Non-Authoritative Information @benhamill@cybre.space

Time for an #introductions

I'm a white cishet man, more or less living at the top of Privilege Mountain, trying to learn to dismantle and undermine that privilege.

Things I'm into:
• #roleplaying
• #linguistics
• #socialjustice
• #software
• #parenting
• #reading
• #videogames
• #kindposting
• #lego
• #comics
• #argyle

Things I'm (interested in?) learning about:
• #socialism
• #coops
• #urbanplanning
• And all the stuff above, naturally.

This is, of course, incomplete. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Uh. What do you do when the #introductions post you pinned to your profile is out of date? I guess you make a follow-up post with the correction, pin it and hope people notice?

Anyway, uh, in the above post, I describe myself as "cishet", but I figured out I'm actually pansomethingual? Only in the last, like, 8 months or so. I'm still a white cis man, so the thing about Privilege Mountain is still pretty accurate, though. But, yeah.

Good morning, bits and bytes.

Someone remind me to write a blog post about an idea I had that's kind of the inverse of that TNG episode where they go to the planet where every infraction is punished with the death penalty.

Did you know? Mushrooms were invented in 1776 by Charles Mushroom. In Pennsylvania.

So I pull out the traditional parental response: "This isn't a democracy," but then I swerve hard left away from tradition and don't say shit about dictatorships because that's fucked up. "This is a consensus decision making apparatus. We all have to agree." #parenting #DadOps

The other day, my wife was out and it was just me and the kids. We were deciding what to have for dinner. The 7yo says, "I want pizza." The 4yo says, "Me, too! Pizza!" Before I can say anything, the 7yo follows up with, "It's two against one. We win. It's pizza." Fuckin' case closed, right? #parenting #DadOps

Good morning, bits and bytes. 🌇

If that's not upsetting already, then their bringing up that worry is either disingenuous or just not really engaging with the topic.

I expect we'll see and increase in subscription stuff. Why sell you a thing when they can rent it to you?

Trying to teach people new vocabulary is hard so I had the idea that it's a non-starter, but didn't know what to do instead. Until today.

You need to show them how capitalism is going to destroy peraonal property on its own. See Spotify, who we rent music from. And those phone upgrade schemes where you get a new phone every year… you're basically renting your phone. Every purchase that gets transformed into a subscription is an erosion of personal property.

I've seen, from time to time, leftists talk about the difficulty in communicating to members of the general population about the dissolution of private property. When you say, "make private property not a thing," they hear, "you can't own your house or car. Not even your bike or a book."

And people talk about trying to teach people new vocabulary like drawing a distinction between private property (bad) and personal property (probably fine).

@shoutcacophony I bought these pamphlets that Jacobin is publishing. There's 3 and are called "The ABCs of Capitalism". Each is labeled with a letter and a subtitle. Today I read "B: Capitalism and the State" and it made me think a lot about your points about voting. Specifically, it made very well a point that merely electing "better people" into office is doomed to fail, including how and why. It was really great. I haven't read C yet, but these might be really good anticapitalism 101 material.

Good morning, bits and bytes. 🌇

I wish more software cooperatives were product companies rather than consultancies. For one, I'd be interested to join a co-op, but am completely uninterested in consulting. For two, I think having the company be in the hands of the workers could have a positive effect on what it's like to use whatever software product is being made.