TLDR
Where did it all go wrong? At some point, capital became the answer to every question—what to produce, how to produce, for whom to produce, and why. When software, that ultimate solution in search of a problem, found the questions answered only by capital, we lost our way, caught in capital’s snare.
But we can break this pattern; we can find our own answers to those questions, and if it’s up to us, the answer does not need to be that answer we’ve been taught, capital. Software is a tool with revolutionary potential, but that is the extent of what it can give us.
Its insane how much software development is incalculable waste due to the inefficiencies of capitalism. That every corporation reinvent the same thing over and over trying to eke a slightly larger siphon of profit off of whomever the present market leader is devouring.
How many hardware manufacturers write the exact same code, reinvent the exact same Verilog designs for SoCs, solve the exact same math problem across a thousand near identical parts just because they are all proprietary and in competition with one another.
And how much human capital is spent on the pursuit of a dwindling pile of ad and data extraction money. Because a supermajority people don’t actually have any money left anymore and the only value they have left is their future potential earnings claimed by addiction and their personal information to more effectively target them for addiction.
There is certainly an alternate universe where paradigm shifts around the realization of digital computers borne an ideological revolution to overthrow archaic institutions of intellectual property and the profit motive as the driving force of labor in society. And the resultant world was all the better for sharing their sources and collectively working to help people rather than hurt them. They would have certainly reached the singularity by now.
