The “Intellectual Property” Stage of Capitalism and the Modern American Economy.
I saw a video on YouTube (Invidious Proxy) about where “managers” came from.
Today, most low wage hellholes like Taco Bell and Walmart call everyone a “manager” to placate them with a job title, give them tons of extra work, and take away overtime pay, in exchange for another 50 cents an hour or something.
The video went into more detail about how it was a Capitalist response to various leftist angers about the unfairness and inequality in the system.
However, modern management theory is not the worst manifestation of this problem.
One of the biggest modern inequalities in the system today is the inequality and unfairness of “Intellectual Property”, especially as it pertains to “digital works”.
There’s no costs of producing copies. This should make digital works cheaper, but it usually doesn’t.
There’s also no workers making the copies that even have a chance at a middle class life.
It’s, at best, in book publishing, one author (sometimes two), some executives at a publishing company, lawyers, and some other slime. I say slime because most of them are extremely rich and constantly complain it’s never enough.
In software, there’s usually not many programmers employed. Very few by the time the product has “matured” and only needs tended to.
Then in exchange for propping up a few rich assholes who get another heated driveway for the Lexus, you get to bust your ass at Taco Bell or Walmart, so you can “buy thangs for mah iPhone 19 Pro Max OMG I’m gonna cum herrr derrr!!!!!”, which actually was produced in a factory, in some low wage cesspit, with suicide nets, which puts up two coal-fired power plants for every one America shuts down (due to not having the factories here).
Then all the crap made in this hellhole gets put on a big diesel boat and shipped across the world.
So this is clearly the “They’re just screwing with us now.” stage of Capitalism.
You own nothing and will be happy with it.
But you’ll do real work to pay for it.
Your credit card bill will be real too.
Oh, yeah, and they might hire some software programmers to make some sort of nutty copy control system that’s illegal to bypass. That way if you take a copy for after the company goes under or shuts down the “store” or “activation server”, you’re a felon.
But the other use for the nearly $2,000 phone that needs replaced every 2-3 years is to view native advertising disguised as entertainment on TikTok.
Nobody is making money on TikTok without a moneyed interest’s hand up their ass using them as a shill. Quite often, these “social media influencers” are directly on the payroll of some Chinese sweatshop, promoting products for Americans to buy.
I’ve only purchased several books this year. I didn’t get them on some “digital platform” where I’m not even allowed to own the copy after the platform shuts down.
I bought them from the author directly. They printed them out and took them to a convention, and I got to hang out with them for a while and shoot the shit over some snacks, and they were all nice enough to sign a copy for me.
Microsoft has outright stolen people’s money several times with DRM-encumbered music files.
In at least one instance, Walmart “sold” the files to people, then shut down the store.
Since the files were all tied to the PC and copies of Windows Media Player that bought them, when those machines running Windows XP died, they stopped working.
They kept trying to get people to take the bait, like MTV “URGE” in Windows Vista, or “Spiral Frog”, or Zune.
It wasn’t that people were smart enough to “Just Say No!” to DRM, it was the cumbersome menial labor of moving around digitally encumbered files that needed to be “managed” by some really terrible computer software.
Apple did one better.
First they sold people music that had the DRM, then they sold it to them again (at a partial discount if they already had a copy with DRM) to remove the DRM.
Then they automatically deleted the entire music library of thousands of songs ($1.29, each!) from the person’s Mac and told them they could download the files again, one at a time, from iCloud, or just pay $12.99 a month forever to use Apple Music.
DRM is particularly nasty because you’ll never have a copy of your own of any of the things you’re paying for. Even if you do have a copy, there’s no legal way to share it with anyone, or make a backup, so it’s very anti-social.
When Apple said it was yours because it had no DRM, people fell for it again, then Apple planted a malicious command that had the Mac destroy their music library, and the notifications said your money is gone, now rent the things you “bought” that we destroyed.
Book publishers hate public libraries, but the concept has been around so long that they can’t just shut them down overnight.
But what they can do, what they are doing, is convincing library managers to use limited taxpayer dollars to foist DRM’d “ebook lending programs” on people which put the publisher in control of what’s even available.
Like Netflix, if they want to take it down, and it was on your list, well, tough shit.
You can’t use it now.
This is why I never agree to DRM. I turn it off in all my Web browsers. It should have never been allowed on the Web.
DRM is essentially a way to rob people who go to work of their money, in exchange for absolutely nothing.
Five iPhones and $10,000 in the trash, and 10 years from now….still nothing.
DRM and the tyranny it promotes make trying to deal with “digital goods” like holding onto sand, or water.
Apple also has the most successful scam in the entire software “publishing” industry.
They charge software developers 30%, essentially for doing nothing more than hosting it on servers, which they mostly rent from Google, and wrapping it in DRM. They then force authors and users to deal with this store by abusing both parties with App Store lock-in.
If they didn’t behave this way, I might even purchase an iPhone because I could actually use it to do useful things. Apple discourages authors from giving me software without charging me something for it, by charging them a considerable amount of money, per year, if they want to register as a developer, only to turn around and give me software for free. And their App Store is entirely incompatible with most Free and Open Source Software licenses.
They’ve done me a favor. By making the platform so overtly useless and obnoxious, I’ll be sure to never have the temptation to buy one.
Thank you, Apple. There’s so little you can do with an iPhone after you pay so much for one that nobody could look at this arrangement and rationalize it.
It’s like a Jitterbug phone, only for teenagers and soccer moms.
It’s hard to make any real money on the Apple store due to the developer account fees and the 30% revenue drain. So when people put useful software in the App Store, like VLC, they make the platform more attractive to users, which in turn hurts the same users.
Marx’s theory of alienation was turned into computing products.
The iPhone. The Mac. The Windows “device”.
The workers are totally alienated from their labor, they are directed at meaningless pursuits that cost them money and life happiness, by the owners of the means of production.
DRM hands the means of production to the wealthy elite with no benefits to the workers who pay to use the digital goods. They don’t even get to work in a factory for a small paycheck along the way.
If it were possible to dig up Karl Marx, and horrify him into dying again immediately, you would show him America, and especially how Americans are pressured into parting with valuable capital in order to do minor, trivial, computing tasks.
The alternative to handing the means of production, in terms of computing, to the wealthy elite, is to seize the means of production yourself with Free Software and a sharing culture.
Richard Stallman as a de facto Marxist both makes me cringe and inspires me, it really and honestly depends on the topic. In terms of computing, he’s often correct.
It actually wasn’t even Richard Stallman or the Free Software Foundation that made me decide that I didn’t like the concept of bring parted with a lot of valuable capital every time I needed to do a small computing task.
In the 1990s, at least software publishers had to publish something. They gave you a box with a disc or some diskettes in it (a physical copy of the software), usually in a pretty box, that came with a printed manual about how to install and use it. And although the software license said to only use one copy at a time, if I wanted to put a copy on my other computer, in the bedroom, there was no technical measure (DRM) that would prevent me from doing it.
So the metaphor of buying something, which was yours to keep, and paying for a service (the disc/diskettes and the manual), and being free to use as many copies as you wanted, generally rang true for proprietary software that you paid for. It also had no built-in “time-bomb” like Product Activators that will de-authorize the product if Microsoft shuts down a server (or has it go offline unexpectedly), or you pay as you go and when your “subscription” runs out, MS Office goes into “read-only” mode.
There was none of this. Your binaries would always work. Today, it is still possible to install Office 95 on a PC, but if you pay for Microsoft 365, all you get is another month.
Why is Microsoft so insidious?
The American government doesn’t literally send the police out to stick a gun to the back of your skull and say, “Now you listen here, you, and you listen good! You’re going to work for for free, to buy Microsoft Office, and pay taxes on the earnings! Every year!”, no, they’re more subtle.
Got a petition to file with an Illinois court?
Need to interact with US Immigration or the Patent Office?
Got a course to take at the local government university?
Well, they use Microsoft formats.
So you’re being told, “In theory, you don’t have to work for free to subscribe to this intangible thing you don’t even want, but if you don’t you can’t interact with your own government or go to one of its schools if you can’t handle their stinking office formats, which are so badly designed that their software can be the only thing that touches it, and it still gets corrupted eventually.”
What Apple or Microsoft represents is an extreme worst case of alienation of labor.
In many cases, people are forced to buy poorly made software, which they don’t even want, and can’t easily put down once they have it, like some sort of a cursed object.
Depending on what the minimum wage is in your State, it might cost you 10-12 hours of working at your job for free, each year. As another cost of dealing with your government.
The court system is already very expensive to access. They have filing fees, and you’ll need an attorney, and now they’re pressuring you to subscribe to lousy office programs you don’t even want.
We already have open standards for office formats, called Open Document Format, but Microsoft has successfully paid off, bribed, corrupted, the Illinois State government to demand Microsoft forms.
The government even demands that you edit PDFs using Microsoft Edge. But I edited them with Okular in KDE and the court accepted them, so it’s not even necessary to use Edge, they’re just giving Microsoft free advertising on a .gov Web site!
The costs of dealing with Microsoft percolate throughout the entire economy.
Because all the businesses you interact with and governments you pay taxes to are also dealing with this parasitic drag.
There are at least some minor positive benefits to employment in a sector that actually produces things.
There are no positive economic benefits of dealing with Microsoft. It’s a parasitic loss to the economy, which snowballs into many billions of dollars, and to the capital you personally could otherwise spend on housing, food, gas for your car, and a pair of shoes.
We already have software that meets or exceeds Microsoft standards and doesn’t force me to squander valuable capital, so in logical conclusion, what else could Microsoft be considered other than a parasite?
So I refuse to pay anything for it.
Microsoft Office could bleed me for $1,000 over ten years and I’d still have nothing, really.
At least I could pay a month of rent on my apartment if I don’t subscribe Microsoft Office.
LibreOffice has made it possible, and this is why Microsoft is leaning on their partners at IBM Red Hat to defund it and delete the packages.
Overall, the fear of going broke and starving is what motivates people in the US.
They try not to make everyone absolutely furious, -or- so comfortable that they don’t need to do a lot of work.
It’s a balancing act. You need to have some people eating out of the dumpster and living in cardboard boxes. Not enough to revolt and change anything and gain a power base, but enough to scare others when they see it.
There’s this “ideal amount of suffering” to compel the public to not do anything to kill the bastards, revolt, and start running the place. You have to always make it enough to scare people into working, but not enough that the police can’t quash them.
You want to keep the people who only barely subsist as distracted and apathetic with nonsense as possible.
That way instead of rage and people burning shit because they’re all starving and have nothing left to lose, at least they can go to McDonald’s and watch some porn.
The problem is that this is all America aspires to be now.
The people running this place almost couldn’t have duplicated Orwell’s Ninteeen Eighty-Four any better if they tried, including “telescreens” to monitor people.
The government literally pays people to put surveillance cameras in their house. The police don’t use them to solve crimes, they just want to be able to tap into the cameras when they become interested, and it won’t be because they’re interested in your home invasion.
My mother even asked me if I could install an Amazon Ring into her front door. I told her I knew how to but I wouldn’t ever do that to her. She sincerely wondered why not, then I explained how the police can access it without your consent, and they’ve rarely solved any crimes with them, but they have arrested the homeowner and used their own camera as evidence.
The government does not want to raise a big stink about how your own camera can be used against you, and you can’t actually delete anything it sees.
Illinois is one of the worst States in America, especially for “right to self-defense”.
If someone shows up, hopped up on crack, trying to break my door down, do you think I want a camera aimed at me?
You can go further into Orwellianism to describe America today, including the point where everyone should be in the middle class, but the government takes their valuable labor and throws the excess into something like, the War in Iraq, or Syria, or Ukraine for that matter. Always war. Never a chicken in the pot and two cars in every garage.
No prosperity, just drugs flooding the streets.
The floorboard has rotten out from under the country.
Having children is generally a mistake because it keeps the cycle of exploitation going.
The government is panicking because of this, insulting people who choose not to have children, because they finally have no money to do it with, by having the media throw about the term “infertility”.
Like you’re a eunuch. Like you need to lay on your back and think of America. A country that has abandoned about half of its own citizens.
I think we should do more to educate potential immigrants coming here in caravans that this country isn’t even taking care of its own citizens. It’s falling apart, and it’s a giant real estate scam. They won’t like it when they get here and nobody will hand them a work permit if they want one.
Of course, the whole point of not handing them one is actually so they will have to work for some crook, for less than minimum wage, with no rights, while the system looks the other way.
I wish I could say that I knew exactly what to do about all of this, but I don’t. I know what to do in regards to my computing.
Don’t let them control that too and don’t let them turn me into another drone who might as well have a $2,000 iPhone sewn into my skin, which needs to be replaced every couple of years.
Don’t rely on proprietary software.
It only has one point, which is to addict you and make you dependent, so that they can demand any price.
I ran into a Web site in the late 90s called “Completely Free Software”.
It had nothing to do with Free Software (as in Freedom), it was written by a man in Australia named Graham Pockett, who admitted that he used to be a “software pirate”, but “reformed himself” due to Fundamentalist Christian beliefs, and then he only used “freeware” (which is an all encompassing term for things that may be proprietary, binary-only, but free of financial cost).
Ironically, this all runs on Windows and DOS, which cost a never-ending pile of money to use (although DOS has since been cloned).
I would say this misses an important point.
Using this “freeware” might alleviate the loss of useful capital, but you still depend on single authors.
You can’t fully seize the means of production and produce a different version that does things you want.
All you get are binaries that will rot.
If Google lets you use “Docs” for free, then it is “freeware”. But you don’t even get the binaries. They can change their mind tomorrow and say it costs $100 a year now.
They can change it, but you can’t. It’s “freeware”, but without even the benefit of “rotting binaries” that you can at least copy exactly how they are now.
Many people give up when they see obstacles like the ones that Microsoft has built in order to ensure their hegemony of Office and Windows, but obviously not everyone has.
Microsoft 365 is as much of a reaction to the decline in Windows usage as it is anything else. I would say it’s even the typical Capitalist response to anger. You adopt the points of the reformers, but only as many as you need to in order to quell the insurrection.
It became necessary to decouple Microsoft Office from Windows because the PC sales are worse every year, and Microsoft only has 69% of this shrinking desktop market for Windows anyway. (StatCounter August 2023)
Porting their software to “Linux”, the Web, or the Mac is a necessary strategy for Microsoft, if it wants to survive the collapse of Windows at all (which they barely invest anything into anymore and manage to break somehow almost every month).
While establishing a beachhead is a tactic that an enemy military might use to make further gains, we should see what Microsoft is doing as exactly that, and refuse to entertain this idea of meeting them on the platforms that we use. ⬆