Do personal computers even really emerge under communism? it is yet to be seen. But this specific technology seems to only evolve under capitalism to suit the needs of a certain type of buisness against the consumer.

If it emerged under communism, it probably would be equally as bad. I imagine if it emerged under communism or socialism it would be designed to solve a similar problems: securing the needs of the state against the citizen.

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adrian_b 5 hours ago | parent [-]

There is no such thing as a communist economy.

The economies of all countries that claimed to be socialist or communist were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.

Because nowadays the economy of USA resembles more and more every year to that of the socialist countries from the past, a non-negligible risk has appeared for the personal computer to become an endangered species.

The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade, long before the current wave of extreme price increases.

There is a steadily increasing pressure from big companies and from the governments controlled by them to eliminate true ownership of computers and of many other electronic devices, by introducing more and more restrictions for what owners can do with their PC/smartphone and by introducing more and more opportunities for others to control those devices remotely.

Many kinds of computing devices have eliminated their low-price models and they are offered now only in models so expensive as to be affordable only for big businesses, not for individuals or SMEs.

Ten years ago, I could still buy various kinds of professional GPUs with high FP64 throughput and any model of Intel Xeon server CPUs.

Nowadays I can choose to buy only high-end desktop CPUs for my servers, because the state-of-the-art server CPUs and datacenter GPUs now have 5-digit prices. NVIDIA, Intel and AMD see only big businesses as customers for such products, and they no longer offer any smaller SKUs in these categories (Intel nominally offers a few cheap Xeons, but those are so crippled that they are not worth for anything else but for enabling the testing of some server systems).

So in the kind of unregulated capitalism that exists today in USA, PCs would not have appeared and there is a risk for them to disappear, because they have become a relict of the past.

	▲	panick21_ 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah the old 'No true Scotsman' argument. Except of course that the centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union were exactly what socialists before WW1 demanded. And what they tried to implement. If the Soivet Union and friends were not Communist/Socialist then a communist economy simply doesn't exist, and has never existed and we see 0 reason why it would ever exists. And its not even clear what it would be or how it would work. So its completely and utterly irrelevant for any debate in the real world. Its only in circular marxist self-mastrobation logic to redefine Soviet Union as 'monopolistic capitalism'. > The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade Not in terms of actual performance ... Maybe for Graphics cards, but at the same time, those graphics cards can do things now they could not before so they gained in value.