[doingmaths]

I'm an anarchist --- wait hold on! --- not like "The Purge" kind, but the "mutual aid and share what you can" kind. I genuinely believe that if we operated more on a "people will produce the tools, food, and art they want to produce, and will improve their working conditions if given the opportunity" mindset, and less on a "hit this deadline so your boss makes a buck" mindset we'd be able to finish more of our 'side projects'.

I think we all naturally have these projects in mind, things we would pursue if we had the time. And I think we could move towards a world where we optimize a little less for maximizing profit, and a little more for maximizing our leisure time. It will take some structural reforms, some trust, and a whole lot of learning by doing, but I'd much rather live in a world when I had less stuff but more freedom to pursue things I enjoyed.

[eternityforest]

I'm all for mutual aid and sharing, and I am definitely not an endless growth capitalist, I want people to have time and resources to make art and tend their gardens.

But I sure couldn't produce the tools I want without making use of the work of profit driven people, simply because advanced tech is a lot of work, takes hundreds of people, is too big for anyone to understand and thus is almost never made if idea-exploring is the main motive, and generally seems pretty tied to profit.

Lots of places in Europe seem to have mostly figured the balance out. I don't think I'd prefer to live in a world without Intel and Microsoft, maybe I'd have free time, but I'm not sure it would be leisure time, I might be hand-washing laundry instead.

We definitely need changes, and there are some amazing side projects out there.... but also, I want to eradicate the last few guinea worms, have every roof covered in solar panels that can last 70 years, and have my Google Keep notes keep working or be replaced with an even more advanced and feature rich version.

To do that, I think we would either need to start doing really big polished side projects, or we'd need to manage and reform, but not eliminate the deadlines and meetings kind of stuff.

I'm not sure we know how to run a chip fab with any other social structure. Maybe a co-op with elected leaders, or unionization, or better inspectors to be sure there's no child labor sourced parts... but we would have a lot of learning to do to make Intel open source, half the people would just say "We should ditch out of order execution, it's a security risk" and the other half would say "This defect tolerance routing that improves yield 20% is really complicated, stuff is getting too hard to understand, we can toss a few wafers if it means the tech stays human-level, and in 5 years we can probably just get rid of the defects".....

[doingmaths]

> But I sure couldn't produce the tools I want without making use of the work of profit driven people, simply because advanced tech is a lot of work, takes hundreds of people, is too big for anyone to understand and thus is almost never made if idea-exploring is the main motive, and generally seems pretty tied to profit.

Kropotkin's model of anarchist society is that we still have guilds and federations of workers, mostly composed of people drawn to whatever they are interested in most. If the farmers produce food, and the workers produce tools for the farmers, we can exchange them without having to profit from that exchange. Take the food or tools you need.

Over time, as practices become established, group up with other farmers, tools producers, etc. and form guilds that are democratically run. Those guilds negotiate with other guilds to help drive what tools are in demand and work to increase them.

Chip fab would necessarily be slower under the system -- democratically run organizations do take longer to reach consensus -- but we would probably route around that a bit by doing with fewer chips. (Or maybe we'd see more people enter chip fab as their career if there wasn't the concern about bankrupting themselves by going to college.)

[belugacat]

> Lots of places in Europe seem to have mostly figured the balance out [...]

> [...] I don't think I'd prefer to live in a world without Intel and Microsoft

Now guess why Intel and Microsoft aren't European companies :)

[doingmaths]

Mondragon is. You might not be familiar with them, but they are a federation of co-ops in Europe that are a billion dollar business and are the 10th largest industrial group in Spain.

They do R&D, Finance, Manufacturing, and a bunch of other stuff.

https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/

There's no axiomatic reason why an Intel or Microsoft couldn't be a co-op or federation of co-ops. It just didn't shake out that way this time.