Post

austin 🇵🇸
@stdlib.bsky.social

It is extremely funny the amount of inhabitants of e.g. lobsters who call themselves "leftist" while rejecting the basic ideas of historical materialism. it makes more sense when you realize it's 99.9% libs who want head pats and can't get those by calling themselves capitalist liberals.

austin 🇵🇸
@stdlib.bsky.social

To be fair I don't even think being an average lib (capitalist) is that bad. But many people on the internet, regardless of professed political ideology, seem to have a politics I would summarize as "Please return everything in America back to 1975" but with iPhones or whatever.

0 reposts6 likes

austin 🇵🇸
@stdlib.bsky.social

I joke to people that "Learning about political economy/history/marxism is the [long pause] worst thing I have ever done for myself." It removes the veil of delusion. Reconfigurations of society/labor and their means of producing human life are not "fun" and you, individually, are not relevant

austin 🇵🇸
@stdlib.bsky.social

"Proletarianization" of computer programmers through eg AI is an opportunity to remove the veil and realize there is no actual "higher form" of labor. There is the working class, and then there is a mode of production that alienates them all equally. The charade is over.

austin 🇵🇸
@stdlib.bsky.social

Genuinely I think one of the biggest failures of the FOSS movement is that it was never labor adjacent enough to tackle these things. Until recent memory it seemed many were happy with FOSS squaring neatly with capitalist production, even RMS himself. The next few years are going to be rough

rowan
@rowan.gay

Given the reaction in the comments, I'd say the article does not succeed in educating programmers that they are and always have been proletariat. This is a failing of the author and not the readers imo

austin 🇵🇸
@stdlib.bsky.social

To be clear I don't even think the article was trying to (or could) convince them of their class; like I said it's decent and succinct, but not great or anything. It's more just me being a hater, really, but I do stand by my characterization of the site in general