I often daydream about how society would be if we were not forced by society to pigeon hole ourselves into a specialized career for maximizing the profits of capitalists, and sell most of our time for it.
The idea of creating an entire identity for you around your “career” and only specializing in one thing would be ridiculous in another universe. Humans have so much natural potential for breadth, but that is just not compatible with capitalism.
This is evident with how most people develop “hobbies” outside of work, like wood working, gardening, electronics, music, etc. This idea of separating “hobbies” and the thing we do most of our lives (work) is ridiculous.
Here’s how my world could be different if I owned my time and dedicated it to the benefit of my own and my community instead of capitalists:
- more reading, learning and excusing knowledge with others.
- learn more handy work, like plumbing and wood working. I love customizing my own home!
- more gardening
- participate in the transportation system (picking up shifts to drive a bus for example)
- become a tour guide for my city
- cook and bake for my neighbors
- academic research
- open source software (and non-software) contributions
- pick up shifts at a café and make coffee, tea and smoothies for people
- pick up shifts to clean up public spaces, such as parks or my own neighborhood
- participate in more than one “professions”. I studied one type of engineering but work in a completely different engineering. This already proves I can do both, so why not do both and others?
Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day. It’s unnatural. But somehow we revolve our whole livelihood around if.
Didn’t say it was.
But here specifically I’m refering to optimization, as in changes the manufacturer did to either streamline the production and make it more efficient (cheaper) or to differentiate from similar products to make it more appealing.
Surely you chose your devices on some sort of criterea and other people would come to a different choice.
This I believe can only happen under capitalism.
Oh, yes capitalism has optimised my devices. But I think that’s often bad thing. Because many of those optimisations weren’t for my benefit. In fact a huge number of them are directly detrimental to me.
The tech was an open platform focused on solving problems of the people working on it. And then capitalism “optimised” it by adding advertising and spyware, locking it down, removing the ability to control or repair it, and artificially obseleting it in order to drive further sales. All at the expense of the user, and the environment.
The optimisations also often removed user choice and product differentiation, rather than added them.
I don’t think I can imagine a statement more false than this.
Capitalism increasing the availability of choice, only so long as those choices are profitable. If they are not profitable, those choices are actively removed. I used to be able to find multitudes of devices that were user-maintainable, had replaceable batteries and expandable storage. But those choices are not profitable, and so they get removed.
Technology would look different under a different economic system. Likely in some ways worse, but in other ways better.