This is beautifully written and frames the issue in a fresh way for me.
I'm taking away an appeal to individuals and business entities to intentionally optimize for economic public good as opposed to profit and that to contribute to international standardization efforts is one practical way to pledge to that goal.
wmf · 19h ago
This is a rosy view of standards that ignores how often they are perverted for rent seeking.
benfortuna · 17h ago
Regardless of the implementation challenges, the theory is sound and that is the point of the article I believe.
tptacek · 19h ago
It's funny to me that a piece like this is as likely to polarize people away from standards as towards it, since the case it's making is essentially orthogonal to the most salient debate about standards.
benfortuna · 17h ago
You left me hanging - what salient debate?
tptacek · 17h ago
Probably lowest-common-denominator vs. innovation; there might be others. But the struggle between capital and labor? Not high on the list!
benfortuna · 16h ago
I tend to think standards are more about interoperability at the interface level - which doesn't specifically exclude innovation in non-interfacing aspects. So in that sense I don't think standards are synonymous with LCD.
tptacek · 16h ago
Sure, that makes sense. I'm an anti-standards person, but lots of people are pro. I just don't think the labor theory of value enters into it very much!
Nevermark · 5h ago
We don't need an end to capitalism.
Just an end to capitalism that perversely carves out an exception to normal reciprocal arrangements for using other people's property, for one of the most important categories of property: universally owned property. I.e. the environment.
Today, the value of our joint inherited environment has no systematic representation. The default is, do your damage until it is significant enough, and some white knight politicians, finally try to limit the damage with one-off narrow per-case idiosyncratic limits.
No wonder protecting the environment is near impossible. Legally and politically, our systems are tilted far into the direction of non-protection. Ignoring the literal reality of joint inheritance, and ignoring the tremendous value being mismanaged.
The default should be: reciprocal agreements in the form of cap and trade for all public asset impact. Most especially the environment. Exactly as it is required for impact anyone wants to have on another owners private property.
Then the legal and political default would be to protect the value of joint assets, and maximize the value back to the public of their use.
Then all the wonderful magic of capitalism, for optimizing the value of resources, would work for the environment.
This even creates an avenue for some universal income. We all should be paid for use of the non-human created, jointly inherited asset: the environment.
Instead of the default being endless over pollution of CO2, plastics, etc., the default would be all entities pay for what they use, and pay even more for what they use that requires fund for offsetting the damage. Suddenly capitalism and the environment work.
And we all get and dividend, reflecting our jointly inherited asset, on its use.
Value which will go up for everyone as the economy grows, without any form of wealth redistribution.
The numbers of top tier problems this would contribute solutions or partial solutions to, is considerable.
superb-owl · 19h ago
If I were King of America, the first thing I'd do is start enforcing standard protocols for things like auth, messaging, data export/migration, etc. Mostly relying on industry to decide _what_ the protocols should be, but making sure everyone adheres to them.
Data interoperability would make our digital lives so much better.
TOGoS · 19h ago
I'd start by standardizing the interface between plastic storage tubs and their lids.
benfortuna · 17h ago
And standard sizing so they are both stackable and nestable with other tubs.
cadamsdotcom · 10h ago
Well written article and very thought provoking!
The more universal a need is, the less it should be supplied by capitalism.
Education; healthcare: universal needs. When left to the private sector, prices explode and exploitation reigns. Because no matter the price, people will pay.
Las Vegas’ strip on the other hand, needs no government intervention. Folks there are spending money they can live without!
American culture worships the market as solver of all problems - which it is while there’s still growth. But when things settle in, standards allow new players to keep incumbents honest.
Regarding standards, neat that the “standard” for C is ANSI C. It calls back to a time when standards bodies were key to technology development. It predates even IBM’s XT and AT PC - a transition away from standards-bodies-driven hardware development toward market-leader driven.
Ultimately the universality of standards and ability for new players should always be maintained in every market - it should never be impossible to disrupt lazy incumbents. Standards are crucial to keeping markets and industries healthy.
Soooo how we doing over in social media?
Cordiali · 18h ago
I'd agree with non-capitalist, but the authors are far too absolute for my liking.
The whole article hinges on examples of a non-capitalist mode of knowledge production being hard to imagine or conceptualise. Wikipedia is often used as an example of precisely that idea; I reckon I'd see it in that context at least once a month.
At this point, it's basically the standard example.
t1E9mE7JTRjf · 20h ago
The thing 'anti-capitalists' never seem to understand, is that it's not a top down system but bottom up emergent human behaviour. A function of consent/interoperability at scale beyond the immediate family/tribe unit. Thus hard to see an "end to capitalism". That would be like an end to language. We'd just re-invent it.
Aunche · 19h ago
Indeed even the Soviet Union depended on a proto-capitalist black market to make up for market deficiencies. In order to incentivize the elites to do anything at all, they had to exchange favors with each other, which meant that corruption became an essential part of governance.
ryuhhnn · 20h ago
I never understood the anti-capitalist argument to be that it’s a top down system (and thus is why it’s “bad”), I think the critique is more that capitalism will inevitably beget hierarchies and self-reinforces them. And to be fair, some earlier attempts at socialism also begot hierarchies, but now I’m being a little pedantic.
t1E9mE7JTRjf · 20h ago
I don't hear it referred to as a top down system either, but infer that. People talk about a world without it, or after it, as if it's one thing - which is why I described it as top down. Ie one corner stone you can remove. Like a monarchy, or damn.
And indeed, the critiques (that come to mind at least) I've heard of capitalism all seem valid at first, until I realise they also apply to socialism, communism, etc. Thus so far I don't see capitalism as being relevant as people think, and stick with my - temporary - conclusion that it's an emergent behaviour.
alxjrvs · 20h ago
Do you mean trade or mercantilism? Capitalism - a system by which the means of production are privately owned - has only been dominant for the last few hundred years, broadly exacerbated by the industrial revolution (where you could easily point to "Guy who owns the big Machine").
It is, at its most fundamental description, a Top-Down system of governance and ownership (I admit, probably not the way you mean, but it did tickle me).
Dragons hoarding wealth might be emergent human behavior, but, hey, so are brave knights.
t1E9mE7JTRjf · 19h ago
> Do you mean trade or mercantilism?
Neither. But to pick one, trade.
> has only been dominant for the last few hundred years
That's hard to falsify, although I'd guess people have had things for much longer, eg spears. Although this get's away from the point, and into something else.
Right now if I step out into the street, I can flag a taxi, I can buy a coffee. In each case these are direct peer to peer transactions, where the price is agreed between us based on what we both want out of the exchange. I find it easy to imagine that's how it was hundreds of years ago too, even within tribes.
The capital (money, coffee, spear), isn't really the relevant thing. It's a conduit and focal point of behaviour. That was my original point, and why I don't value a top down aspect to it (even though that of course exists in groups with more scale - societies). I would welcome a refute on that point, or if you could frame a different way of looking at it (capitalism) at the level of individuals who want to consentfully interoperate (and don't even know the word capitalism).
alxjrvs · 19h ago
> Right now if I step out into the street, I can flag a taxi, I can buy a coffee. In each case these are direct peer to peer transactions, where the price is agreed between us based on what we both want out of the exchange
I agree that we can do this. I do not agree that this is, strictly speaking, capitalism.
Capitalism =/= the exchange of goods, services, and capital.
Capitalism is the system that says the people who own the property constituting the critical infrastructure of an organization - the "Means of Production" - should get to make all the rules. That's it.
If I own a big beef machine that turns cows into hamburgers, it doesn't matter that I need 50 people to run it and 200 people to box and ship and sell the patties, the fact that I am the person who had enough money to buy the big beef machine means that my word is law, period. If I don't like the way they touch my big beef machine, they go away. If they don't like how unsafe the big beef machine is, too bad. Doesn't matter how much I sell the patties for - I decide how much I pay you, and I keep the rest (not exactly peer-to-peer). I own the big beef machine, so my say goes.
I agree with you that trade will exist until the end of time, and has existed since the first time Ook had something that Grog wanted and Grog decided it was too much energy to kill Ook over it.
When I say I am "Anti-capitalist", I mean (among other things) that I do not believe Capitalism specifically is the best (most productive, least ethically repulsive) means by which to engage in trade.
None of these opinions relate to trade or even the concept of capital itself, but rather the means by which we organize it.
To the original quote: It is hard to imagine the end of capitalism, because people believe capitalism is a natural facet of human nature. It is not; it is a big beef machine.
pram · 19h ago
There is a definition difference. What Marx defined as capitalism is a pattern of post-feudal production after the industrial revolution. It means the transformation of quantities of surplus value from wage labor, and the qualitative transformation of the surplus into capital.
People typically respond with “well using money and buying stuff in a market is just natural law” etc which isn’t “capitalism” and indeed the first chapter of Capital is all about commodity-money and primitive markets and production. These things are all pre-capitalism and have existed for as long as civilization has.
thrance · 12h ago
Communism is supposed to be socialized ownership of the means of productions. So yeah, in a communist world capitalism would be gone (duh). In fact, you don't even have to imagine it, just look at pre-agrarian societies.
If you're arguing capitalism naturally emerges from large societies, you have to prove it and explain why. You can't just claim it based on your surface level of modern economics.
And no, anti-capitalists don't think they can remove a few billionaires from their thrones and be rid of capitalism. Your idea that they do seems most uncharitable to them.
aussieguy1234 · 19h ago
I've found what's happening in north eastern Syria to be interesting.
This area was previously under the religious fundamentalist rule of Islamic State, who were pushed out by a Anarchist/Libertarian socialist milita, around half of whom were women (much to the dislike of ISIS, whose fighters believed if they were killed by a woman, they don't get to go to heaven).
Currently it's the first example of a working Anarchist system.
No laws means that capitalism isn't illegal, so it still exists there.
But most of the economy is based on cooperatives and wages are three times higher than the rest of the country.
They smartly played the global power order, letting the Americans develop their oil and the Russians develop their gas.
Unlike what many may think, people don't go around killing each other without laws in place - which does happen in the rest of Syria under a statist (State based) system of government.
thrance · 20h ago
Yeah yeah, markets are a natural phenomenon arising from human nature itself and nothing can be done to fix the issues they cause, so we shouldn't even try. We get your argument, it's as old as humanity itself, and was used to justify feodalism, slavery, etc.
grg0 · 20h ago
I wonder, where was GP during the cold war? Did he sleep through it?
t1E9mE7JTRjf · 19h ago
> so we shouldn't even try
I haven't said that.
Do you have a point or view, which counters mine?
I wonder if it's capitalism, or the consent of humans with different values you reject.
thrance · 12h ago
I have trouble even understanding your original comment.
First, I've yet to meet an "anti-capitalist" who believes its existence is enforced by a secret cabal at the top. They very much understand the material conditions that led to it.
Second, I reject your "function of consent/interoperability at scale beyond the immediate family/tribe unit". Take a look in your history books, societies have been organized in many ways that don't require accumulation of capital in the hands of a minority.
So, if your viewpoint is that capitalism is a natural state of things, I completely disagree, and there are many counter-examples throughout history.
grg0 · 20h ago
This is an old, unoriginal argument that is also completely baseless. According to this, people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution, right? And then capitalism just naturally emerged, of course. Not a single drop of blood was spilled.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with standards or the article, if that is what you are implying. The Internet, for example, along with the many standards that followed, is the result of government funneling money into the Pentagon, universities, and other research institutions. It did not emerge spontaneously. And then private enterprise has flourished on top of that baseline infrastructure, much of which is used unaltered to this day. If anything, we need more and up-to-date standards, not siloed proprietary technology that disappears on the whims of an acquisition or a bankruptcy.
karaterobot · 19h ago
> According to this, people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution, right? And then capitalism just naturally emerged, of course. Not a single drop of blood was spilled.
I didn't really want to wade into a pointless argument, but this is a very ungenerous reading. They didn't say any of the things you're implying they did. A system can be natural, inevitable, emergent and still require that blood be spilled to make it happen. Karl Marx certainly believed so.
grg0 · 19h ago
Fair enough, if you admit that violence is part of that "natural" emergence of things.
I don't think my reading was ungenerous, though. OP wasn't even stating anything related to the article, mostly just spammed free market fundamentalism. That bottom-up argument etc. is entirely baseless and does not check with even recent history.
t1E9mE7JTRjf · 19h ago
> completely baseless
Can you say what is baseless?
> people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution
Not sure where you're going with this?
> there is nothing wrong with standards
I agree.
It seems you think capitalism and standards are at odds with each other? I'm trying hard to read points from your sentences.
grg0 · 19h ago
Your view is baseless, as in not grounded in reality. Abstractions that do not model reality are useless, they are mostly just ideology.
> Not sure where you're going with this?
I was just stating the corollary of your original statement. I know, it makes no sense, that's precisely my point.
> It seems you think capitalism and standards are at odds with each other?
Not at all.
> I'm trying hard to read points from your sentences.
Maybe check your reading comprehension, then. Try again.
t1E9mE7JTRjf · 19h ago
If you can refute it, do. Otherwise, no merit seen yet.
grg0 · 19h ago
Haven't I already? Which part are you referring to?
SpicyLemonZest · 19h ago
I don't really understand this article. The authors don't seem interested in the details of either capitalism or standards development organizations. Just because they're nonprofit doesn't mean they're outside of the market economy! (ANSI must have forgotten about their purported commitment to "information sharing for free or nearly free" when they started charging $2500 for the complete 2023 SQL standard.)
pessimizer · 19h ago
You don't need an anti-capitalist case for standards. The capitalist case for standards is that you don't want firms to succeed though manipulation of the market because it keeps them from competing in productive ways (i.e improving product or process.)
Energy that companies spend on dirty tricks and dirty trick defense is waste, and makes us all poorer. But you can't expect any particular firm to unilaterally give up an incompatibility moat, unless all of them do. Government stepping in to set standards is solving a collective action problem.
And standards can also be bullshit. No mention of the OOXML debacle.
readthenotes1 · 20h ago
"And so we return to where we started: the difficulty of imagining an end to capitalism. We do not claim to have a solution to that particular problem"
It's pretty funny to see such a blatantly biased article coming out of academia. Oh wait.
Meanwhile, I'll save my paychecks to buy the texts of some of those anti-capitalist produced standards.
In other actual anti-capitalist news, the NIH says we shouldn't have to pay twice for government sponsored research.
Standards are a bad thing. Convenient isn't the same as good. They mostly help large companies to monopolize large markets. Without standards, there would be a patchwork of companies catering to different communities. It would create a lot of work opportunities, lots of competition and there would be adapters to bridge between different interfaces. It would be more hassle but it would improve everyone's work life 100x and would probably result in faster technological progress as more people would be able to have capital to innovate, in a more flexible self-directed way.
saurik · 20h ago
All of the monopolies I can think of are built on the back of a proprietary solution and every "patchwork of companies catering to different communities" is seemingly enabled by a standard...
jongjong · 19h ago
Look behind and you will find that this so called 'patchwork' all benefit a small number of centralized entities who define the standards, ultimately.
True decentralized communities do not require standards. They don't require global coordination.
The problem is that you don't even realize that they exist. If you're mainstream, your idea of decentralization is actually just a thin veneer. It's often all centralized behind the scenes. Made centralized using standards and an unhealthy obsession with cooperation on a global scale. Ignoring that small-scale competition is healthy and necessary to keep everyone motivated and doing the right thing.
Then they sooner or later fall victim to a big company like Microsoft with their three Es philosophy; Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
gessha · 19h ago
> Standards are a bad thing. Convenient isn't the same as good.
We successfully communicate on this bulletin board thanks to standards and protocols. We will be in the Stone Age of computers if it wasn’t for standards.
AlotOfReading · 20h ago
Who monopolizes floating point or electrical sockets? Whose lives would be improved if every product had a different, incompatible implementation?
I would actually go entirely the opposite direction and argue that many standards are so useful that it's inappropriate to lock them behind a paywall. They should be entirely free and public despite the costs to produce standards.
jongjong · 19h ago
Small producers would benefit. Producers who produce solutions that are most compatible for a specific community would benefit from other solutions not being compatible.
In such system, everyone would be a small producer. So everyone would benefit. It would be much harder to move cities or countries but that would be a good thing. Everyone would have a great work life. Everyone would have an advantage within their community over unknown foreign producers. Equality of opportunity would be maximized.
The biggest problem in everyone's lives today is their job/career. People spend all their time working. So the system should be optimized to make workers' lives better, not consumers' lives. Capitalism already looks after consumers naturally. The government's job should be focused mostly on producers.
It's not right that every aspect of the system looks after consumers when they don't necessarily produce much social value. A lot of their income nowadays is subsidized by money printing, not the result of past labor as the myth suggests.
TFYS · 16h ago
People and communities are not that different from each other, so I don't think the idea that each community would benefit from a customized local solution would work. You'd lose the benefit of economies of scale and add a lot of friction to economic activity for no good reason. The workers are also consumers, and would have to pay a lot more for everything because a huge amount of work would have to be duplicated everywhere in the economy, making things more expensive.
Large scale is good, the problem is who owns the large scale solution. When it's owned privately, it's easy to abuse such a position of power and workers and consumers don't get the full benefits of scale. The solutions should be collectively owned and managed.
AlotOfReading · 19h ago
A regional standard is still a standard, like the electrical sockets I already gave as an example. What you're advocating for is the absence of standards. Not having standards generally makes producing things harder because you now have to reverse engineer anything you want to be compatible with instead of just designing to the standard.
gessha · 19h ago
Giving people meaningless work like translating between one company’s “standard” to another’s is BS. For successful cooperation and trade you need standardized way of doing things. Languages are a form of standard way of communication. If it wasn’t for standard there won’t be civilization.
Just an end to capitalism that perversely carves out an exception to normal reciprocal arrangements for using other people's property, for one of the most important categories of property: universally owned property. I.e. the environment.
Today, the value of our joint inherited environment has no systematic representation. The default is, do your damage until it is significant enough, and some white knight politicians, finally try to limit the damage with one-off narrow per-case idiosyncratic limits.
No wonder protecting the environment is near impossible. Legally and politically, our systems are tilted far into the direction of non-protection. Ignoring the literal reality of joint inheritance, and ignoring the tremendous value being mismanaged.
The default should be: reciprocal agreements in the form of cap and trade for all public asset impact. Most especially the environment. Exactly as it is required for impact anyone wants to have on another owners private property.
Then the legal and political default would be to protect the value of joint assets, and maximize the value back to the public of their use.
Then all the wonderful magic of capitalism, for optimizing the value of resources, would work for the environment.
This even creates an avenue for some universal income. We all should be paid for use of the non-human created, jointly inherited asset: the environment.
Instead of the default being endless over pollution of CO2, plastics, etc., the default would be all entities pay for what they use, and pay even more for what they use that requires fund for offsetting the damage. Suddenly capitalism and the environment work.
And we all get and dividend, reflecting our jointly inherited asset, on its use.
Value which will go up for everyone as the economy grows, without any form of wealth redistribution.
The numbers of top tier problems this would contribute solutions or partial solutions to, is considerable.
Data interoperability would make our digital lives so much better.
The more universal a need is, the less it should be supplied by capitalism.
Education; healthcare: universal needs. When left to the private sector, prices explode and exploitation reigns. Because no matter the price, people will pay.
Las Vegas’ strip on the other hand, needs no government intervention. Folks there are spending money they can live without!
American culture worships the market as solver of all problems - which it is while there’s still growth. But when things settle in, standards allow new players to keep incumbents honest.
Regarding standards, neat that the “standard” for C is ANSI C. It calls back to a time when standards bodies were key to technology development. It predates even IBM’s XT and AT PC - a transition away from standards-bodies-driven hardware development toward market-leader driven.
Ultimately the universality of standards and ability for new players should always be maintained in every market - it should never be impossible to disrupt lazy incumbents. Standards are crucial to keeping markets and industries healthy.
Soooo how we doing over in social media?
The whole article hinges on examples of a non-capitalist mode of knowledge production being hard to imagine or conceptualise. Wikipedia is often used as an example of precisely that idea; I reckon I'd see it in that context at least once a month.
At this point, it's basically the standard example.
It is, at its most fundamental description, a Top-Down system of governance and ownership (I admit, probably not the way you mean, but it did tickle me).
Dragons hoarding wealth might be emergent human behavior, but, hey, so are brave knights.
Neither. But to pick one, trade.
> has only been dominant for the last few hundred years
That's hard to falsify, although I'd guess people have had things for much longer, eg spears. Although this get's away from the point, and into something else.
Right now if I step out into the street, I can flag a taxi, I can buy a coffee. In each case these are direct peer to peer transactions, where the price is agreed between us based on what we both want out of the exchange. I find it easy to imagine that's how it was hundreds of years ago too, even within tribes. The capital (money, coffee, spear), isn't really the relevant thing. It's a conduit and focal point of behaviour. That was my original point, and why I don't value a top down aspect to it (even though that of course exists in groups with more scale - societies). I would welcome a refute on that point, or if you could frame a different way of looking at it (capitalism) at the level of individuals who want to consentfully interoperate (and don't even know the word capitalism).
I agree that we can do this. I do not agree that this is, strictly speaking, capitalism.
Capitalism =/= the exchange of goods, services, and capital.
Capitalism is the system that says the people who own the property constituting the critical infrastructure of an organization - the "Means of Production" - should get to make all the rules. That's it.
If I own a big beef machine that turns cows into hamburgers, it doesn't matter that I need 50 people to run it and 200 people to box and ship and sell the patties, the fact that I am the person who had enough money to buy the big beef machine means that my word is law, period. If I don't like the way they touch my big beef machine, they go away. If they don't like how unsafe the big beef machine is, too bad. Doesn't matter how much I sell the patties for - I decide how much I pay you, and I keep the rest (not exactly peer-to-peer). I own the big beef machine, so my say goes.
I agree with you that trade will exist until the end of time, and has existed since the first time Ook had something that Grog wanted and Grog decided it was too much energy to kill Ook over it.
When I say I am "Anti-capitalist", I mean (among other things) that I do not believe Capitalism specifically is the best (most productive, least ethically repulsive) means by which to engage in trade.
None of these opinions relate to trade or even the concept of capital itself, but rather the means by which we organize it.
To the original quote: It is hard to imagine the end of capitalism, because people believe capitalism is a natural facet of human nature. It is not; it is a big beef machine.
People typically respond with “well using money and buying stuff in a market is just natural law” etc which isn’t “capitalism” and indeed the first chapter of Capital is all about commodity-money and primitive markets and production. These things are all pre-capitalism and have existed for as long as civilization has.
If you're arguing capitalism naturally emerges from large societies, you have to prove it and explain why. You can't just claim it based on your surface level of modern economics.
And no, anti-capitalists don't think they can remove a few billionaires from their thrones and be rid of capitalism. Your idea that they do seems most uncharitable to them.
This area was previously under the religious fundamentalist rule of Islamic State, who were pushed out by a Anarchist/Libertarian socialist milita, around half of whom were women (much to the dislike of ISIS, whose fighters believed if they were killed by a woman, they don't get to go to heaven).
Currently it's the first example of a working Anarchist system.
No laws means that capitalism isn't illegal, so it still exists there.
But most of the economy is based on cooperatives and wages are three times higher than the rest of the country.
They smartly played the global power order, letting the Americans develop their oil and the Russians develop their gas.
Unlike what many may think, people don't go around killing each other without laws in place - which does happen in the rest of Syria under a statist (State based) system of government.
I haven't said that.
Do you have a point or view, which counters mine?
I wonder if it's capitalism, or the consent of humans with different values you reject.
First, I've yet to meet an "anti-capitalist" who believes its existence is enforced by a secret cabal at the top. They very much understand the material conditions that led to it.
Second, I reject your "function of consent/interoperability at scale beyond the immediate family/tribe unit". Take a look in your history books, societies have been organized in many ways that don't require accumulation of capital in the hands of a minority.
So, if your viewpoint is that capitalism is a natural state of things, I completely disagree, and there are many counter-examples throughout history.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with standards or the article, if that is what you are implying. The Internet, for example, along with the many standards that followed, is the result of government funneling money into the Pentagon, universities, and other research institutions. It did not emerge spontaneously. And then private enterprise has flourished on top of that baseline infrastructure, much of which is used unaltered to this day. If anything, we need more and up-to-date standards, not siloed proprietary technology that disappears on the whims of an acquisition or a bankruptcy.
I didn't really want to wade into a pointless argument, but this is a very ungenerous reading. They didn't say any of the things you're implying they did. A system can be natural, inevitable, emergent and still require that blood be spilled to make it happen. Karl Marx certainly believed so.
I don't think my reading was ungenerous, though. OP wasn't even stating anything related to the article, mostly just spammed free market fundamentalism. That bottom-up argument etc. is entirely baseless and does not check with even recent history.
Can you say what is baseless?
> people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution
Not sure where you're going with this?
> there is nothing wrong with standards
I agree.
It seems you think capitalism and standards are at odds with each other? I'm trying hard to read points from your sentences.
> Not sure where you're going with this?
I was just stating the corollary of your original statement. I know, it makes no sense, that's precisely my point.
> It seems you think capitalism and standards are at odds with each other?
Not at all.
> I'm trying hard to read points from your sentences.
Maybe check your reading comprehension, then. Try again.
Energy that companies spend on dirty tricks and dirty trick defense is waste, and makes us all poorer. But you can't expect any particular firm to unilaterally give up an incompatibility moat, unless all of them do. Government stepping in to set standards is solving a collective action problem.
And standards can also be bullshit. No mention of the OOXML debacle.
It's pretty funny to see such a blatantly biased article coming out of academia. Oh wait.
Meanwhile, I'll save my paychecks to buy the texts of some of those anti-capitalist produced standards.
In other actual anti-capitalist news, the NIH says we shouldn't have to pay twice for government sponsored research.
https://deepnewz.com/us-domestic-policy/nih-to-end-paywalls-...
True decentralized communities do not require standards. They don't require global coordination.
The problem is that you don't even realize that they exist. If you're mainstream, your idea of decentralization is actually just a thin veneer. It's often all centralized behind the scenes. Made centralized using standards and an unhealthy obsession with cooperation on a global scale. Ignoring that small-scale competition is healthy and necessary to keep everyone motivated and doing the right thing.
Then they sooner or later fall victim to a big company like Microsoft with their three Es philosophy; Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
We successfully communicate on this bulletin board thanks to standards and protocols. We will be in the Stone Age of computers if it wasn’t for standards.
I would actually go entirely the opposite direction and argue that many standards are so useful that it's inappropriate to lock them behind a paywall. They should be entirely free and public despite the costs to produce standards.
In such system, everyone would be a small producer. So everyone would benefit. It would be much harder to move cities or countries but that would be a good thing. Everyone would have a great work life. Everyone would have an advantage within their community over unknown foreign producers. Equality of opportunity would be maximized.
The biggest problem in everyone's lives today is their job/career. People spend all their time working. So the system should be optimized to make workers' lives better, not consumers' lives. Capitalism already looks after consumers naturally. The government's job should be focused mostly on producers.
It's not right that every aspect of the system looks after consumers when they don't necessarily produce much social value. A lot of their income nowadays is subsidized by money printing, not the result of past labor as the myth suggests.
Large scale is good, the problem is who owns the large scale solution. When it's owned privately, it's easy to abuse such a position of power and workers and consumers don't get the full benefits of scale. The solutions should be collectively owned and managed.