prohibition. This just a type of reformism.

>>12976
>Bring other comrades into your criminal circle.
agent glow ?

>>12980
You fear agent glow? Your OPSEC is not strong grasshopper.

What a great thread.

>it doesn't matter who is in charge because it will never be you or somebody who cares about you.
>Hitler made massive gains for his people
>lenin and stalin managed to murder more [than hitler].
>Under capitalism people are materially rewarded for doing useful work.
>Under communism there is no private property so there is no way to reward people
>lenin's disastrous collectivized farming initiatives in the early 1920s (the self-employed workers of these top producing enterprises didn't know it tho)
>Nazis are just racist commies.
Dang, chatbots really are the ultimate cultivators of nonfascist ideology. Not even worth it to pick any of this apart.

the other side:
>The Soviets had prisons. Calling it camps is what spooked ideologues do.
& that is why it was officially called Glavnoye Upravlyeniye Lagyeryami. Wow. Nazoid fucks with daddy fuhrer & Great Rus' specifics really go to such lengths in denying reality.
>The Soviet prison system was progressive for it's time
in terrorizing the accused by STD gang rape for which they kept special inmate departments in prisons & camps, & also by specifically employing white guards to work in such facilities of theirs. I wonder why did mister Stalin & his elite enablers did this particular thing
>tried to rehabilitate people
Maybe in the period of Jacobinism. Certainly nothing of such was being pursued in the bloody thermidor all these ersatz-bourgs did to secure their collective power over the society.
>They payed a inmate-workers 90% of the regular wage
Oh, how good of my masters to throw me into an isolated northern camp on completely & conveniently fabricated grounds (esperanto-fascism or trotskyist fascist organisation, for instance) to exploit me for surplus value under gunpoint & while throwing me scraps in a way to show me who's the financial boss here.
Now it is becoming completely clear what has to be done with your kind in the future.
>Private property is what big capitalist corporations own
As usual, a red nutsacc nazoid considers it bad only when da big guys have something privatized, not the concept itself (which for some reason was allowed all the way up until faithful stalinets Khruschev (until he too was thrown out by a gang of another faithful stalinets, jej))
>public property
>basically the stuff the government manages
I bet this retard also doesn't like when fascists call for solidarism keq.