According to this plan, people with minority viewpoints would also get a vote - they could vote for some left-wing newspaper/blog/tv channel/whatever, and their share of the "news" tax would go to that paper/blog/tv station. Simple as that.
I'm not proposing a winner-take-all system, like the US presidential election... hell no:-)
In addition: Maybe I, as a taxpayer, don't want my nickel going to the liberal/conservative/communist/libertarian rag on the corner, and I only want to financially support the local whack-job-environmentalist newsletter. Why should I be forced to subsidize the others?
See, there's this cool technology called "voting"...
If we all paid a "news tax" we could still vote to direct shares of our tax to the news providers we preferred. If you don't like liberal conservative communist libertarians you could direct your money somewhere else. The difference from a retail market is just that you couldn't choose not to pay.
So you can still have choice. I pay taxes that pay for the public health system in this country, but I still get to choose what doctor I go to.
The northern lights are particularly fascinating, and are visible to about 25% of the Earth with the naked eye during the fall and spring equinoxum -- and take note, a similar phenomenon, referred to as the southern lights, occurs in the
lower hemisphere to treat the other 25%.
"lower"?! I think the word you were looking for is "other". "Southern" could be good if you want to get real technical.
But you have to realize the fact that evolution is not widely accepted. In fact, the only places where it's taught is the USA, Most of western europe, Canada, and a few asian countries (Japan, China, South Korea).
Regarding the US dollar and English, I take your point, which is only natural.
But I assure you that when the US dollar crashes and the Euro becomes the major online currency:-) the conversion will not be a big issue for American consumers (though actually being able to afford to buy stuff may be a different matter of course). I have often bought things over the web in US dollars, using a New Zealand credit card, and it was transparently converted to NZ dollars at a reasonable exchange rate... no problem at all.
Also, I wouldn't worry about English dying out on the web. There's a lot of material in Chinese on the web today, and it's increasiny very rapidly, but does it get in your way? No of course not. I don't think many website publishers will be thinking "I'm not going to publish this website in English any more, it's going to have to be all in Chinese instead". If there's more Chinese content online that doesn't mean that English speakers will be served any less well.
But news on the other hand... it seems to me that more foreign news would be a big step up, even if it were all of it lies. At least it would be different, and as you suggest, even reports on the US would provide you with a different perspective. You can learn a lot even from lies. If you only see US lies you will know a lot less than if you see foreign lies too:-)
I spent a couple of months in the US a few years ago and was amazed and appalled at the mass media's lack of coverage of the rest of the world, and on the pro-US-business bias, and even worse, the sheer narrow parochialism of the TV networks who seemed interested in events in the rest of the world only to the extent that they affect the US.
Don't take this as a personal criticism, but as a criticism of the US media/establishment. I think American citizens actually have a lot to gain from "their" media being pushed into second or third place.
What about "The Cyberiad", by Stanislaw Lem? As I believe the original poster suggested. Seriously, it's a fantastic book (in every sense). It is hilariously funny while still being philosophically very interesting (i.e. it's not just "trash" science fiction).
Google, in the other hand, shows a lot of pages related to the movement to free Tibet from Chinese domination. Note the link to the Tibetan Government in Exile's website, which ranked #3 in Google.
... whereas the evil Red Chinese have censored this page on Accoona so thoroughly that it doesn't appear at all!... oh, until #6
Also, note that the #3 match in Accoona (under "sponsored links"), shows the Chinese government's page on Tibet.
... whereas Google's sponsored links had it at #2.
The differences between the two search engines are real, but there's no way a sane person who had actually used Accoona would think this is because Accoona is censoring these Tibet-related links. IMHO this goes beyond the anti-Chinese prejudice which is wearyingly common on/. to reach the level of clinical paranoia.
... fields of robots battling it out, even if they are merely remote controlled, will keep real people from dying needlesly. However, again, how long before someone figures out how to gain control of these things and turn them against civilian populations, villages, cities, etc.
You seriously think the Pentagon will only deploy these robots against other robots?! Would they think it too "unfair" to use them against humans?
I don't imagine it will take the Pentagon very long to work out how to use them against civilians (hint: point and shoot).
It is official; Linus Torvalds confirms: RPM is dying!!!
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered RPM community Linus Torvalds CNN confirmed that RPM market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all package managers. Coming on the heels of a recent LinuxWorld survey which plainly states that RPM has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict RPM's future. The hand writing is on the wall: RPM faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for RPM because RPM is dying. Things are looking very bad for RPM. As many of us are already aware, RPM continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
All major surveys show that RPM has steadily declined in market share. RPM is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If RPM is to survive at all it will be among academic dilettante dabblers. RPM continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, RPM is dead.
Note also, that, while non-invenstment activities are consistent with, and part of, capitalist endevours, they are not the primary activity of capitalist systens, and by themselves, or with little choise in invenstment, do not a capitalist system make.
So, no the serf, or slave, is not a capitalist, per se, but this does not mean that he does not undertake activities harmonious with such a system.
Well quite. This is the same point that I was trying to make about O/S software development; i.e. that these activities while harmonious with capitalism, are not themselves capitalist. They are in fact a kind of commmunist activity, embedded in a capitalist framework, but recognisably communist (rather than, say, Socialist, even).
This has been interesting, for me at least, despite the thread being well cold;-)
"that which can be invested, leveraged, or traded for a more desirable thing, whether tangible or intagible"
Your definition of capital is ok up to a point, which is the bit at the end "... a more desirable thing, whether tangible or intangible". If you'd replace it with "... other capital..." (i.e. a recursive definition) then I'd agree. As it stands though, buying myself lunch is a capital investment! I am a capitalist because I buy myself lunch! By this definition, almost everyone in the world is a capitalist. Even some slaves and serfs could do this. In Roman times some slaves were even known to save up enough money to buy their freedom so they must've been able to buy goods for their own consumption.
It seems to me that you want to use the c-word to apply to all kinds of human transactions because you approve of capitalism and want to see social life always through that lens. But I don't see the point in that - actually social life is more diverse than that, and by doing this you can actually lose sight of what is distinctive (both good and bad) about capitalism.
In fact, precisely because you approve of capitalism, it seems to me you should be clear about what capitalism actually is, i.e. what distinguishes it from these other relationships which also fall under the overly-broad definition of capitalism which you currently use. Otherwise it seems to me you can't have a decent critique of non-capitalist relationships, because your analysis actually disregards them.
Because capitalism is a highly developed social system, you can trace the origins of it in other social forms, just as you can see the origins of the human species in fish, without actually conflating humans and fish.
In the case under discussion, the difficulties in the operation of markets, with purchase and sale etc (a defining feature of capital, at least as economists define it), was precisely the point under discussion, after all.
This presumes that a majority can best direct the efforts of all. I disagree with that premise. I much prefer a free market system.
I don't think it does presume that a majority dictates the production. It seems to me that minorites could also direct production through a system of voting. People would vote for software, and the by voting they would be directing "their" share of the tax take towards that software developer. So if a software package was very popular and had majority support it would receive more money but even with a small amount of support it could still receive investment.
What I wonder though, is if the instability caused by perpetual artificial scarcity can be damped by removing some of the positive feedback elements: viz. overbroad patents. Would that be sufficient?
I don't think it would, though that would be an improvement. What concerns me more is the inefficiency of a system which prevents wide-spread use of productive resources. Only if the good software is free of charge can it be guaranteed to be deployed as widely as possible. So long as the financial system in place imposes costs on software use, there will be people who could benefit from the software, but will not be using it, despite the fact that it could be delivered to them for next-to-nothing. This is the big problem with the software mass market IMHO.
I think it is useful to restrict the word "capitalist" and related words to the financial sphere. It doesn't help, imho, to try to use these concepts to describe consumption of goods in pursuit of happiness. While this is a fine thing and legitimate ways to invest one's resources, they should not be called "capitalist" when they don't involve the use of "capital", which is a perfectly good word with a useful meaning.
Please don't get the idea that I'm opposed to consumption, or opposed to people making things for fun, or whatever; you're correct that this is what life is all about, and I don't think we differ at all there; it's just that I don't think it helps to describe this ordinary life as "capitalist".
If you want to use the word to describe other situations altogether then you impoverish the language by denuding the word of its real specific content. Note that by this definition, kings, nobles, serfs, slaves and slave-masters, wage-earners, employers, and hunter-gatherers are all capitalist. You could just as well apply it to animals and plants, as well. I just think there's no point in misusing the word that way.
I view capitalist, as any mechanism for leveraging a resource for a perceived gain, but it appears that you (and the article's author) recognize this as capitalist only when such a trade would be generally recognised as beneficial.
My understanding of the word is that the mechanism is only "capitalist" if there is a financial exchange involved. What makes it capitalist is
the deployment of "capital" which is money or at least sufficiently liquid to be able to be deployed in a number of activities, so that there's an element of choice involved for the capitalist ("where will I deploy my capital today?"),
and that the capital is deployed in order to produce something which will then be sold to recoup more capital. Something which is produced to be given away free may be part of a capitalist process if that giveaway contributes to sales of something else, of course.
So, highly personal activities, which might be viewed by the participant as beneficial if only for the sheer joy of doing them, are capitalist in my book, but probably not in yours.
Yes, because you can't take that "sheer joy" and use it to do something else; the "sheer joy" is an end in itself, something directly consumed and not a valuable input into some other economic enterprise.
I happen to prefer my definition because the greater leverage or productivity arises out of such personal tradeoffs in a greater free market.
I don't think I understand this statement - could you explain?
I take your point. This would be the case if the software development work was being done as part of a capitalist enterprise (i.e. by an IT dept in a private company), for the purpose of reducing the costs of that company. In that case, and to that extent, it can be seen as capitalist.
But if you look at Linux, or Apache or some such project, that's not really the case is it? These projects are actually outside such a narrow framework. That's the point of the German dude's article which is quite correct, IMHO. They can co-exist with capitalist enterprise, in a capitalist system, and even mobilise some resources from the capitalist system, but they are not themselves capitalist. My example with domestic cookery is the same in a way - though domestic cookery is not a capitalist enterprise, it is not incompatible with a capitalist system, and can actually play a subordinate role for capital, without being capitalist itself. I think "voluntary" domestic labour has a similar relation to capitalist enterprise as capitalist enterprise does to collaborative open source software development.
I think it is something that needs to be addressed. Really, artificial scarcity must be abandoned on the long term, it just isn't sustainable.
As much as I am a libertarian, I agree: Artificial scarcity is useful, and consistent with the belief that the individual control what he produces. But I do not think that such scarcity need continue in perpetuity in order for it's benefits (creation of new things with high development costs) to be reaped. The biq question of course, is how is the artificial scarcity to be ended? I do not subscribe to the idea that a strong government is the right way to do it.
I agree that artificial scarcity (="intellectual property") must be ended.
It seems to me that
any alternative must be able to ensure that sufficient investment is put into this production which is really useful to society.
And the producers of this wealth must be compensated by society (they must be able to survive and thrive).
But the products themselves must be freely available, hence not for sale, so there must be some other kind of mechanism to extract resources (money or equivalent) from society in general, and provide it to the producers. In other words, some kind of tax levied on society generally, by some kind of government.
Roll on communism!;-) Long live the Ministry of Software! Of course this needs to be done in a really flexible, non-bureaucratic, user-oriented way. IMHO the tax should be levied on each enterprise in proportion to the "software-intensiveness" of their particular sector. Each enterprise would get to vote on how "their" share of the tax would be allocated (i.e. vote for what they use most, or value the most). Basically replace the market with taxes + voting.
The collaborative process traditional with major, popular, Free Software progrms is nothing more than capitalist efficiency at work...
Seriously, but what does this have to do with capitalism? A lot of people like to use the word "capitalism" in a pretty loose way, but it has a specific meaning which ought to be remembered. It all boils down to what are the economic relationships involved in production.
You can call this o/s development "efficient" alright, but where there's no money involved, where people are not employed to do the work, and paid wages, where there's no-one making a profit on a financial investment, then I'm afraid it has nothing at all to do with capitalism. Of course in some o/s efforts these things are present, but they are by no means essential feature.
I realise that a lot of this open-source development goes on in "capitalist" countries, but that does not in itself make it a capitalist practice, either. Consider domestic work done on a voluntary basis. I live in a capitalist country, and last night I did the dishes and cooked dinner, but that didn't make it capitalist work. I was not paid to do this work, and the results of my work were not for sale. I actually gave a bowl of pasta to my partner merely because she wanted it. Of course some people are paid to cook, but most cooking is done on a voluntary basis outside of the sphere of capitalist relationships.
Also, a lot of software development work is done in nominally "socialist" countries, but in itself that doesn't necessarily make it "socialist" production either.
The question of what the participants think of it is not relevant either. If programmers write code without pay and give the results away to society generally, then that makes it "communist production", irrespective of the political beliefs of the workers involved.
It doesn't matter if information about a product can worth 99% of the whole production cost,
Seriously, is this just a mis-placed hyperbole? Because it seems to me that if 99% of the cost of production was informational, then it really would be possible to make this kind of economic analysis. What percentage would be sufficient? 99.99999%? You mentioned replicator technology in another article, saying that such a technology would allow for this kind of analysis, but of course a replicator will require matter to run, won't it? So even that wouldn't be 100% informational?
it doesn't matter whether this information can be transmitted just the same way as computer programs. As long as physical goods require scarce and specilized physical resources, the economy can not be analysed in FS, OS concepts.
I think you making an absolute out of this, when it should be treated as a relative thing: any product has an informational content, and where this content is very high (and computer software, music, etc are only "extreme cases" of this), then capitalist relations will be problematic; inefficient; a barrier to innovation, etc. Where the informational content is low, then "commodification" is not a problem in this way.
You don't need an absolutely generic production system (a la your nanotech factories) to get this effect: ordinary robotized factories such as are common in countries like Japan will also exhibit this effect (to a relatively smaller degree). The pharmaceutical industry is a good present-day example where a kind of software (in the form of genetic code) has become the key area for investment, and patents, copyrights, and other evils are already obstructing technological and social progress. Now "generic" AIDS drugs can be (re-)produced at a fraction of the costs of their (soft) development, and this is already a problem for poor countries with AIDS epidemics and for the drug companies trying to extract $$$ from these countries, etc.
So it's a matter of degree, and the point is that other economic sectors are all inevitably gravitating, more or less rapidly, towards the "high-informational content" end of this spectrum, and therefore we can expect these problems to occur not just with computer software, but increasingly with other economic sectors. But we shouldn't expect capitalism to work perfectly until 100% of production is informationalized should we? As this "informationalizing" process proceeds, we should expect to see the corresponding crisis gradually grow.
BTW, it's been a well-known thesis in the communist movement for some time that science and technology (i.e. information) are increasingly becoming a direct productive force in the economy, just as much as physical machines. So I think Stefan Merten's article is not so neo-Marxist as some people here think.
Both of you are misreading my sentence about uniquenness of computers. No other production tool can be used for producing arbitrary things (unless you count humans as tools), computers can.
You hit the nail on the head. "Unless you count humans as tools". Capitalists do essentially regard humans (or "human-resource units") quite similarly to tools.
A human requires information to work, just like a computer. If you can educate a person (=program a computer) to perform a task better, then you will have illustrated this dude's point perfectly. The improved training or education is very like an improved piece of software; if this human-oriented information were free it would bring benefits similar to those offered by free software; to the extent that education is un-free, it hinders society in the same way as un-free software does.
His big point is that our economies are becoming more information dependent in just about every way you could think of, so the lessons from the software world can increasingly be applied to other areas. Admittedly, software is an extreme case, but that actually makes it a better example, because it shows clearly and simply what is obfuscated and moderated in those other areas.
They can ban it, they probably could not get rid of it, but they could certainly ban it. Think drugs...
But computers are one of the key strategic sectors of the American economy. Drugs (though very popular) are not.
Banning drugs is a ridiculous idea, but it's no real threat to US power. Banning computers on the other hand would destroy the US economy. It's in the nature of computers to be "general purpose" - ban that and you're back to having dedicated word-processors, teletype machines for email, radios for music, magazines for things like/.... and while the US went down the tubes, the rest of the world would watch in utter disbelief. That's why I can't believe it could ever happen.
In the longest term, there is a real risk (see for example the "SS"SCA), that general purpose programmable hardware will simply not be allowed, and we will have to hope that an illegal underground market for hardware that is not user hostile will appear...
The Taliban can ban this sort of thing, because they can factually suppress the technology. But not in the US - it would be too damaging to the hardware industry. Hey, if it did happen it would require a full-blown fascist regime - in that circumstance getting a decent stereo is going to be the least of your worries;-)
Slashdot Mirror
spot the deliferate mistale
I reckon you probably could get a fairly useful text out of it, without OpenOffice, using standard XML tools to extract the textual content only.
XSLT exampleHow so?
According to this plan, people with minority viewpoints would also get a vote - they could vote for some left-wing newspaper/blog/tv channel/whatever, and their share of the "news" tax would go to that paper/blog/tv station. Simple as that.
I'm not proposing a winner-take-all system, like the US presidential election ... hell no :-)
See, there's this cool technology called "voting" ...
If we all paid a "news tax" we could still vote to direct shares of our tax to the news providers we preferred. If you don't like liberal conservative communist libertarians you could direct your money somewhere else. The difference from a retail market is just that you couldn't choose not to pay.
So you can still have choice. I pay taxes that pay for the public health system in this country, but I still get to choose what doctor I go to.
"lower"?! I think the word you were looking for is "other". "Southern" could be good if you want to get real technical.
bollocks!
Regarding the US dollar and English, I take your point, which is only natural.
:-) the conversion will not be a big issue for American consumers (though actually being able to afford to buy stuff may be a different matter of course). I have often bought things over the web in US dollars, using a New Zealand credit card, and it was transparently converted to NZ dollars at a reasonable exchange rate ... no problem at all.
... it seems to me that more foreign news would be a big step up, even if it were all of it lies. At least it would be different, and as you suggest, even reports on the US would provide you with a different perspective. You can learn a lot even from lies. If you only see US lies you will know a lot less than if you see foreign lies too :-)
But I assure you that when the US dollar crashes and the Euro becomes the major online currency
Also, I wouldn't worry about English dying out on the web. There's a lot of material in Chinese on the web today, and it's increasiny very rapidly, but does it get in your way? No of course not. I don't think many website publishers will be thinking "I'm not going to publish this website in English any more, it's going to have to be all in Chinese instead". If there's more Chinese content online that doesn't mean that English speakers will be served any less well.
But news on the other hand
I spent a couple of months in the US a few years ago and was amazed and appalled at the mass media's lack of coverage of the rest of the world, and on the pro-US-business bias, and even worse, the sheer narrow parochialism of the TV networks who seemed interested in events in the rest of the world only to the extent that they affect the US.
Don't take this as a personal criticism, but as a criticism of the US media/establishment. I think American citizens actually have a lot to gain from "their" media being pushed into second or third place.
So you get to see some more foreign news - is that a bad thing?
Bring it on, I say!
What about "The Cyberiad", by Stanislaw Lem? As I believe the original poster suggested. Seriously, it's a fantastic book (in every sense). It is hilariously funny while still being philosophically very interesting (i.e. it's not just "trash" science fiction).
... whereas the evil Red Chinese have censored this page on Accoona so thoroughly that it doesn't appear at all! ... oh, until #6
... whereas Google's sponsored links had it at #2.
The differences between the two search engines are real, but there's no way a sane person who had actually used Accoona would think this is because Accoona is censoring these Tibet-related links. IMHO this goes beyond the anti-Chinese prejudice which is wearyingly common on /. to reach the level of clinical paranoia.
You seriously think the Pentagon will only deploy these robots against other robots?! Would they think it too "unfair" to use them against humans?
I don't imagine it will take the Pentagon very long to work out how to use them against civilians (hint: point and shoot).
There is a Mozilla extension called Annozilla which adds the ability to browse and edit RDF annotations to web pages, using the Annotea protocol.
It is official; Linus Torvalds confirms: RPM is dying!!!
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered RPM community Linus Torvalds CNN confirmed that RPM market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all package managers. Coming on the heels of a recent LinuxWorld survey which plainly states that RPM has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict RPM's future. The hand writing is on the wall: RPM faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for RPM because RPM is dying. Things are looking very bad for RPM. As many of us are already aware, RPM continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
All major surveys show that RPM has steadily declined in market share. RPM is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If RPM is to survive at all it will be among academic dilettante dabblers. RPM continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, RPM is dead.
Well quite. This is the same point that I was trying to make about O/S software development; i.e. that these activities while harmonious with capitalism, are not themselves capitalist. They are in fact a kind of commmunist activity, embedded in a capitalist framework, but recognisably communist (rather than, say, Socialist, even).
This has been interesting, for me at least, despite the thread being well cold
Cheers!
Con
It seems to me that you want to use the c-word to apply to all kinds of human transactions because you approve of capitalism and want to see social life always through that lens. But I don't see the point in that - actually social life is more diverse than that, and by doing this you can actually lose sight of what is distinctive (both good and bad) about capitalism.
In fact, precisely because you approve of capitalism, it seems to me you should be clear about what capitalism actually is, i.e. what distinguishes it from these other relationships which also fall under the overly-broad definition of capitalism which you currently use. Otherwise it seems to me you can't have a decent critique of non-capitalist relationships, because your analysis actually disregards them.
Because capitalism is a highly developed social system, you can trace the origins of it in other social forms, just as you can see the origins of the human species in fish, without actually conflating humans and fish.
In the case under discussion, the difficulties in the operation of markets, with purchase and sale etc (a defining feature of capital, at least as economists define it), was precisely the point under discussion, after all.
Cheers!
I don't think it would, though that would be an improvement. What concerns me more is the inefficiency of a system which prevents wide-spread use of productive resources. Only if the good software is free of charge can it be guaranteed to be deployed as widely as possible. So long as the financial system in place imposes costs on software use, there will be people who could benefit from the software, but will not be using it, despite the fact that it could be delivered to them for next-to-nothing. This is the big problem with the software mass market IMHO.
I think it is useful to restrict the word "capitalist" and related words to the financial sphere. It doesn't help, imho, to try to use these concepts to describe consumption of goods in pursuit of happiness. While this is a fine thing and legitimate ways to invest one's resources, they should not be called "capitalist" when they don't involve the use of "capital", which is a perfectly good word with a useful meaning.
Please don't get the idea that I'm opposed to consumption, or opposed to people making things for fun, or whatever; you're correct that this is what life is all about, and I don't think we differ at all there; it's just that I don't think it helps to describe this ordinary life as "capitalist".
If you want to use the word to describe other situations altogether then you impoverish the language by denuding the word of its real specific content. Note that by this definition, kings, nobles, serfs, slaves and slave-masters, wage-earners, employers, and hunter-gatherers are all capitalist. You could just as well apply it to animals and plants, as well. I just think there's no point in misusing the word that way.
My understanding of the word is that the mechanism is only "capitalist" if there is a financial exchange involved. What makes it capitalist is
Yes, because you can't take that "sheer joy" and use it to do something else; the "sheer joy" is an end in itself, something directly consumed and not a valuable input into some other economic enterprise.
I don't think I understand this statement - could you explain?
I take your point. This would be the case if the software development work was being done as part of a capitalist enterprise (i.e. by an IT dept in a private company), for the purpose of reducing the costs of that company. In that case, and to that extent, it can be seen as capitalist.
But if you look at Linux, or Apache or some such project, that's not really the case is it? These projects are actually outside such a narrow framework. That's the point of the German dude's article which is quite correct, IMHO. They can co-exist with capitalist enterprise, in a capitalist system, and even mobilise some resources from the capitalist system, but they are not themselves capitalist. My example with domestic cookery is the same in a way - though domestic cookery is not a capitalist enterprise, it is not incompatible with a capitalist system, and can actually play a subordinate role for capital, without being capitalist itself. I think "voluntary" domestic labour has a similar relation to capitalist enterprise as capitalist enterprise does to collaborative open source software development.
I agree that artificial scarcity (="intellectual property") must be ended.
It seems to me that
Roll on communism!
You can call this o/s development "efficient" alright, but where there's no money involved, where people are not employed to do the work, and paid wages, where there's no-one making a profit on a financial investment, then I'm afraid it has nothing at all to do with capitalism. Of course in some o/s efforts these things are present, but they are by no means essential feature.
I realise that a lot of this open-source development goes on in "capitalist" countries, but that does not in itself make it a capitalist practice, either. Consider domestic work done on a voluntary basis. I live in a capitalist country, and last night I did the dishes and cooked dinner, but that didn't make it capitalist work. I was not paid to do this work, and the results of my work were not for sale. I actually gave a bowl of pasta to my partner merely because she wanted it. Of course some people are paid to cook, but most cooking is done on a voluntary basis outside of the sphere of capitalist relationships.
Also, a lot of software development work is done in nominally "socialist" countries, but in itself that doesn't necessarily make it "socialist" production either.
The question of what the participants think of it is not relevant either. If programmers write code without pay and give the results away to society generally, then that makes it "communist production", irrespective of the political beliefs of the workers involved.
I think you making an absolute out of this, when it should be treated as a relative thing: any product has an informational content, and where this content is very high (and computer software, music, etc are only "extreme cases" of this), then capitalist relations will be problematic; inefficient; a barrier to innovation, etc. Where the informational content is low, then "commodification" is not a problem in this way.
You don't need an absolutely generic production system (a la your nanotech factories) to get this effect: ordinary robotized factories such as are common in countries like Japan will also exhibit this effect (to a relatively smaller degree). The pharmaceutical industry is a good present-day example where a kind of software (in the form of genetic code) has become the key area for investment, and patents, copyrights, and other evils are already obstructing technological and social progress. Now "generic" AIDS drugs can be (re-)produced at a fraction of the costs of their (soft) development, and this is already a problem for poor countries with AIDS epidemics and for the drug companies trying to extract $$$ from these countries, etc.
So it's a matter of degree, and the point is that other economic sectors are all inevitably gravitating, more or less rapidly, towards the "high-informational content" end of this spectrum, and therefore we can expect these problems to occur not just with computer software, but increasingly with other economic sectors. But we shouldn't expect capitalism to work perfectly until 100% of production is informationalized should we? As this "informationalizing" process proceeds, we should expect to see the corresponding crisis gradually grow.
BTW, it's been a well-known thesis in the communist movement for some time that science and technology (i.e. information) are increasingly becoming a direct productive force in the economy, just as much as physical machines. So I think Stefan Merten's article is not so neo-Marxist as some people here think.
Cheers!
A human requires information to work, just like a computer. If you can educate a person (=program a computer) to perform a task better, then you will have illustrated this dude's point perfectly. The improved training or education is very like an improved piece of software; if this human-oriented information were free it would bring benefits similar to those offered by free software; to the extent that education is un-free, it hinders society in the same way as un-free software does.
His big point is that our economies are becoming more information dependent in just about every way you could think of, so the lessons from the software world can increasingly be applied to other areas. Admittedly, software is an extreme case, but that actually makes it a better example, because it shows clearly and simply what is obfuscated and moderated in those other areas.
They can ban it, they probably could not get rid of it, but they could certainly ban it. Think drugs...
/. ... and while the US went down the tubes, the rest of the world would watch in utter disbelief. That's why I can't believe it could ever happen.
But computers are one of the key strategic sectors of the American economy. Drugs (though very popular) are not.
Banning drugs is a ridiculous idea, but it's no real threat to US power. Banning computers on the other hand would destroy the US economy. It's in the nature of computers to be "general purpose" - ban that and you're back to having dedicated word-processors, teletype machines for email, radios for music, magazines for things like