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Comment by drb91 | Hacker News Reader

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"Small cabals of capitalists" didn't murder a hundred million of their own customers in the last century alone. It took governments to do that. (Or, I suppose, tobacco conglomerates.)

So when the regulators come to you and explain why they need a back door in the messaging protocol you're working on, try downvoting them.

The foreign policy of the US, including all invasions, death squads, oppressive trade deals supporting open slave labor (sometimes to death), is primarily to support the business interests of the upper class of the united states. The petite bourgeois’s increased “quality of life” (which is an incredibly misleading term) is a byproduct of the largest wealth redistribution in history, at american gunpoint.

So, it’s incredibly disingenuous to reduce all alternatives to capitalism to murder when american capitalism is objectively morally broke.

'Whataboutism' isn't the answer, I'm afraid.

If "the business interests of the upper class" makes governments do all the evils, why do you think this time will be different?

It won’t, permanently, and who thinks that about anything? But it would be a good change to try and have human ethics reflected on a societal level. I do have faith with enough failed attempts at capitalism we’ll learn, and at some point in the future capitalism will have the big failure, the one that makes it obvious how unsustainable it is. I’d like to avoid that one in my lifetime. One way that could happen is our AUTOMATED nuclear system built to protect capitalism fails and accidentally destroys civilization. This could happen at literally any time.

> "Small cabals of capitalists" didn't murder a hundred million of their own customers in the last century alone. It took governments to do that. (Or, I suppose, tobacco conglomerates.)

lol I appreciate you offering an excellent counter-example to your own point within the sentence.

It’s better than entrusting messaging to a cabal of socialists. Capitalism means that there is diversity in products. If you don’t like Apple’s iMessage or What’s App, create your own. You might like your government today, but I am unwilling to bet my life on government being trusted to do the right thing. Also, the right thing for you might not be the right thing for everyone. That’s what capitalism understands that socialism doesn’t.

Capitalism means there’s a diversity of products and they are ALL bad. We need collectivization to actually produce software that primarily benefits the user.

If we want the equivalent of 1987 Aeroflot, then sure, let’s do that. If the products are all bad, what’s stopping you from making a good one? You’d be a billionaire overnight, assuming the market agrees that they are all bad. I’ve used France’s government sponsored taxi app and it doesn’t come close to Uber’s. I’ve ridden in public buses and they don’t come close to the private FAANG shuttles in Silicon Valley. If you build technology optimized for everyone, that means it’s necessarily optimized for no one.

As far as messaging apps, iMessage benefits me greatly. The premise that apps don’t benefit the user is flawed: if they didn’t benefit the user, nobody would use it — except government, we have no choice on using government or not. If the government meets 99 people’s needs, but doesn’t meet my needs, I’m stuck. I can’t switch to an alternative. If an app meets 99 people’s needs but not mine, I can switch to an alternative or build my own. Nothing is stopping you and your friends from building the most amazing messaging app ever. From someone who grew up remember Lada and Yugo, my faith in collectivism in product development is admittedly thin. Very few products from Soviet era factories were any good, I have no expectation that a government built Messaging service would be any better.

> what’s stopping you from making a good one? You’d be a billionaire overnight,

This is exactly the problem with this site: no good tools made anyone rich.

There’s a reason I am having this discussion on HN: People should separate the building of valuable things from the pursuit of riches. Those two are inherently contradictory, and we have nothing but closed mediocre technology making someone rich who barely worked at all.

I believe cooperatives, collectives, and trade unions should be discussed more here. Nothing about Yelp is hard to build, and yet it’s a piece of crap, but the only piece of crap we have. Capitalism is a future of absolute mediocrity, where your needs are considered proportional to your wealth.

I'm sure both of your positions have merit, however I do think it's a bit disingenuous to claim that a capitalist system rewards a good solution in any way. It rewards good marketing.

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