I’d like to talk a little about capitalism (I know I know please don’t leave!). Not politics, not an “Uh it sucks!” conversation, but a serious discussion that’s highly relevant to the future of coding. This is a hard topic to discuss with the same rigour as computer science or PL design but I think it is one of the most important topics for this community to tackle. To help bring some rigour to this conversation I’d like to bring up some incredibly important academic work which you can check out should you want to. Surveillance Capitalism and Platform Capitalism (these models aren’t in competition) are two of the best and most current models of economics, and could not exist without computing. They are both worthy of your time and have lots of explanatory and predictive power. They also point to a very important point for us: The technical challenge alone will not fix computing, nor will design. It’s not as simple as changing the incentives for companies or decentralising software, and not as straightforward as improving coding by a few orders of magnitude. So, if we as a community want to change coding forever and for good, we must also understand the societal, political and economic context we exist in. I’d love to hear thoughts and discuss this but want to guide this conversation away from some pitfalls and towards productive conversation. Things we don’t need to discuss: • Personal opinions on wether capitalism sucks or not • Opinions on social media or corporate giants and their many problems or evils • The kind of discussions and critiques we have again and again all over social media around capitalism, Web 2.0, platforms, giant tech companies, etcetera. Some things this community could benefit from discussing: • Concrete research and resources to learn more, inform ourselves and each other. • Ways in which we can facilitate true systemic change through our work here. • Questions that we think are worth exploring • Ways for this community to keep growing its understanding of economic context, the complex structures behind them, and improve our collective reasoning and decision making.

My background started in sociolinguistics, financial auditing and economics. I came to Future of Coding after founding a tech company on a mission to reduce emissions by 50% for average Canadians, by leveraging gaps in the real-estate tech market and careful UX design. So this conversation is interesting to me. It's important to remember how much the phenomena of surveillance capitalism and platform capitalism are not new, just the terms are. One could argue that culture always has been the emergent "data essence" of a society, which different players (eg. Religion or the army) have used for their own ends. Viewing data and culture as a similar thing is helpful, because it allows us to apply known methods from culture conflicts to the world of surveillance. For example, parallels between decentralized cultures and decentralized data. With Platform capitalism, how different is it really from what a market has always been? Every farmers market that is owned by a third party is effectively a two-sided marketplace that the landlord owns. 1,000 years ago the landlord had to guess if the merchant was making more money, and then could be gauged a bit more, now it's just digital and simple. Digitization hasn't actually created the emergence of a new phenomenon, it's moreso increased the scale at which old phenomenon can operate. The world has become more flat. Everyone can be in every market simultaneously, even before we start employing barter bots. Even tinder allows me to be swept upon by matches 500k away after Covid-19.... Up to here there are 3 basic points I have: 1. Data and culture are the same thing 2. Platforms are just digital markets with increased information access by the platform owner 3. The number of players in all games we play in the digital world, has grown exponentially So how do we enact systemic change for the good? Firstly, I think it's inevitable. That's a whole other discussion, but it is not hard to see the cosmic arc of history's bent towards justice, or the innate human goodness that happens when boys are stranded on an island. Inevitability aside, I then ask, "is it getting better for me." And that's the selfish side. So the way I make it better for me is by playing the game to accelerate the inevitable process. The diamonds are in the delta. The three basic points guide the methodology within our organization to do that. 1. Avoid building a global brand, build decentralized data aligned to cultural boundaries 2. Reduce the market's existence, eg. optimize for buying eggs at my neighbours backyard coop 3. Align all our metrics and system optimization on the one constraint a flat world hasn't made disappear: neighbourhoods. We all live somewhere. Design success in one neighbourhood, and scale it to neighbourhoods. Ignore other metrics. Along the way, I'm sure we'll get to test drive some pretty nifty tech solutions. 😜

@Tim Lipp great points, I would point out there’s a healthy debate about just how new platform capitalism is, there doesn’t seem to be a useful consensus yet. A good friend of mine is currently writing a paper on that exact question. One of the best critiques of the _original_ conception of surveillance capitalism by Evgeny Morozov addresses some of your points, though they do also recognise the model as important but incomplete. To me, your second point seems incredibly important and easy to understate

2. Platforms are just digital markets with increased information access by the platform owner

I think there is danger in taking this to be something that’s been around forever, the increase in information available to the platform owners can be a monopolising force that we may not ever be able to escape incrementally. I’d argue we need more than just better company leaders if we want to change this, replacing Tim Cook with a generous anti-monopoly utopian thinker will only go so far.

Hmm, I'm not sure I understand the danger in drawing comparisons to historical analogs, but your point about digital others brings up another interesting thread about the implications of when bots pass the Turing test. Why is it dangerous to view platform markets as just markets with more information? A small example happened 500 years ago with the invention of the receipt, it gave increased certainty for a transaction, but also added risk that information could be used against the parties involved. Different cultures have different marriage norms. Some are polyamorous, some are monogomous, some even practice polyandry. If we were to equate Tim Cook to the perfect man, and profitable transactions to sex, are there healthy upper limits to profits as there are healthy upper limits to sex? Even if I have 20 lives, they can only make me so happy. Perhaps the dilemma with profits is that the upper limits follow a much bigger power law than with other "wins" such as sex, and we haven't yet evolved an understanding of what the counterforce is. At the very least one exists in the reality that Tim Cook will probably get bored one day. Perhaps we could speed up the process by creating an even more interesting game to play.

Thank you @Orion Reed for trying to create such an interesting discussion. Currently I’m on vacation for the next two weeks and I only have my phone with me but your inquiry really resonates with me. So I’m now challenged to condense the experience and knowledge of my last 20 years into some meaningful and tangible for you and all others interested. I will try my best ...

Book recommendation for those interested in the evolution of society: Hanzi Freinacht’s « The Listening Society » and « Nordic Ideology ». On capitalism, he thinks (and I agree) that it will stay around but fade from center stage as a principle for the organization of society as material goods become less of a focus.

👍 his meta-modernism gives nice perspectives

With regards to how one might have the benefits of market societies without the inhumanity of them, I rather like the Nordic model as a starting point:

[O]ne can discern over the course of the twentieth century an overarching ambition in the Nordic countries not to socialize the economy but to liberate the individual citizen from all forms of subordination and dependency within the family and in civil society: the poor from charity, the workers from their employers, wives from their husbands, children from parents – and vice versa when the parents become elderly […] legislation has made the Nordic countries into the least family-dependent and most individualized societies on the face of the earth. To be sure, the family remains a central social institution in the Nordic countries, but it too is infused with the same moral logic stressing autonomy and equality. The ideal family is made up of adults who work and are not financially dependent on the other, and children who are encouraged to be as independent as early as possible.

[... and particularly this statement about love ...]

[A]uthentic relationships of love and friendship are only possible between individuals who do not depend on each other or stand in unequal power relations. Thus autonomy, equality and (statist) individualism are inextricably linked to each other.

That said, I also have sympathy for Freinacht's concerns about personal freedoms within these sorts of structures.

One very interesting approach that I have found so far is John Vervaekes - Awakening from the meaning crisis series https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY and his work in general. He is a cognitive scientist and in search of practices to tackle the challenges of the meaning crisis.

This might all be too academic feeling but stick with me here, because scholarly academic politics outside of partisan bleh is quite a nice place to visit... 1. We (humanity) live in a neoliberal world, A word that has lost its meaning and is obscured from general discussion and even thought so our only hope is to look to academia. Neoliberalism: the reigning philosophy of life, politics, society and economics since the 70s-80s. get an overview here. 2. We will eventually (and I’m arguing here for ‘imminently’) need a coherent, scalable alternative. 1. This is something that should be thought about and discussed and yet we have forgotten it’s an ideology in the first place. More specifically with all the reading n’ stuff... _Inventing the Future [wikipedia summary]_ It's openly partisan but isn’t a partisan discussion. Less likely to sit as well universally are the Accelerationist Manifesto and _Capitalist Realism._ But really any of the work that’s yet to escape the lab of politics departments that is working to build a truly coherent politics beyond neoliberal capitalism in all its many forms is worthy of reading and bringing into general discussion. @curious_reader

To help connect the dots, do you see ways that any of these scholarly academic ideas have implications for technical research? Like, if someone is pro-accelerationism, would certain kinds of projects be more or less difficult in such a world? If the political future I believe in is incompatible with the technological future I'm exploring, that would be super useful to know early. If there are no such constraints, then this feels like a complementary subject where we can "cleave nature at the joints". As an example, I think a fundamental property of software is that it can't be delegated without exposing oneself to unbounded risk of being pwned, at some point in the long-term future. This leads me to trust extrinsically motivated (for pay) software less than intrinsically motivated, and small-scale software over large (because of the need to maintain relationships with one's dependencies). That worldview further leads, inevitably, to a world where software is developed primarily by those who can make ends meet by other means besides the software they write. If you trust someone enough to use their software, it seems to me, money can't be more than a tiny part of that relationship. This is an uncomfortable realization for me, because I'd love to live in a world where everyone can contribute to open source, rather than just the modern equivalent of gentleperson scientists in the Enlightenment. More background reading on my worldview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinschaft_and_Gesellschaft; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi We don't need to debate the pros and cons of different schools here, but it might be interesting to take on frames of reference and explore implications.

@Kartik Agaram my Zettelkasten repo is called - connecting dots 😅

@Kartik Agaram I do see a possible alternative to your trust scenario. Software could be written by paid professionals but be independently audited for various quality criteria, including privacy. Clients would then have to trust at least one certificate issued after an audit. This is in fact not very different from how we evaluate complex physical artifacts coming from industrial production lines.

@Kartik Agaram to join some dots, there are several ways we can help: by building software, languages and ideas that make it possible for smaller groups of people to build larger systems By aligning our software projects with ideas that are compatible with a good future (truly owning data, trustless systems like decentralised apps, avoiding centralised platforms, making sure user data is not central to profit incentives) And perhaps most significantly, help ourselves and each other understand long-term possibilities in the transformation of our collective political philosophy so that we can (as individuals and collectively) help to transform politics and political discussion to change what’s possible in terms of the projects, organisations, and companies that we build. An example of this would be a nation transitioning to an economics build around automation, universal basic income and an intentional move towards eradicating work (wage labour). You may not think that’s the way to go, and that’s fine because the point is that it’s an example of a long-term philosophical shift that changes the things we can do, we’d all have different constraints on time and money which would change a lot of what we can do (in real-world, practical terms). This is sometimes referred to as a type of freedom. Today we have negative freedom, this would be a type of synthetic freedom. Here the ideas are explained well in a different context. An example would be that any US citizen is free to run for president in the negative sense (free from things that would stop you like laws excluding you) but they’re not free to do so in the positive sense (you need enough time, enough campaign finance, etc)

@Orion Reed To connect some more dots: remember Conway’s law. A software architecture favorable to out goals (whatever they may be) can only be developed and maintained by organizations that have a corresponding structure.

@Konrad Hinsen yes exactly, and I would extend ‘organisational structure’ to include the political and economic system that organisations exist within.

I'm keenly interested in the question of how we can create a better future for all of humanity, but the conversation we would need to have to scratch the surface of what that might mean in practice seems too large for this venue.

I'm enjoying the continued discussion! A fantastic fresh perspective can be found in the book Walden 2.0, written by one of the top behavioral theorists of the last 100 years. It's a utopian novel that wrestles very well with the implications of things like universal basic income, but has I think a superior model. It is however a difficult book to come by.

@Jack Rusher great point, and you’ve clarified an organising principle for my thoughts here. Let me try and connect the discussion to this community: Within our political economic system we are by default second hand dealers in ideas. We are not the source of impactful political ideas because we think of computing, not of politics. Importantly, we do interact with the people and knowledge within political thinking, but usually through media, conversations, social media, etcetera. Regardless of what we do we will be thinking about, spreading and interacting with deep systems of political theory, economics, and so on. Work by people in the field where politics is almost as code is to us. It is knowable, sometimes objective and academic political thinking accumulates and spreads over time. So for us, who already have a world of things to do and think about, it is not a world we can really participate in. But if we take it as true that we interact with political research, theory, and philosophy indirectly, I think we owe it to ourselves to try. This can’t be done by trying to get everyone to discuss thousands of papers, research, blog posts and articles so it seems the best thing we can do as a community is focus directly on facilitating and understand the hard work others are doing. If I were to start this thread again the above is maybe where I’d start.

@Tim Lipp https://www.amazon.com/Walden-Two-Hackett-Classics-Skinner-ebook-dp-B003GEKL10/dp/B003GEKL10 purchased! @Orion Reed I mostly agree with you on the goals. Amplifying small groups, data sovereignty, avoiding centralization, UBI, these are all the way to go for sure. The challenge for me is how to discuss these ideas in a productive way without pulling in the whole universe into this thread. (Paraphrasing Carl Sagan, step 1 to baking apple pie is a big bang.) How can we programmers here ease into the practice of reasoning about the political "type systems" that influence our lives? The way I've been trying to manage complexity is to have some hazy sense that the software I create is likely to foster the world I want to move towards, and then forget about politics and focus on the thing I can contribute. But this doesn't feel like an ideal level of integration for sure. How can it be improved? You're right that software depends more on politics than the other way around. But it also depends more on physics than the other way around. Does that mean we need to also discuss physics? Or is there a different, less reductionist, axis that matters more? At the risk of seeming to toot my own horn, I recently described how my political goals drive my side project in http://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200607.pdf. Hopefully it shows that we share many of the same political goals, and that I'm not averse to discussing capitalism here. I've expressed similar sentiments to yours in the past in this group, about the need to discuss the context software is embedded in. Another recent thread that you may like is https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1595017818433700 @Konrad Hinsen my reaction to independent bodies auditing code is twofold: * Ugh, that'll squeeze out all that's new and great about software. * That'll never never work, because software is changing too fast, and auditors will always lag auditees in knowhow. Perhaps my opinion is colored by only having experienced regulation in India and the US.

@Kartik Agaram that’s a great quote and is exactly the kind of base starting point here. Maybe remixing and collecting thoughts above and putting them in an order that helps us know how to facilitate the conversation.

(Coalescing comments after Orion coalesced intervening questions.) On a tangent, can I recommend batching up your comments? I think that will help facilitate the discussion you want to have. Just hit send less often 🙂 It'll make the conversation seem more balanced between different voices. I also find that it naturally makes the prose tighter (I'm more likely to edit text I haven't sent yet), and so easier for someone to follow. This thread is now at a forbidding length for someone just encountering it for the first time. And I imagine you'd want more people reading it.

My concern about scope is similar to what @Kartik Agaram articulated above. This topic area -- once it escapes Red/Blue tribal poo flinging -- starts from the already deep question of "What is a Person" and then expands to touch pretty much everything else.

@Kartik Agaram, I downloaded your article and can't wait to read it. The title is genius. I used to work professionally as an auditor, and agree with you completely in your critiques. The focus on the "physics" side rather then the "politics" side of programming is what makes it so magical. It is much easier for politicians to lie than it is for scientists.

In an effort to support future discussion —and as proctrastination— I tried to slightly condense and annotate this comment thread, I removed a few things that I think weren’t central, such as some meta-conversation and reactions. It’s color coded, red means I still have to find a good short paragraph or link. yellow is open questions ripe for potential further discussion. I also tried to preserve some of the original context by keeping the bulk of this thread preserved. Have a look. notes, additions, edits welcome. (I’m thinking of making a more condensed version with few or no messages) if there are no objections and you think some of the questions are good ones I’ll post it as a new thread to give others a chance to get an overview and hopefully help guide this community towards good future discussions.

@Orion Reed have you heard of the Zettelkasten method? https://andreass.gitlab.io/Zettelkasten.html

@curious_reader yes I have, I use Obsidian extensively (I have about 2,000 notes) but didn’t for this because it was more of a mental process and I didn’t feel there was a good tool for the job. Do you see any key questions or pieces of insight I should pull out of the thread still?

@Orion Reed I like the structure of your PDF. 🙂

@Orion Reed is your Zettelkasten or parts of it public available? Here is an example from a friend from the sense making community- nick redmark, interestingly he uses his public twitter account as a data backend and then tries transclusion/aggregates like this later: https://tweetliner.com/nickredmark/1275500762173341698

(@curious_reader — Please move this discussion about zettels to DMs, or to a new thread — this thread is about capitalism. Let me know when it's safe to delete your above message and this reply)

Both because it's germane to this topic and because Tristan asked me to share it with anyone who might be interested, here's a trailer for an upcoming Netflix film that's trying to spread the good word about the dangers of the attention economy paperclip maximizer:

I think @Jack Rusher you hinted at the problem that it’s difficult to talk about the problem. I would agree in general with this but of course I’m still thinking about ways how to change the status quo. This documentary is a possibility in education about how the current system works. One of the more promising actual practices that I have found goes by the name of P2P learning. Has anyone heard of that or is interested in it?

@curious_reader The version of that concept with which I'm familiar is a sort of "horizontal transfer" of knowledge within orgs. Can you elaborate on how it would fit into your vision here?

I think its not "my-vision" but I can try. So the problem is that too many things are too complex and educational instituions as well as organisations ( even companies) might be unfit at times to provide a context for the individual to learn what he needs. So I think this resource here outlines many good aspects of #p2p-learning https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education

since this is a long living thread I would have to update the history dump to make it display newer messages, but here it is: https://marianoguerra.github.io/future-of-coding-weekly/history/?fromDate=2020-07-25&toDate=2020-07-26&channel=general#2020-07-25T14:08:04.036Z

@Jack Rusher for further context of P2P-learning i'm currently reading "Education in a Time between wordls" by zak stein, which is related to the GameB movement (Jordan Hall and many others) which is related to John Vervaekes - Awekening from the meaning Crisis / the religion that is not a religion. In which people try to build a culture which is has better relationships to meaning and sustainability than our current one. I hope this is not to vague or "woowoo" for you , there are are a lot of scientists working on this but as you can imagine its a monumental task and the scientists can only be one layer of if it. So I thinks its interesting how this plays our to the larger places of society and how "we" the FoC Community - what role do we play in this infinite game of creating meaning in relationship to society.

@curious_reader My friend Samim https://twitter.com/samim calls this "open understanding", in the spirit of "open source". I'm in fundamental support of the concept.

Yes its such a very fundamental concept. I mean really if you try to re-learn or trying to make sense bottom up. Climbing up the maslov hierachy of needs with all the infinity of information available, its a humbling experience. But it can be also very personal and human. For example I find joy in learning new things about food, health and cooking which are unknown to my culture. And yet I enjoy it very much!