You engage in confessions as accusations when ignoring the possibility, it could be you who is wrong.

The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism. The economic system forces corporations to behave in anti-social ways.

Similar goes with the trope you peddle, individuals were to blame. They're not. The system they live in, and never had any say in shaping, forces them to engage in behaviors short term that ultimately run counter to their own interests long term.

Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable. Those contributions get monopolized and their benefits privatized. That's not a "belief".

▲

thegrimmest 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What do you mean capitalism? As in the system of private ownership, free exchange, and due process, spanning back to the dawn of agriculture?

Which bits do you object to? The idea that people should be able to form going concerns that outlive any individuals (e.g. investing in the construction of a fishing boat)? That several individuals should be able to share in the risk and profit of such a venture (e.g. a group investing in the construction, and receiving shares of the profit of each catch)? Or that they should be able to hire others on a free market for a wage or share of profits (e.g. hiring a crew for the boat)? Or that if they should have a dispute, there should be a formal, legal, process to resolve it?

The trouble is that there is no human system in which the agents who distribute the resources are perfectly aligned with the agents to whom resources are distributed. This is nowhere more obvious than in the staggering planning, execution, and communication, failures of the Soviet Union. This is a general case of the alignment problem, which is fundamentally unsolved. I would argue that it's un-solvable as long as your agents are living organisms competing in an ecosystem.

As long as niches exist, they will be exploited. Resenting that is akin to resenting the biggest fish in the pond for being so damn aggressive - it's pointless. We live in a pond. We should focus on maintaining the nonviolent and often ecosystem-benefitting nature of our exploitation (since it is hard-won and precarious), rather than resent the inescapable reality of its existence.

▲

soperj an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> As in the system of private ownership, free exchange, and due process, spanning back to the dawn of agriculture?

As far as I can tell none of these things existed before modern times. Mostly people were under authoritarian rule.

▲

Loquebantur 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

You point out aspects you like about capitalism, but those maybe aren't the problematic parts to begin with? You imply, there were no viable alternatives, but that's just ignorance on your part.

When you refer to "private ownership", you unreflectedly endorse things like individuals "owning" land.

The consequence of that negligence are things like environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on. A substantial part of what currently goes wrong on the macro-scale.

"Free exchange" is a misnomer in the same vein. The "freedom" leaves people to willfully avoid asking whether they really should in the first place. More importantly, it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without.

"Due process" isn't tied to capitalism to begin with and all these things don't "span back to the dawn of agriculture".

You put up the straw man of the Soviet Union, prepping it up to the height of serving as the epitome of what humans could conceive of as alternatives (or modifications) of the existing system. That's a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy, not higher insight.

	▲	thegrimmest 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Territorial (read: assertion of exclusive rights to the use of land) behaviour is not unique to humans. My point is that "capitalism" is an abstraction that includes pre-existing human behaviour and motivations, and that many of these in turn are emergent from the constraints of natural world. > environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on > asking whether they really should in the first place? > it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without All of these criticisms reflect a total naivety to ecosystem dynamics at play, and the motivational landscape that they create. As long as these behaviours continue to create a competitive advantage for the organisms that display them, they will continue to emerge and perpetuate. There is no method of social organization that can remove the advantages of resource surplus. You'll also note that environmental destruction, resource hoarding, and interference competition are all widespread behaviours in the natural world. We are part of that world, and are subject to the constraints that it produces. It's like trying to overcome a bug in the CPU instruction set by writing JavaScript. The "problems" are part of the fundamental substrate and aren't addressable at the proposed layer of abstraction.

▲

matkoniecz an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism.

well, other systems were tried and were worse (feudalism, communism etc)

in practice capitalism with some regulations is better than known alternatives

> Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable

what is not questionable then?

	▲	Loquebantur 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Worse, you mistake the bounds of your personal knowledge as the borders of the world. Even if there was no currently "known" alternative, the proper course of action is to research that and find one?