Foo - Forum communities is modern socialism?

As found on /.



Now we're trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn't solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.


http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all

I may have touched on this topic in a somewhat recent flame war I started in RC...

discuss...

There is a distinct, and huge, difference between a collective where folks enter freely and are free to leave at any time to one where it's mandatory and enforced from the outside. Additionally, we're talking here about the exchange of information/knowledge and some labor in the form of coding, we're not talking about reforming a complete society with all of it's complexities. Again, another big difference.

Small, voluntary collectives can work just fine. Look at an Isreali Kibbutz. Everyone is there willingly and they are free to leave at any time.

Every large scale collective that's been tried has either failed or been morphed into something else. Human nature just doesn't allow it to be successful.

Shouldn't this be in P&R?

If you can keep it apolitical, it can stay in Foo.

I'm not European. I don't plan on being European. So who gives a crap if they're socialists? They could be fascist anarchists, it still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car.

Neither the article or this thread have anything to do with political states.



While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now
But I find this subject matter to be a very important facet of modern life. For example, there was recently a firestorm created by Facebook when they decided that they could license the content of it's members under copyright law. If they had succeeded, what precedent would that set?

How would you feel if your ISP decided that certain packet types would be sabotaged in an effort to throttle bandwidth of your unlimited internet? Perhaps you wouldn't care so much if you couldn't see how it impacted you, but imagine this scenario: Forum software evolves to be less client-server oriented to a mode distributed architecture and suddenly you and everyone from that ISP can't benefit. That's simply limiting innovation in order to fleece customers.

In my opinion, many companies (Microsoft and Sony come to mind) have a very dim view of the online freedoms we as individuals have today. When they use terms like "Online chaos" to describe these freedoms, I become very concerned.

Who cares