Fully Automated Luxury Communism

The book is out! ITT we read and discuss the book! Quotes/passages from the book are welcome!

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Memebumps are also welcome.

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>>>/reddit/

Science Fiction bullshit…

stale reddit meme

Review of Aaron Bastani's book written by Lewis Hodder:
>The book itself is a slog to get through, and it feels like you’re reading pages among pages of PR directly from Silicon Valley (…) FALC works as a catchphrase that attempts to fulfil the negative function of criticism; it contradicts the caricatures of communism as a mass of faceless workers bound to the fate of being able to buy one type of cola. Yet at the same time FALC takes these caricatures at face value and readily agrees with them.
ebb-magazine.com/essay-reviews/2019/6/11/fully-automated-luxury-communism
Not a good sign when even a Frankfurt School fan thinks you're a pretentious hack.

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Fuck off back to reddit please.

Plebbit stole that meme from us, kid
It came out of our discussions on the fragment on machines and the left acceleration manifesto if I remember correctly

Sell more books that way

so star trek but irl and without critical thinking

if full post-scarcity is achieved under capitalism, communism would still be relevant because of class conflict. ie, people would still be wage slaves but with access to food, etc. post-scarcity is just one aspect of "established" communism, there would still be a lot of shit to organize, like, do we concentrate our efforts to build X or build Y.
in many ways, we already live in a post-scarcity world, where scarcity is created artificially (by the """"efficient""" markets), Peter Kropotkin points out this fact in his book The Conquest Of Bread.

we might not build a fully automated factory, but we can certainly reduce the workforce needed by orders of magnitude. Also, there's a ridiculous amount of labor power that goes into menial, soul-crushing, paper-pushing, busywork. Such as advertising, investment banking, insurance, loans, the scam industry, all types of sales-people, etc is work that is not needed under communism. Also, under capitalism, it is cheaper to have people do ridiculous work like manually copying data between spreadsheets, than it is to automate those processes. even if it is profitable long term, big businesses are increasingly more interested in short term gains than long term. an ideal communism would prioritize long term benefits to workers over short term, in the small scale (automating the processing of spreadsheets), all the way to the largest scale (reducing societies necessary working hours of society, maintaining the same production rates).

not very interested in futurism, not really "my thing". I could write about how software technology might change under a communist model, if anyone is interested. But honestly I wouldn't say anything that isn't already obvious to people who have read about the ideas of Richard Stallman.
on a quick skim, it seems the book is for laymen that might not be very versed in leftist theory and offers historic, scientific and theoretical background without assuming the reader is versed in Marx or knows about specific technology. I find this a very positive point. From the passages that I read, I didn't feel this was particularly "sloggish" as the quoted reviewer says here , however I observed that there was some tangential information that could be left out or summarized. overall review of the skim I just made, this seems like an excellent book to give to liberal leftists as introductory material to leftist thought.

I'm familiar with Stallman ideas, i find that free libre open source software lacks a component that makes it easy to lay the foundations of a software project. It lacks a organisation bootloader so to speak. Could you comment on that aspect.

Not sure if I completely understood what you are referring to, and I'm not as involved in libre or open source communities, due to work taking up all my energy, so this is my perspective from navigating the spaces as an outsider, so to speak.
From what I've seen, open source software tends to succeed when there are employees building and maintaining code in a commercially backed project. Many successful projects are internal tools that get open sourced (there are a ton of examples). By open sourcing the projects, other companies will use them and dedicate labor to make the software better, so in a way, it is outsourcing labor to improve internal software.
With very few exceptions, these software have MIT-like licenses which allow the software to be essentially copied and become closed source, whereas GNU FOSS licenses are much more restrictive in this respect, if you use the software and modify it for commercial purposes, you must make the new code available as well. For this reason, there is very little labor time dedicated to FOSS projects. There are some exceptions where companies are set up to provide service to users of the FOSS projects and part of the revenue goes to maintaining the projects, but again, these types of companies are more common for the commercial and not free open source software.
I think that it is primarily for this reason that FOSS projects aren't "as strong" as the commercial "open source" projects. Basically, it is hobbyists that are dedicating their free time to building software. And since it is a hobby, people are less willing to do stuff they don't want to do. This results in ugly user interfaces, unmaintained projects, obscure bugs that never get investigated or resolved. And in a kind of chicken-egg problem, this causes FOSS software to not be used as much, and since there are few users of the projects, there is not a lot of incentive to make them better.
Specifically with small to medium open source projects, with the advent of git and online git repositories (mainly, github), it is much easier and is very common to be able to build software in an unorganized, semi-anonymous, asynchronous manner. Especially with small projects, sometimes maintainers disappear, and people interested in the project merely fork it and continue working on it elsewhere.
So, I wouldn't say that FOSS projects are inherently unable to form an organization, or that they even require one. If there was money behind it, FOSS would definitely be more ubiquitous. There are many excellent and successful FOSS projects, such as Firefox (backed by the non-profit Mozilla foundation which is internally organized like a private company), VLC media player (an excellent media player, backed by the VideoLAN non-profit), GIMP (a feature-full alternative to Photoshop which seems to lack a foundation). Sometimes we just reap the benefits of FOSS without realizing it is FOSS. Also, porky has made sure to blur the line between open source and free and open source.
A good example of where there is still work to be done is Microsoft's Office suite and OS. They are extremely expensive for companies, if all of them donated a mere 1% of the cost of renting the software to a foundation that is dedicated on making a quality FOSS enterprise suite, it would soon be the death of the MS Office hegemony.

2/3 of the way correct

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this, reddit basically steals leftypol memes all day

Well what you are describing here is sort of what I mean, as far as lacking strategic ganization goes. For your MS example in particular, i sort of doubt you can just break MS Office hegemony by underbidding it. In Germany a big city called Munich had switched their local government computers to linux (limux project) and then Microsoft managed to get them to revert back to Windows. This isn't about market competition for price, but rather the political realities of monopoly power.

As far as boot-loading a open-source project goes, i'm going to line up a example.
The route of increasing Computing power via shrinking transistor sizes is fading out as it's increasingly affected by diminishing returns. The next avenue for getting faster computers is hence going to be by creating more dedicated chips, maybe even application specific hardware acceleration chips (Asic). This seems like a good field where opensource could work even with capitalist realities. Consider that what I'm describing here is essentially a compiler program that doesn't just translate human readable source-code into executable mashine-code, but "spits out" mashine-code and a integrated circuit blueprint for an entire dedicated optimized system on a chip. Meaning producing dedicated soc-components for a software package. The most important part here is the compiler that compiles to hardware. Now the question here is how do you start organizing this.

Consider that what started the open source movement was a handful of people like Stallman that wrote the gcc compiler and lots of gnu-programs, and Torwalds who wrote the linux kernel, meaning you had sort of Pioneers doing to the initial heavy lifting, what I'm describing here cannot be done by just a few pioneers, it needs a few hundred people. Next is the organisational requirements, you want to avoid creating own-able capital, because that shifts influence to people with lots of money, who would abuse this for getting even more money at the expense of solving technical problems. Then you want to have as many interactions as possible outside of money-exchange to reduce the influence and dependency from finance systems. To deal with the realities of capitalism, you want to use the resources of corporations without actually giving them any control or the ability to produce exclusive systems, like walled gardens. The "business-end" should be reduced to a accountant role for paying wages and capital goods. And it would be preferable to have the smallest possible monetary footprint, and if possible avoiding high-finance all together for stability reasons, since managing investor-moods seems like a intractable psychology problem. Growth has to be lateral by focusing on increasing the involvement of people rather then increasing money/stock-points, possibly by organizing the employment of developers based on access to capital goods and resources, as well as organizing the access for users of the technology in such a way that it doesn't register as the hot new thing (muh disruption euphoria), to avoid short term exponential growth, and instead have steady linear incremental long term growth, to avoid mismanagement of system standards that always happens during the brainmelting acceleration part.

Consider this my wish-list for an organisational scheme for booting a new open-source project. Now the question is how do you do that ?

What's wrong with automation and high tech?

this is so disappointing… I remember it was all over the news when they announced the switch to libre software, I didn't know about this follow-up.
isn't this kind of like an FPGA?
we probably don't _really_ need faster computers.
modern software is extremely bloated, mainly due to business reasons. if we really wanted personal computers to be faster, we could probably start with quality software using quality tools. Namely, no Windows, no Electron apps (slack, spotify, etc).
Since the browser is like the #1 client right now, some big improvements could come by moving from javascript to wasm, possibly moving away from the DOM or creating a sane alternative to HTML+CSS+JS althogether. And there's also the issue of Google being a cunt with their majority share, like ignoring standards and making their own as they go along, forcing smaller players to comply with Chrome's tyranny. Big improvements could come if there were dedicated efforts to make more and better free and open source browsers like Firefox. The servo engine is a good step in this direction.
I think the easiest way is to set up a company/ngo that provides service to enterprise for free and open source software/hardware and use part of the revenue to fund development, research and prototyping. It's been done before to moderate success, like red hat.

I'm sure this guy is a fountain of bright ideas

Artificial scarcity will always be maintained.

Yeah kinda sad.
Well yeah but it goes a lot further then this.
this is just foolish, and besides the proposed hardware acceleration would also yield lower energy consumption.
Sure optimizing software is also a part of this.
If you can compile to hardware Firefox could use this too.
That makes you controllable via financial levers, what i want is to have an organisation that works within capitalist structures just to use the resources, but isn't a capitalist organization, in the sense that it doesn't use the capitalist legal forms. You can't do anything with those, they won't let you build, everything just disappears.

I’m like 80% sure you’re full of shit and that the meme is older than Zig Forums itself

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