this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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In an ideal (post-scarcity communist) society, we should be able to be completely libertine without judgement from society or from government systems (so long as we're not causing harm). But as with the rest of this ideal we don't know if we can actually get there.
I have an ancient (2016) paper about potential joys of full disclosure (on Wordpress, if you're interested) that portends the enshittification of Google. But it points out Google's original business model, which was to have an enormous body of data that no human being got to look at directly (except their proper owners), and in the meantime the computers would report on observable trends and correlations.
In the end, it got messed up by the usual suspects: Advertising interests pressured Google to reveal more and more. Technicians abused their positions of power to stalk. The police state forced Google to fulfill reverse warrants and list all people near the scene of a crime, making them all suspects. Or to completely reveal all the data of a given suspect, which poisoned the whole idea of your own safe private place to track contacts, dates, travel, etc.
As it is, we need privacy specifically because of all those interests that would want to link our data to us. All the reasons for commercial or state interests to have our data are causes for them to not have our data.
I'm pretty sure Communism is definitely not an option. I don't want to starve or die today.
A big part of communism is about who owns the means of production. One way to alter this aspect of society is through cooperative economics. A state-less form of socialism (edit: democratically controlled) that's already proven effective in small pockets of our own country (assuming US here) and around the world. One common example is Mondragon in Spain, a cooperative business and the seventh largest company in the country, that has proven its even possible for the cooperative model to reach levels of scale capable of competing in a private capitalist world.
Cooperatives are cool, but unfortunately Markets lead to class contradictions even with cooperatives in place, which is why the goal still needs to be full Socialism.
Cooperatives have different structures to help mitigate class conflicts, but either way the model essentially, or practically, has a baked in, or something akin to a, union by giving members voting rights while not outright excluding the presence of a union.
I don't disagree with having a goal of full socialism. I just see cooperatives as a practical stepping stone in that direction.
They certainly can be a practical stepping stone, and probably will be in some countries, I just wanted to indicate that competing worker coops does not defeat the issues inherent to the profit motive.
Ah right. I see. This is why I think we need to couple this with something like the economy for the common good as an alternative to measuring growth of an economy by GDP.