Open Source Hardware (relates to post-scarcity)

You might like to read this:
http://antinational.org/en/copyleft

Though I don't agree with it all, I think it touches on this.

The Telekommunist Manifesto is interesting as well. The author is definately one of us, but he is making kind of transitional organizational proposal - Venture Communism - where worker owned entities share intellectual knowledge/designs with each other but charge profit making businesses. The royalties re-enforce and increase the wealth of the worker-sector.

Good find! This is exactly what the world needs: imagined communist technology. Hey it is not like the metals, petroleum and resources needed to make computer chips demand the co-ordination of millions of workers from mines, to trucking and shipping, to processing, refining, and manufacture, etc. The only way to demand all that is by coercion. Do you technology loving types know there are still indigenous and native peoples who live tied to their land, and don't want their land raped?

Thras:
Am I right in assuming that you are communicating over the internet with a home made computer, fashioned entirely of biodegradable, locally sourced materials, connecting to this server via an elaborate array of smoke signals?
Because I would hate to infer that you might be a little bit hypocritical.
And fuck off with the rape analogy.

Make no mistake I hate computers. I just use them because as I intimated in another thread:
https://libcom.org/forums/general/sick-living-surrounded-capitalist-desiring-subjects-there-no-one-worth-meeting-13
There is no one to do anything with, worth doing with. Actually computers are alot of the reason for that. I am not that old but I remember in the 80's and 90's when I was growing up people actually went outside. There were no cellphones or smartphones, so people had to actually go out to try to find people. But don't let me get you workerist technology fetishizing types questioning techo-utopia! If only workers could control alienating technology anywhere but in your fantasies...

Besides clueless technophiles, computers benefit the elites and not the average worker, which you pretend to advocate for, but your naive pastiche worldview doesn't even allow that in actuality. Computers are just alienation and distraction for me, for the most part. But for the CEOs and controlling stockholders it is the only thing that allows their vast, complex global production to take place. How else could they co-ordinate natural resources from hundreds of different countries, shipped to dozens of different countries, and finally assembled in yet another location, to make just one product?

Hey can anyone help? My computer's acting up, it keeps showing phantom posts from someone who hates computers, which is obviously too absurd to be real.

SOS!

People pretending to be against capitalism, are advocating for technology only possible under capitalism. They are cheering that some electrical engineer geek makes some schematics freely available somehow of an alienating technology -- as if that alters anything substantially. Now that is revolution, workerist style!

(implied: except communists, and they only worth arguing with and misrepresenting/ misunderstanding via the medium of a communist website)

Fleur (edit: and snip) just totally demolished your imbecilic perspective. I came here to learn, not to listen to your nonsense. No one is arguing that capitalists don't use computers to aid capitalism (obvs). Try to see that technology can be used in different ways depending on the aims and methods of those that create, own, use and control it. Please don't drag this thread down.

I think you are dragging things down with your infantile analysis in post after post. Computer circuits, chips and computers REQUIRE resources from all over the world, involving millions of workers who don't want to go to their jobs. No workerist, alleged anti-capitalists can make that happen. Millions of people need to face a choice: work or face starving to make such feats possible.

I know how capitalism works. I know workers make things under shitty conditions in order to produce surplus for capitalist profit. I also know there is no point in focussing on consumption- because we need to live and consumption is part of that. Non-consumption does not a revolution make.

If you think being a revolutionary means you can't consume or utilise anything made under capitalist conditions, then please stop funking our corner of the internets, take all your clothes off, trek barefoot and naked into the wilderness and catch and skin a wild animal. Make yourself some clothes and then eat the animals flesh. Or if you prefer, do the same thing, but with a plant. Then maybe you'll realise all of that would have been easier if you had others to help you out, and that revolution will also be a case of people working together to make things and do things in a way which better meets their collective and individual needs.

I will do my best to refrain from responding to you anymore. It only seems to make things worse.

Yes, you do that. From reading your posts, thinking obviously hurts you... Keep masturbating over some future revolution to avoid analysis of actual social space-time, you have quite the aptitude for it.

One or two EE geeks releasing hardware schematics does not change one iota the production processes involved, the alienation caused by computers, or the frenetic pace they induce on the hapless humans who must adapt to machine time and machine speed.

Thras, I sent you a DM. If you wanna discuss it privately, or on the other thread which you started that would be just fine. I am not going to engage with you on this thread any more (sorry to others using this thread if I've contributed to dragging it away from a potentially useful discussion).

FWIW I find it hard to get excited about this stuff. I went to some of the Open Rights Group conference with a (liberal) friend a couple of years ago and it was so very uninspiring. They did a talk on open source hardware and I was filled with boredom rather than any revolutionary zeal.

That said, I think you're being a bit unfair. For a start, you have quite an abrasive approach considering the OP was opening up to others' thoughts. Maybe chill out. The big audience you seem to address your bombastic statements to is not to be found here.

Have you looked at the critical text that hellfrozeover linked to? Or boomerang's suggestion of how it might help a revolutionary effort?

Yeah, me too. I did wonder if I was missing a trick though. I'm still working my way through some of the links above and would be interested to hear others perspective.

I'm not a techie (so probably don't know what I'm on about) but I don't see open source as revolutionary in and of itself, but I also see some logic in it having a bit of revolutionary potential or at least, think it might have some potential for making life better for the working class. I don't doubt that technology can have some pro-revolutionary applications (like I would still be pretty clueless about many things were it not for this site, or old and new self-publishing formats for e.g.).

So according to you computer chips only work because the people making them are forced to work against their will. I take it the negative feeling of those workers acts on the chips changing there structure so the electrons to flow properly.

I assume the same principle apply to all other things produced under capitalism. i can guaranty you the people who procured my food only did so because of there threat of poverty if they did not, i take it this means food production is impossible without capitalism to.

Is any kind of production possible without capitalism? From your argument i can see none. It must be that to truly free of capitalism we have to live naked in the woods communicating only through grunts

Also, this.

Yeah, I'm detecting that the primitivism is strong in Thras. Explains his misanthropy at least.