[Alex63]

Hopefully, after you "destroy capitalism and wash away the weird bourgeois conception of having a 'career'", there will still be some people around who want to be in Operations and keep information systems running. Of course, we'll probably be too busy subsistence farming to worry about information systems.

[MSFT_Edging]

Please consider the amount of open source projects that are kept going and maintained for free out of the developers' passion.

Sure we wont have the profit driven ad tracking ops and social media to maintain, but as long as there is a need for communications infrastructure, people will be doing this out of curiosity and desire to create. Whatever would be left of the internet would probably be higher quality.

[Alex63]

I applaud those who contribute to open source projects out of passion and curiosity. But presumably they are still participating in some "capitalist" endeavour that puts food on their table and a roof over their head (and pays the electricity bill for whatever they choose to use for development).

[MSFT_Edging]

What's your point? Obviously jumping to a post-capitalist state in this thought experiment is lofty, but we're already making a lot of assumptions, lets say "working in order to deserve to live" is already something of the past, my point stands that people will partake in creative endeavors for the sake of creating.

The thesis of the book "Capitalist Realism" states the all encompassing nature of the economic system we live in bars the average person from being able to imagine a world outside that system.

Outside a profit motive, people still create and imagine new ideas. Profit motive in our current tech landscape is 80% innovation in selling ads. Basically a pointless expenditure of resources IMO. All we have is advertisement and war, with a sliver of toys to make our days easier. Outside of a profit-centric environment, there's reason to believe ideas can be explored on their own merit, not on their potential profit.

[Alex63]

My original point, posited slightly provocatively, was to suggest that one should think about whether the "destruction of capitalism" would leave anyone interested (or able) to perform Operations tasks for an information system. Your response was something of a non-sequitur, since I wasn't really questioning whether there might be people still interested in contributing to an Open Source project. Nonetheless, I felt some social pressure to signal that I appreciate contributions to open source work (with the proviso that we still need to obtain the necessities of life from somewhere).

Do you think the comment to which I originally responded was a "thought experiment"? To me it sounded like another knee-jerk anti-capitalist response that ignores the realities of life today. It certainly wasn't a very practical response to the question of how one works in Operations without burning out. So read my response as a knee-jerk pro-capitalist response.

[MSFT_Edging]

> Do you think the comment to which I originally responded was a "thought experiment"?

To be honest, it was annoyingly worded so I went with the thought experiment route. While I agree with what the user said, I try to convey my thoughts with a little more tact on the Venture-Capitalist forum.

I do think a post scarcity scenario would breath some life into a tech field that's been bloated with "because money" tech and solutions. Any interesting tech cannot be explored inquisitively without being useful for profit optimization. LLMs would be a really cool tech if the main usecase in our society wasn't "remove the human who does X better to save costs". An AI therapist will never be the solution, even if it was effective, IMO it shouldn't be the solution.

Back to the operations context, so much of the plight of the operations engineer is that teams shrink to reduce costs, take on more responsibility to reduce costs, and drive the operations engineer to an early grave to reduce costs. I firmly believe there should be room in society and the economy for a business to be considered a success without massive year over year growth, hell even static non-growth. Stability should be sought for certain aspects, and disrupted when the solution is actually improved, not just because its shiny.

[remram]

Participating in capitalism is not an endorsement or a choice when living in a capitalist society. Do you call everyone who is critical of capitalism a hypocrite unless they starve to death for their ideals?