[api]

The Internet is not made of fine unicorn hair braided by pixies. It’s a huge very physical machine comprised of wires, switches, demarcation points, interchange data centers (carrier hotels), undersea and long haul overland cables, satellites, and massive cloud data centers that host shared compute and data and SaaS apps. It consumes a ton of energy and if you weighed it all would be quite massive.

PCs and mobile devices are part of that vast spaghetti monster, but only small parts.

If we could achieve cloud SaaS levels of performance and usability in pure P2P apps it would be possible to dispense with some of that, but not all of it. You would still need the wiring and interchanges and stuff. Pure P2P is also hard and doing it that efficiently requires solving some unsolved engineering problems around rapid bootstrapping, data lookup, consensus, and security.

[AnimalMuppet]

I think you completely missed the point of the question.

If I have a computer and an internet connection, I can download, for free, everything I need in order to write, say, an Android app. And put it on the app store, and start making money (if it sells). That doesn't let me do SaaS or become the next Google, but it lets me go into business as a "producer".

Same with making and selling music. Same with writing (hello, Amazon self publishing). Same with some services - audio and video production, software contracting, editorial assistance, and I'm sure many more that I can't think of at the moment.

So, how do Marxists deal with that? Is a computer part of "the means of production"? Or does that only mean "big industry"? If it only means big industry, the Marxists are talking to those who live in the past. In the present, big industry employs a much smaller fraction of the population than it used to.

[kleer001]

Depends on if OP is looking for the proximal or ultimate means of production. No schlub like myself is going to own and run the data centres necessary to host all that created content of music, books, or apps.

[api]

I suppose you could say that computing reduces the imbalance between capital owners and workers to some extent in some areas.

[AnimalMuppet]

True, "to some extent in some areas". Even in the example that I gave, an Android app, Google's going to take their cut, because they own the app store.

So from one perspective, you're free to go into business for yourself, writing your app. From another perspective, you're just working for the man in a different form.

[dragonwriter]

> So, how do Marxists deal with that?

Why would Marxists need to deal with it at all? I mean, even if you ignore that the data centers, etc., supporting the app stores, ebook stores, etc., involved are, in practice, essential parts of the means of production for the actual consumer product being delivered, all "it's possible for a solo independent business owner to own the whole means of production for a product and make and delivery the product to consumers by applying their own labor to capital they own" would mean is that "the capitalist middle class, the petit bourgeoisie, can actually exist in that society." Which Marxists generally assume to be true about capitalist societies.

> Is a computer part of "the means of production"?

Yes, the same as, e.g., workers hand tools are. Specifically, its part of the instruments of production, which are a subset of the means of production.

> If it only means big industry, the Marxists are talking to those who live in the past.

No, if it only meant big industry, Marxists would be talking to no one; workers owning their own tools, that can be anywhere between the entire instruments of production for some goods to a small part for others, have been common longer than capitalism. But then, Marxism always incorporated that, so its not an issue.