The centralized monopolies are built to serve the interests of, and to consolidate the powers and control of, a relatively small number of individuals. There’s nothing more freeing an individual than total power and control over others.
Comment on Silicon Valley’s ultra-individualist philosophy wants to conquer the world
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I see nothing individualist with building centralized monopolies.
TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
There’s nothing more freeing for an individual than total power and control over others.
No, possessing power doesn’t mean knowledge, understanding or ability to use it to destroy one’s own chains.
No, all kinds of control add to one’s own chains, through the need to maintain them.
These are not freeing at all for an individual. These are “freeing” in a perverted sense for the kind of collectivist that wants to be at the top of the collective.
TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I don’t agree. I think these people are acting out of what they believe to be self interest, even if it is an unenlightened self interest. Why else would they desire to be at the “top of the collective?” What do they gain if not special, INDIVIDUAL, privileges, opportunities, liberties, etc?
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
I’m pretty sure they meant ultra-privileged.
misk@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
I see plenty. Individualism is the basis of free market economy. Free market economy tends to produce monopolies.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Umberto Eco considers Stalin’s USSR as one of the main examples of fascism.
Fascist “market” economies have anti-individualist propaganda similar to Soviet one, - about everyone selflessly working for the common goal, accepting hierarchies, normalcy.
Fascism itself is anti-individualist, it’s one of the main traits of it, that an individual is a building block for it and nothing more. Except for the will of the people\nation.… expressed in the personalities of the leaders.
Free market economies eventually produce monopolies, because the rest start as monopolies. USSR, again, was basically one humongous corporation, even its planning mechanisms were similar to those that exist inside big corporations. And like many a humongous corporation, it broke up into a few pieces because of C-suite politics.
misk@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
I encourage you to stop idolising individualism because it’s not a virtue by itself. There is a significant difference between state and private monopoly that liberals tend to conveniently ignore. I’m a citizen, not a shareholder.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This conversation is fruitless because you have neither lived in USSR nor studied it.
But in general for a person living in USSR “citizen” was their sorry reality and “shareholder” (in different words, but that’s how “common ownership of means of production” was applied - we have a hierarchical structure, a state, commonly owned by all the citizens and in turn administering the public property, which would be everything in economy) was something they were being told from TV they are, but in fact weren’t. One was better than the other.
Things structurally same are same in operation. Names and ideologies matter zero. State monopoly is worse than private monopoly, because it’s absolute monopoly.
It is a virtue by association with truth, because choices you make are individual and responsibility for them is individual. No matter what you imagine, agree with, sign to, support etc.
Computer games with easy satisfaction and easy construction of unnatural mechanisms have hurt humanity, I think. The virtue of something being just true eludes many people.
shortrounddev@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Except the 99% of times it hasnt
misk@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
What’s the 1% that did? I want to see where the bar is.
shortrounddev@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Italy, Germany, Chile