The next paradigm beyond capitalism These are some rough thoughts I wasn't expecting to share publicly for a long time, if at all, but it seems to be inevitable for me to hit a point of, wth, throw it out there. In this case the impetus was @Alex McLean's comments on https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5U3SEW6A/p1696567536918589 The way I see it, capitalism currently performs many load-bearing functions in the world, but the world today suffers from capitalism being the predominant engine of meaning/motivation. Why do we get out of bed and do anything? The places we tend to pay attention to are governed by social proof, a sense that others are paying attention. Social proof is in turn governed by status seeking; we all want to be "successful", and in our efforts to be successful we chase the prospects of success around us. We're more likely to attend to something if it promises to be successful. And finally, closing the loop, the metrics for "success" are basically money at root. Everything else seems to get grounded at some level of indirection in money. All this hit home particularly hard when listening to the first hour of episode 65 (totally awesome, and having nothing to do with the title), where @Ivan Reese at one point says, to be taken seriously you have to signal effort. And at a second point: one way to signal effort is to spend a lot of money. All totally right and obvious for the world we live in. And yet.. I'm kinda feeling done with seeing large projects spending lots of money as more intrinsically meaningful? We've seen many many examples of the same depressing way large projects with lots of money fail. Money invariably has strings attached. So, I'd like to live in a world where money exists, but more people consider it a satisficing rather than optimizing criterion. Something that inhabits the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy and gets banished from the upper level that it has somehow infected while we weren't looking. What might replace money as a source of meaning and motivation for programmers? One answer I've been rolling around in my mouth and feeling increasingly ok with is: durability. Durability has a long track record (i.e. monuments) as something that can motivate people. Software is currently really bad at building durable artifacts, and not I think for any intrinsic reason. We just haven't prioritized it. I think a world where software artifacts can be easily run a decade later -- without any modification -- would be a significantly better world than the one we live in. In such a world, software would be part of the solution rather than the problem. So, with that lengthy preamble, here's the draft I've been noodling on. Draft: A programmer's pledge Given that: • We are on this planet for a brief time and will take nothing with us when we leave; and that • The effects of our actions compound for good and for ill, long after we are gone, in ways we cannot always anticipate; and that • I want to be helpful to others, and for the good in my actions to outweigh the bad; and that • I want to persuade you that I truly believe the above, that I want to be helpful more than I care about my own gain and aggrandizement; Therefore, I pledge to: • Tell you, when I build anything, what I hope to gain from it. If it's money I'll tell you how much in inflation-adjusted currency, and I'll commit to giving away anything beyond that while unencumbering any secrets it took to create it. If I create organizations or foundations around what I build, I'll enshrine these limits on value capture into their bylaws. • Tell you, up front, when it will be done. I'll provide a clear test for features I will add, and when I will stop adding features. • Show my thought process in my efforts to make it durable. Even after it's done, it might need changes to be runnable on people's computers. What have I done to minimize the likelihood of such changes? What have I learned from past projects that makes this one more durable than them?

That's a really cool idea! I personally have some strong ideas about what capitalism got wrong, and what we can do better, but I havn't ever thought of something like this! If you wanna talk, that would be amazing

Nice thoughts! It reminds me of stumbling across the MOTIVATION file that came with emacs when I was a student, talking about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.. it made an impression on me back then, a bit sad to see it's been removed at some point in the last few years.. I guess the research it's reporting on is very old at this point though

Re: the preamble -- given that capitalism has exerted such a destructive force on the planet, felt first by the most vulnerable spaces, George Monbiot, the journalist, writer, and environmentalist, co-authored a paper in the Schumacher Institute in which he presents a phrase and concept I absolutely love: "public luxury, private sufficiency". In line with your pledge, I believe most systems would benefit from applying this kernel.

@Arvind Thyagarajan https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/private-sufficiency-public-luxury-land-is-the-key-to-the-transformation-of-society makes for brutal reading.

Since you posted this @Kartik Agaram I've been trying to think about what I find meaningful in making things with code. Personally I don't find making promises or planning too much ahead of time motivational although I can definitely see how it is for others. I think for me meaning comes from understanding/learning what I'm doing through the process of coding it, sharing software I've made and then see people do weird unexpected things with it, and connecting with others through live coding. Making money from it isn't really a motivation, although that is a privilege really.. plus I work for a non-profit and am not allowed to make commercial products or prototypes as a condition of my funding..

@Kartik Agaram Your programmer's pledge is about single-person projects, right? What about the more frequent case of team, enterprise, or community projects? Would you make the pledge part of a code of conduct, for example?

I'm very glad I posted this, because y'all are poking at concrete gaps where I only vaguely sensed that some gaps existed 😄 @Alex McLean I wasn't really thinking about digital artists or live-coding communities when I wrote that draft. (Do y'all call yourselves "programmers"? I can see a case for that seeming like a cooty-inducing term 😄) My focus is more on a dynamic of "productive" software that insinuates itself into people's habits, and then exercises power (often accompanied by rent extraction). I think y'all are all good here. (Though do tell me if I seem to be mischaracterizing you, or if I sound like I'm excluding anyone. I tend to think of y'all's position as: you get a voice, but you don't bear much responsibility for what has occurred so far.) @Konrad Hinsen There are certainly many problems facing the world today, and my two paragraphs aren't intended to address them all. Re growth vs sustainability, I'll just point out that getting people to think hard about what we each find meaningful seems more resource-efficient than having whole countries go through the motions of bullshit jobs just to engage in zero-sum status games, all while mining the planet and polluting externalities. A focus on durable artifacts will hopefully lead to fewer artifacts. My focus is just on programmers. I don't pretend to know enough to tell other industries or fields what to do. </handwave> I'm deliberately positioning the pledge at the level of individual projects. There's no limit on how many projects a person can start. At the same time, the start of a project is a high-leverage point at which to set its trajectory. I think we all have experience of joining projects later. It's much harder to change their direction then. Whatever the rules were at the start, we mostly tend to follow them. Re "enterprise", one thing I want to draw attention to is that the value capture limit is phrased as a raw number, not a per capita number. And it is not profit. These are two deliberate decisions. I tend to think there's something vaguely unethical about successful artifacts indefinitely milking society to hire increasing numbers of people for indefinite periods that mostly has the effect of degrading the artifact. I'd like it to be more "glamorous" to build something, freeze it and disband. (Like a game or a movie.) Get what you wanted out of it, then give it away. (Not like a game or movie at the moment.) Get out of the way for a new project to build on the artifact. This worldview considers one-time charges for products morally/ethically superior to ongoing subscriptions. (Services of course are a separate matter. I don't have an opinion there. Though there might be an argument that programming is fundamentally about building artifacts, and the need for something to be an ongoing service is a failure on some level..)

To add to @Konrad Hinsen’s comment: I also find it disappointing that almost everyone I see using the word capitalism online — whether pro or con — seems to be talking about something else. It would be nice if more precise terms were used.

@Kartik Agaram I don't really understand what you mean.. I am indeed a programmer, although don't really see any distinction between programming and coding - I use them interchangeably. I've made credit card management software, web platforms and ecommerce systems as well as pure FRP-based music systems and don't think my motivations have changed so much. Certainly music software is productive, gets into peoples habits and can exert commercial power. Some people (like Steven Pinker) don't see music as serious or important but I strongly disagree, it's intrinsic to human life. and I think it is also intrinsic to the 'future of coding'.

I like the idea of the programmer's pledge. Not able to put it into exact words yet, but I have the feeling I'd like the pledge part to be more human and nature centred and less about economics. I do understand 'capitalism' and 'money' were your points of attention. And I'm also very much in favour of moving away from money as a driver for what we do or don't. If we try to move away from economics (say "no" to), what are we actually after (say "yes" to), what could we pledge then? Just from the hip: "I will build things which empower humans (instead of taking away their empowerment/agency)", 'I will build things others can build with me (search for co-creation)", "I will not build things which are 'over' sufficient (I will not build too much)", "I will build things that are durable for the foreseen lifetime", etc. The last bit being about resource usage which has it marks on our environment(al footprint). I'm trying to see if I can come up with a more concise set of pledges the coming weeks. See how well I do on those in my work 😉. Kinda reminds me of the Inventing on Principle from Bret (Alex beat me to it, bringing Bret into the discussion 😉).

@Alex McLean I think you understand me just fine and I'm just wrong 😅 I need to reflect more on what you've said, as someone who's been on both sides of a divide that is just in my head. So credit card management doesn't exercise a different hemisphere of the brain for you than making music? (Sorry, I only have wrong ways to talk about this stuff..) @Jack Rusher can you think of better terms we could be using here? Or are we just failing to communicate entirely? Would just adding "US" to various terms help?

@Kartik Agaram I didn't mean to imply that programmers should (or could) save the world. But programmers have an unusually high leverage in their decisions. Their indirect impact on the environment, via the actions of others that they encourage or discourage in their software, is more important than their direct impact. So I'd expect a programmer's pledge to include topics such as suggested by @Erik Stel above.

@Kartik Agaram it's been a while.. but working on payment processing was mostly writing c code to pre-written specs but there was some room for finding creative solutions to problems.. A big part of making music for me is making new representations for music, which is really hard and is definitely some of the most interesting and technically challenging work I've done in my career. Actually making live music by live coding does feel very different though in a number of ways.. Being fully absorbed in the sonic output of your code while changing it, with a room full of people are dancing to it, is just a lovely time. It does seem like a very different activity to systems programming, but someone has to program the live coding system in the first place, and building and using systems happens in the same community, with everyone coding in some way.. like with dynamicland, things can get interesting when you break down the barriers between systems programming and live interaction.

@Konrad Hinsen Agreed! I'd love to see more ideas for a pledge that includes these topics. One criterion that seems important to me is objectivity. It should be really obvious to someone juggling a baby whether you're hewing to your pledge or not. A pledge that tries to say more but permits equivocation seems like a net negative to me. Because then you can paper over broken promises with marketing. I.e. by spending money. Which brings us back to the sad situation we're trying to escape. If you lived around the era of competing models of the cosmos in the late 1500s after Copernicus, you would be totally correct to expect that a good theory should explain the lack of Coriolis forces on the Earth's surface. But it took 300 years to get a good story here, and in the meantime we went through 3 more models of the heavens that incrementally improved things. So the world doesn't always cooperate with the expectations people have.. At this point in our history it seems to me that with some of these thorny questions like sustainability or efficiency, a direct approach is unlikely to succeed. It'll just be too easy to game. But they were very much on my mind when I came up with my draft, and I've tried to indirectly nudge people in the right direction along those dimensions, as best I could. Hopefully this clarifies some of the rationale for my current design. But I'm only trying to explain my thought process, not discourage others from exploring these directions.

@Kartik Agaram Most of what you’ve described here seems to be about a collection of bad social norms that became widespread in the anglophone world after Reagan/Thatcher (and sadly show signs of spreading further). I hate that stuff too, but it isn’t “capitalism” per se. Likewise, the things that provide an important (“load bearing”) informational role in modern economies are markets and prices, which can exist in non-capitalistic arrangements.

Agreed. Cory Doctorow has been doing a good job lately describing the history of antitrust regulation in the US, particularly the failure to regulate since Reagan/Thatcher. Calling the system of the last 40 years "capitalism" seems to be an unfortunate consequence of the word getting redefined during these neoliberal years.

I favour local capitalism, which seems mutually supportive and sustainable, over global, which seems rapacious and polluting

I’ve been trying to frame this since I first read your pledge a few days ago @Kartik Agaram — something struck me about it, and I haven’t been able to put my finger on it until tonight when I revisited your pledge while wandering around my neighborhood. I dig the pledge. I think it does a solid job making explicit some motivations that may otherwise not get engaged with in the open when doing a programming. The bit that I’ve realized I found off putting is how neutral it is towards power — ideas like capital and gain are often framed in neutral terms, in ways that sort of place them as forces unto themselves. In my thinking they’re not neutral and they aren’t things unto themselves. They’re byproducts or a proxy for the consolidation of power. Wealth and capital and all that sorta stuff (see @Jack Rusher’s desire for more specificity around the term “capitalism”) are proxies for power. What I feel like might be missing is a more direct statement or acknowledgement of what a programs relationship is to power. How does it run up against an existing power, how does it support, complicate, or concentrate power?

@Kartik Agaram I see I'm not the first to mention it, but my primary motivation for my work is something similar to Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle." I feel pain when I see people struggling to understand software because they're using inadequate tools, and that motivates me to build tools that reduce the amount of misery in the world. When I first read Peter Thiel's Zero to One, I was convinced that the best way to improve the world was to create a startup. But at the same time, I'm much more interested in creating value, and not so interested in figuring out how to capture it for myself (Thiel's two ingredients for success). It wasn't ever planned, but I've stumbled into an alternative in my own career that I thought is worth sharing. My solution is to work in Big Tech, and focus on creating internal supportability tools. Paradoxically, as long as it has a non-toxic culture, I believe the interior of a large tech company is as shielded as you can ever get from capitalism influencing your daily life. Here are a few of the benefits: • I have a natural local community of a few hundred potential users for the tools I build. They're all generally friendly and supportive. • Whatever tools we have can be used internally by anyone for free. So as far as my experience and theirs is concerned, money is not a factor, and our interests are almost always aligned. I'll never face the problem of needing to make my users' experience worse to capture value. • Many of my users are active contributors to our tools as well. So I get to learn how to supervise a large group with different levels of involvement. These days, I focus more on designing the software to make it as easy as possible for other people to help out in their spare time, and less on adding new features myself. In the process, I also get to learn from all of the experts within each domain. • My impact is magnified by increasing my peers' ability to serve our customers effectively. Even if I only serve a few hundred users directly, I may indirectly benefit millions of people. Overall, I think of my experience as being equivalent to creating a startup with training wheels. In several years, chances are that I could save enough money to not need an income, and then I would have the option of "graduating" to the real world and independently building tools for the general public. In the meantime, I'm getting just about the best education for that that I could ask for, without most of the stress that people generally experience in a startup.

Local vs. global is a key element in this, in my opinion. Many schemes work fine in the small, but don't scale up. The reason they work fine in the small is that the consequence of rules and actions are both easier to predict and easier to verify. Correcting mistakes and fixing bugs is easier as well. Promoting something that works in the small to a universally valid, or even morally necessary, principle is a huge paving stone on the road to hell. That's also the problem I see with @Kartik Agaram's focus on objective/easily verifiable engagement in the pledge. Of course that's a property worth having. But it's local, and doesn't scale up. You can respect your engagements and end up doing harm that way, because you didn't foresee the outcome of your rules, or because the environment changed in unexpected ways. On the other hand, you can announce lofty goals that nobody knows how to achieve, and end up doing harm while pretending to keep your promises. There's a reason why nations have a constitution for vague but global goals, in addition to laws for precise but (time-)local rules. For the same reason, scientific research practices (local, rule-based) need philosophy (global, value-based) as a complement. And both need to evolve as history unfolds.

@Konrad Hinsen Funny you should mention it, the Preamble to the US constitution was on my mind when I wrote my draft. I'd love to see a new batch of Federalist papers for the current epoch 😄 Because the questions you raise seem to me to quickly end up in the weeds of thorny philosophical questions I've never seen satisfactorily answered, and it would be good to have someone distill the current philosophical thinking for the rest of us. With my limited knowledge so far, it seems to me that we have no demonstrated way to avoid harm, or to compare arbitrary actions by their total harm caused. We cause harm everyday just by existing, and that's not going to change. So you're absolutely right about the fork between the way that might not scale up and the way that nobody knows how to achieve and will cause evils in its name. I prefer the first fork. I prefer to respond to questions I don't know the answer to with avoidance rather than soaring rhetoric. I'd like the scope of my intervention to be small. The goal is not a perfect intervention but a "more perfect" intervention. That way I avoid unnecessarily perturbing the existing patterns of harms caused, so that people who study them have to spend less of their time playing catch-up. (They still have to play catch-up to some extent just by new wars declared and so on.) But I'd certainly love to learn from proposals that update the "vague, global goals" side of things. (I'm very influenced by the emergent properties of a local or bottom-up intervention like setting the price of an object, and how they help societies plan. I think indirect bottom-up interventions have a better track record than attempting to attack thorny problems head on in a top-down way. Top-down still has a role to play. I imagine society as a system of bottom-up rules. As they emergently cause problems, we apply band-aids of top-down regulation using laws. One dream I have is to see the bottom-up rules get gradually replaced with better ones, obviating some number of top-down regulations.) The one thing I'd encourage in a thread like this one is more of a "yes, and" mindset from improv (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_and...) It seems to me you're both accusing me of being small-scale on one hand and lecturing me against the dangers of scaling up on the other 😄 I'm very cognizant of both dangers. I'm nowhere near the point of trying to tell anyone else what to do. This thread is very much in the brainstorming stage of things. Long lists of what it doesn't do don't seem very actionable. Tell us surprising new applications for what you see, or suggest changes/alternative formulations that would improve things. If you think it would benefit from a dose of soaring rhetoric in favor of harm reduction, suggest it and show me an example of a situation where it can't be rationalized away. Or try to do what I do, and try to apply this pledge in a background thread as you go about your life. Do you run into situations where the pledge obviously leads in the wrong direction? Or places where the pledge made you uncomfortable about your choices, but seems to lead in the ethical direction? I'd love to hear anecdata like this.

@Konrad Hinsen Why can't local things scale up? If you do something small and local, and document and share it in a way that it affords copying, then if it's good, it should spread with little effort from yourself. This has worked well for the tech-oriented cultural movements I've been involved with.. making it possible for others to copy what you're doing and take it further as a model of 'growth'.

@Alex McLean There are two kinds of scaling up: in size and in complexity. I was mainly thinking of scaling up in complexity: more rules, which interact, make for a more complex rule system. Also: iterated application of rules over a long time generates hard to predict outcomes, because rule composition is a form of complexity. What you cite as a counterexample is scaling up in size. Take a set of rules and have it applied, independently, in many places. That is much less risky, but there is some risk of undesirable collective effect. Example: you write home automation software that starts you washing machine at 1am each night, to profit from cheap electricity at night. And then, a whole town adopts your software, and thousands of washing machines start at exactly 1am, causing a surge in electricity demand that takes down the power grid.

@Timothy Johnson I think you're right to move away from Thiel's way of thinking.. AFAICT he's a fascist

@Kartik Agaram My favorite formulation is for the last pledge. It's just the right mix of being unambiguous yet not overly rigid. There's a goal ("make it durable"), and there's a concrete verifiable promise ("I'll tell you what I did and why to make it durable").

Just today, I watched this interview where Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism has been devoured by "Cloud Capital":

@Konrad Hinsen Ah, this helps a lot to understand where you're coming from! The point of the pledge is not to make anything harder. Certainly not to go back to the old world of shared tarballs with fixed signatures. The way I was imagining it (and I tried to allude to this in the third bullet), we'd continue to have the infrastructure of version control available to us. It's just, if you ever see an ad for something after doing a

git pull

, or a new timeline algorithm 😄, then that would do reputation damage to me. All three bullets are intended to "spread the load", to plug each other's weaknesses, so the final bullet is trying to allude to the constant possibility of change even as I try hard to avoid it. Thanks a lot for the feedback now that I understand it 😅 Let me think about to how to rephrase to address your concerns more clearly. I was trying to avoid using jargon in hopes of being more accessible to non programmers and also more timeless (require fewer tweaks in future) but perhaps I'm going too far and muddying things that the right bit of jargon would clarify.

I’m not sure if it also falls into the category of local vs global, but not everything has to land in the programmer’s pledge. More roles are involved before anything is programmed, so these roles have their responsibility and hopefully their pledge to do good. And even if so, as mentioned by others, things sometimes just change. I worked for a government project to create a level playing field for European citizens some 5 to 7 years ago. Sounded fair and good. If I look back how things have turned out, it looks more like our solution is now used for surveillance and control. Not good (in my opinion, but this is also just an opinion, since the government talks about terrorism and fraud). Shouldn’t I have worked on that project? I don’t know. Trust in the people and goals (of that time) were there. Without trust we might come to a standstill as well. For big projects (like this one) it is difficult to go back to individuals being involved and ask for their ‘pledge’ of way back. How would that work for our pledges? What if someone comes back in a couple of years and challenges us about it? Can we make our pledges durable? And can we fix things if we broke them (the pledges)? And how to prevent pointing to the other: they’re not using it as we meant. I’m going to stick with things I have control over or things I can influence. The larger ‘power’ focus seems more difficult to fit in that, but I might understand it the wrong way. And I am going to see how to make my pledge durable/time resistant. Interesting discussion! 😊

@Nilesh Trivedi that Varoufakis interview is amazing. @Arcade Wise it claims we already live in a planned economy 🙂

@Nilesh Trivedi loved the video. We now need to imagine a post-cloud world, for motivation can just glance at https://landscape.cncf.io/

@Kartik Agaram I fully agree that in the real world, nothing scales up indefinitely. The required assumption is that the individual items that are to be multiplied are independent. That's never strictly true, in particular not in a finite world where scaling up hits obvious limits. This reminds of a typical question to the speaker in academic physics seminars: "How big is your infinity?" This translates as "You have supposed some quantity to be infinite, but we all know it can never be. How big can it become in real life before your conclusions break down?"

Some things seem to be infinite. Love for example, if you give it to someone you still have it so it keeps doubling. Idealistically, you can say the same about sharing software, music and other data. This is 'data love'. Capitalism seems to be about scaling things up and growth, but really it is more about creating artificial scarcity through IP, patents, etc.

@Alex McLean Love is hard to measure, so its finiteness is hard to assess. Sharing data definitely cannot scale to infinity. When every person or device on the planet has a copy, no further sharing is possible.

Ok so if what you says is true (and you're arguing against a lot of disco lyrics), love does have bounds and so is basically a ponzi scheme. I'm still in favour 😉

@Alex McLean Life is a Ponzi scheme as well. Better get used to it 🙂

I've found that love hits scalability issues at some threshold based on wakeful hours and caloric availability, but haven't nailed down the equation yet :-) I think there are a lot of terms we use poetically, and thus vaguely, that still have contextual precision for the participants in said poetry. Capitalism is one of those. For "capitalism", my definition & equation, which I haven't fully worked out yet, has aspects of the following: • value (needs-fulfilment) abstracted into physical money abstracted into digital currency abstracted into equities abstracted into derivatives abstracted into..... crazy s**t like "gaining personally from betting that something will fail" 🤯 • possession of this abstracted value gives you the rights and mechanisms to manufacture more of itself (in abstract) • possession of more of this abstract substrate grants you the rights and mechanisms to define the rules that enable the mechanisms in the previous point, thus creating even more of it (if you are one of, or fund, the rulemakers of course) • these Abstraction Games are self-fulfilling and devoid of connection to local and global planetary limits -- they operate in an invented game world • yet, vast amounts of this abstract give you the forced agreements (see rules above) to enact very real things on and beyond this planet, with relative short term impunity and immunity • growth/scale/more is the main bottom line metric for calling the execution of a plan within this scheme, "successful" • skin-in-the-material-reality seems inversely related to capitalistic heft -- the only real way to benefit collectively from risk is to pick up a walking stick and go see what's over the hill, and if you don't want to grow things, build things, or go on exploratory adventures, then your only option is to invent (waves hands) capitalism? I stand against all these things when I use the term "capitalism", albeit vaguely! My proto-pledges: • don't disparage naiveté • never use "you don't understand the way the world works" as a counter-argument • look for ways to enact slow de-growth in all ways within my control (methodical but definite de-growth is, I think, the only way out of "the mess") -- this part definitely includes technology • make things that are tools for self-sufficiency at local scales (personal, neighbourhood, town, district) -- this part definitely includes computering (i've covered my ass with the first two, and still working towards the last one...)

'don't disparage naiveté' - all for this! So many times people have asked questions in workshops with my software that could look really stupid as they don't fit the software's model or how it works.. But have given really fresh perspectives on how the software could work, uncovering blindspots that have lead to new directions of development. I really wish I'd documented these moments (and/or had a better memory)

Great discussion you started @Kartik Agaram . Makes me wonder how would a pledge sound like if was based on values and beliefs described in Nature of Order by CA 😇

There are some threads like this that I wish we could do "@threadreader unroll" on and get a PDF to post to a web page. Or at least a permalink. @Ivan Reese does the futureofcoding.org stuff have something that could help?

Also https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/thinking-together/1696628791.117649.html, though it gets updated irregularly. Let me go do it now..

Cron job

Yes please! 🥸

@Kartik Agaram Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I have seen a lot of internal tools that are pretty mediocre, and the idea of capture might help explain why. I get how users are captured, but I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the tool builders are also captured. I think one of the key requirements for success is that the main people using tools need to somehow participate in building those tools as well. Otherwise, it's very difficult to be aligned on what's needed. (Relying on vendors is definitely a mistake.)

To connect this back to the initial intentions of re-envisioning and de-growing (local vs global, complexity-scale vs size-scale) -- i.e. active moderation/conviviality. Because operational market capitalism (i.e. the "market" knows more than a thinking-feeling human) is for the most part structurally both participatory and democratic at local scales (thus its baseline resilience and creativity). Everyone genuinely believes they're part of a team striving for something beneficial and nothing must stand in the way of that endeavour, and they throw their best selves at it. Ted Chiang, as ever, puts it well in this old article titled "Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear".

"The fears of superintelligent AI are probably genuine on the part of the doomsayers. That doesn’t mean they reflect a real threat; what they reflect is the inability of technologists to conceive of moderation as a virtue. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that’s the attitude they adopted. (Of course, they saw nothing wrong with this strategy when they were the ones engaging in it; it’s only the possibility that someone else might be better at it than they were that gives them cause for concern.)" 😂 (emoji mine)

To avoid harmful rent-seeking of any kind, yet put food on the table, I think the idea/tool/platform must be something that can be set free, and then used by anyone, including ourselves, to build useful things. This stands in contrast to "The White Man's Burden" approach that drives user capture -- "it is to the benefit of the users to be captured by those who've invested the best money and best design and best practice into advancing the platform, and the well deserved rewards accrue to those who capture the most users" (and so the measure becomes the goal)... [Footnote] A golden pledge in the OP: "If it's money I'll tell you how much in inflation-adjusted currency, and I'll commit to giving away anything beyond that while unencumbering any secrets it took to create it." There is a concept called "Ameeri line" that I've heard used in recent years, especially during a wonderful set of online talks from India on De-growth during the pandemic (I'll dig up the links and share if they're to be found online) -- i.e. a Richness line, rather than the Poverty line, and much like Monbiot's "Private Sufficiency" I think if there's a shared culture/vision/story of self-regulating this notion of an "Ameeri line" at the individual, family, small business, community level, perhaps we'd have a more healthy, scalable life-work platform.

the idea/tool/platform must be something that can be set free, and then used by anyone, including ourselves, to build useful things

@Arvind Thyagarajan Business Source License (like the one Hashicorp adopted recently) seems like on the same lines as unlike FOSS, it limits competitors for a limited term, to allow the original devs to build a revenue stream around it - thus encouraging the development and maintenance of more almost-OSS software.