Flippanarchy

Infinite loop detected

Solarpunk folks be like "would you be willing to CAD a tensegrity-constructed X and print it on your solar-powered 3d printer out of compostable polymer sustainably synthesized from hemp?"

The answer, obviously, is "hell yeah".

I can hear it now: "Eventually, but the competition of capitalism accelerates innovation so we can have it now instead of decades or centuries from now."

Maybe life would be actually enjoyable without the constant forced pressure of having to be "valuable."

Oh, capitalism created tons of things that would not exist without it, like student debt, subprime mortgages, for-profit prisons... just think about all we would lose!

Mucking out sewers, garbage collection, manually excavating Fatbergs:

I'll play

Garbage collection

But nobody even likes twitter ☹️

The “No” line from “Would other people be willing to work to create X if they weren't forced to?” should just directly lead to “Then capitalism is wasting its resources on X.”

I get the idea but there are several issues.

1. Intermediate products. For example I've used many automatic measuring microscopes, so if a block was 25mm +/- 1mm it would find the edge of both sides and calculate the distance between them and determine if part was good. These systems are very expensive (cheap ones could buy a car, expensive ones could buy a house). It's useful but I don't think anyone would make it without a benefit to them personally. Technically I could do the same with a drop gauge or even a ruler but wouldn't be as accurate or as fast. In a lot of cases you don't need that, for example making utensils like forks or spoons. But for example making gears in a transmission have as tight if not tighter tolerances.

2. Quanitity. Now let's make a house, yeah people might like the act of building. And we all agree houses are valuable, not monetarily but in shelter from weather and safety from animals and other humans. How many screws are in your house? If your answer is 3 digits you are wrong. Who is going to make all those screws? Now we are going to ignore machine screws which need a precise thread and just use wood screws. Do you think anyone's life dream is to make 10,000s of screws? If you find someone to make them, how are they going to feed their family over the months/years it will take them?

3. Quality. Going back to screws they need accurate threading and accurate heads. Without accurate heads a screwdriver won't work(think of removing a stripped screw) and without accurate threads it won't screw down or mate with the drilled hole. Who is going to verify that? If you "buy" 1000 screws and only 50 are usable what do you do? With no incentive to make good screws does the screw maker care? Who is going to verify the food you get is safe to eat?

4. Non-profit products. Let's say you love math. How are you going to survive? In history their were patrons who paid some of these people hoping there would be a reason in several years or decades. Some worked out, some didn't. But someone needed to say "yeah study how to solve that problem and I'll support you while you do". But they have limited resources too. In most cases these were basically investments hoping the end product would result in a net benefit. You can't survive with just math. You can't go into the woods and scream a theorum at a deer to get meat to feed your family. Now that math feeds into intermediate products which feed into final products which are valuable and that value gets distributed to all the earlier producers.

Yeah people like to make final products. Most people won't enjoy just sitting their useless. Some people like fixing/restoring stuff. But they use so so many stuff other people have done. Distribution is totally fucked up, granted. But for some people to do their dreams there are so many other people they rely on.

There are jobs that generally no one wants to do but everyone needs done. You can't rely on pure volunteerism to keep garbage collection running.

I get it and am here for the anarchy of it all, but there's no "no" coming out of the "Would other people be willing..." box, which a capitalist would say is the most important line.

Maybe it should loop back to the "Then capitalism is wasting..." box, since if nobody is willing to create it, is it really valuable enough to exceed creation inertia?

Radio waves were thought to have no value, to the point that the person that discovered them thought so too.

Following this graph, we would never have radio, because it didn't have value. Which was true.

There's many things where something didn't have value but does later on. That's where this graph has a huge flaw.

Unless you want to extinguish all progressivism.

This graph also doesn't work at a large scale. Good luck figuring out food distribution logistics that everyone just accepts at a scale of even 200,000 people, let alone millions. "But just make an organization of volunteers that deals with that!" - congratulations, you just reinvented "government".

Unfettered Capitalism is extremely obviously not the answer, but neither is idealistic anarchism that at best works only with a smaller sizes community that does not rely on anything post-industrial era due to advanced complex logistical systems of creation. There needs to be a new system.

I’m not a moneyologist, but I think that’s describing market economy rather than capitalism. ME is older and can solve some things that capitalism doesn’t.

In the ‘garbage / sewage’ scenario, you might be willing to do those things (ie not forced) in exchange for something else consider more valuable to you. No ownership is required for that.

Stack overflow

This char literally says "If no one wants to do X then it isn't valuable."

The logic sorta tracks, but also kind of not. Basically it's saying civilization is not valuable, which I might agree with under certain circumstances.