[vilhelm_s]

I say if you work as a programmer using a laptop, then that laptop is a means of production. The usual formulation is that workers should own/control their means of production, so if you work as a programmer and own your own laptop, you are living in a small slice of communist utopia.

This probably is very related to how much nicer programming jobs are than most other jobs--as a programmer you are much less affected by capitalism than workers in capital-intensive industries are. I remember reading a pamphlet about the micro-computer revolution published by some British communist organization in the early 1980s. They analyzed programming as belonging to Marx' category of pre-industrial "craft" production, and predicted that there would be a push from employers to gain more control (by reducing programming to a less personalized, more commoditized activity).

I think several trends can be fruitfully analyzed from this point of view, e.g. UML-style software engineering methodologies, cloud computing, DRM, and app stores.