Remix clone Hacker News

	▲	crabbone 2 days ago
		I was born and lived in USSR for quite a while... life wasn't pleasant there, and technology was not the culprit really. They ran out of carrots a very long time ago, and were left with just the stick to try and enforce the ethics advocated by the communist program. There was a joke that I didn't quite understand at the time: `--What are the benefits of group sex? --You may slack off.` The idea was to say that in order to optimize almost every aspect of industry, everything was centralized, gigantic... which also created a situation where most people could only see a very tiny fraction of what they were working on. Virtually nobody knew what their individual effort contributed to the whole. And in this situation, say, you come to the factory and during your shift you cut a thousand of bolts... or ten thousands... or just ten. The system is too big to adequately respond to your individual input. You just don't know whether your extra bolts were smelted again to make more nuts, or whether some other department in your factory was sitting on their hands waiting for more bolts to come. People who enjoyed their work usually worked outside, or even against the establishment because the system couldn't provide them with adequate reward, not even in a form of recognition.