Memes

1157 readers

1 users here now

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

seahorse@midwest.social

373

Quality of Life ☭ (midwest.social)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by mossy_capivara@midwest.social to c/memes@midwest.social

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 9 points 7 months ago (3 children)

At the same time, we'll have to recognize that a world without megacorps is going to involve a much greater presence of state power in the technological sphere due to the need to standardize communication protocols to facilitate a free market of mutually communicable softwares and hardwares.

The question will stop being about how we stop price gouging for the latest iPhone and more about how we prevent a situation like HIPAA where people are forced to use a less secure less efficient technology because it was the most efficient and secure at the time Congress was last able to get off it's ass to legislate on the matter.

[–] groet@feddit.de 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Corporations are doing a bad job at it as well. While Gouvernement standards tend to be slow and stagnant, the free market produces an incomprehensible sea of standards. Like with USB, HDMI, 3/4G signals, cat-X Internet cables. If a single global manufacturer decides to do things slightly different you get a new version of a standard that everybody has to be compatible with.

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 3 points 7 months ago

Additionally, corporations will only invent the standards that they benefit from. A government can introduce requirements that people benefit from.

[–] blackstampede@sh.itjust.works 5 points 7 months ago

There are plenty of communication protocols that are developed and expanded without corporate support, one of which is the ActivityPub protocol, which this platform is built on.

[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.world -2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

You're assuming that we must have a free market and a state though. Those are not requirements for many economic theories.

[–] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They are requirements for any theory that intends for there to be economy at a scale beyond a tyranny of cousins and inequitable allocation of non municipally managed resources.

It also sounds as if you believe there can't be any sort of democratic accountability to a free market, which is just not even remotely true, there is objectively nothing which makes worker ownership of productive firms incompatible with the sale of what they produce in a free economy.

[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

I have no clue where you got that assumption, but I'm well aware of worker cooperatives, and that worker cooperatives are compatible with a socialist free market. All I said was that not all economic theories require the assumptions you made.