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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

I hate to say it, but the tech industry is the roadblock.

Most of what happens is far off, remote, unobservable, unlearnable. People cannot understand what is happening on the things they deal with the most. Everything is black box apps powered by vast cloud data centers. Humanity has zero chance to find their footing in this world, to comprehend what goes on about them.

Tech is to blame, tech is the problem, and there are so many simple basic remedies tech could be trying to deliver, to make General Systems Research to make computers general again, to make what happens in the computer knowable again. New frameworks, new systems, not no-code for developers, but no-code for users, to watch & adjust data percolating through systems.

We are no where, we've gone further into the dark, we've made it worse, and we, we techies, are to blame for letting corporations misuse our sharp keen selves for these shitty disprogressive ends.

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Maybe the real issues emerge from capitalist system rules and incentives and the current tech industry is just shaped and emerged as a result?

I ask myself what on-ramps consumers have to get interested & excited.

Almost nothing in the world offers this path. Most tech rebuffs & rejects interest. It's a very very long path to learning programming & shell before one can begin to reverse engineer & peak behind the veil on what tech about us does.

Without observability, there is no hope. Tech has to start. Tech has to open the possibility of visibility. Then we can start to judge.

I've switched to thinking consumerism is more of a problem than capitalism. Capitalism is just the producer, if what capitalism produced isn't consumered, certain things won't be produced.

Additionally consumerism is something that we all can influence with our credit cards. Capitalism is largely controlled by large nameless corporations.

Problem is: The larger the wallet, the larger the vote.

Also, consumers get manipulated to buy into black boxes all the time. Nobody wants to know how their sausage is made but everyone would buy one. A company that is perfectly transparent about their supply chain would fail.

Well yes and no, in not purchasing something I am also making a statement.

Manipulation has to do with education and sources of information. But as long as the notion that happiness can only be found in purchasing products, then not much will change.

Perhaps poverty can be a good thing.

The sources of information are the limit though - to make a better world using this sort of 'consumption vote'[0], businesses and their relationships need to be way more transparent, with possibly a regulated transparency.

I wonder whether there could be FOSS business intelligence to a degree that the most likely business relationships of entities will be estimated and published, automatically. And then companies that actually supply data about their supply chains etc. will have a marketing advantage.

[0] you cannot organize this vote, since there are anti-boycott laws

Anti-boycott laws, but surely only between nation states? Being forced to purchase something would seem little dictatorial.

Boycott could also include purchasing an EV - thereby the consumer is boycotting the oil industry. Meaning there does not necessarily need to be transparency of the supply chain to make a consumption vote.

> Capitalism is just the producer

I'm having difficulty parsing this part. What does this mean?

For me there are two parts at play: consumerism and capitalism, without one, neither the other.

If consumers don't purchase the products produced by the capitalist factories then the system would come to a standstill.

(I am thinking of the companies running/ordering from the factories not necessarily the factories themselves, i.e. Chinese factory.)

This means that as a consumer, I can influence the system by not purchasing certain products. The larger consumer group, the larger the change.

I'm still having trouble understanding what you meant by "Capitalism is just the producer"

> If consumers don't purchase the products produced by the capitalist factories then the system would come to a standstill.

What about buying from a socialist factory? Is socialism also just the producer?

> This means that as a consumer, I can influence the system by not purchasing certain products. The larger consumer group, the larger the change.

This seems like you are talking about markets, not really capitalism.

  > If consumers don't purchase the products produced by the capitalist factories then the system would come to a standstill.

thats interesting... so you are saying that it is capitalism itself presupposes that consumers exist, and without it you can't have capitalism...?

it kind of makes one ask which came first...

I would argue capitalism arose with the invention of money, before that humans bartered. Consumption was the aim of the barter system also, so I would say consumerism came first ;)

> before that humans bartered

This account of history of money is largely viewed as bunk by historians since there exist no evidence or description of a barter economy in our history.

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