Comment on "Censorship" ☠️
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 6 days agoDefending capitalism as inherently good and worth keeping is the simplistic perspective lacking nuance.
Real lack of nuance, is failure to understand that any system that’s supposed to replace capitalism, would need to be able to reconcile incentives of multiple egoistic participants. Such thing doesn’t exist, outside, maybe P2P file exchange protocols like Torrent.
godsammitdam@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
Well, I dismantled your incorrect understanding of Lolita complex given you lacked the nuance of understanding the novel, Lolita, the term was based on. Looks like you misunderstand the nuance of humanity as well. At least your worldview is coherent I guess? Simplistic and lacking nuance, but coherent.
This assumes a fixed human nature rather than a behavior that systems actively select for and reward. Capitalist institutions structurally favor egoistic actors. Corporations that externalize costs and maximize shareholder returns outcompete ones that don’t, regardless of what the individuals inside them actually want. You’re amplifying egoism and then pointing at the result as proof it’s inevitable.
This is always the fun bit with capitalists. Your own example dismantles your argument. BitTorrent works precisely because it aligns individual incentives with collective benefit through protocol design. You seed what you leech. The more you contribute the better the system works for everyone. Cooperative protocol design producing pro-social behavior, egoism be damned. That’s closer to a socialist design principle than a capitalist one given its collectivist structure. You’ve described a commons and called it evidence for capitalism.
Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in economics for documenting how communities manage shared resources without private ownership or state control, through collective governance, mutual accountability, and designed incentive structures. Her research directly refuted the “tragedy of the commons” argument that collective resource management inevitably fails. Cooperatives, commons-based peer production, mutual aid networks, all reconcile participant incentives without capitalism as the mechanism. Torrents reconcile incentives without capitalism as a mechanism, so again, thank you for the useful point to argue 🫡.
The real lack of nuance is assuming that because capitalism has been the dominant system during a particular period of history, it’s the only possible system compatible with human behavior. That’s just survivorship bias.
An aside for those interested, but tangentially related, and from a video essay on one of the ugliest fps games I’ve seen no less.
A thought provoking line of dialogue I recently heard:
What is the meaning of life? What you make of it, right?
But consider the question itself before the answer. A blank sheet of printer paper arrives to you pre-defined. Clipped, pressed, bleached, packaged with the specific intention of being fed into a machine, slathered in ink, and filed or discarded. Its name tells you its purpose. Printer paper. For the printer.
And yet nothing stops you from drawing on it. Folding it into a plane. Using it as kindling. At the end of the day, printer paper is simply paper. The printer is explanatory, anticipatory even. It is not the whole of the paper’s purpose on earth.
So what is the meaning of life? The question is asked inside a context. In our world, that context is capitalism. The system arrives before you do, pre-defines your purpose, clips and presses and bleaches you into a shape that fits the machine. Your labor has value. Your time is a commodity. Your worth is your productivity. The printer doesn’t define the paper, but the paper rarely gets to decide that for itself. Is that as far as your nuanced thinking takes you? That capitalism is the end-all be-all simply because its all you’ve ever known?
Sounds pretty simplistic, dull, disheartening, and joyless to me.