Are you a communist? @vitalik.eth
No. And Iâm also not a capitalist. Both are 20th century ideologies. (And they are words that have been stretched and abused to the point of meaninglessness: remember, in the 1990s, Microsoft called Linux âcommunistâ: www.theregister.com/2000/07/31/m⊠) I support freedom, global equality of opportunity, kindness and cooperation, human welfare and progress. These are timeless principles. The question is how to use the tools we have available to achieve these values in the context of the 21st century. Iâve written at length about the kinds of mechanisms I personally support, but I definitely do not think that I am the only source of good ideas, I think figuring out the best approach is a shared project of both thinking and also increasingly real world experimentation.
- Also when you say freedom do you mean individual liberty or do you mean liberation from institutional oppression of classes
- Some of both. Liberation from institutional oppression, without individual liberty, is imo too easily turned into a slogan to justify new forms of institutional oppression Individual liberty without liberation from institutional oppression too easily slides into forms of oppression that leave people alone in a purely formal sense but are still highly extractive
Hard agree re tools/mechanisms. Iâm quite fond of relational ethics as a guiding framework for new technologies, esp coordination technologies. The literature is still very theory based (not a bad thing) but there are some practical mechanisms emerging eg. to improve plurality in llm trainingsets and rlhf
Cypherpunk.timespan.vc archives of the Cypherpunk listserve. A lot of the early emails have to do with the ideals of the community. At the time they were fighting for cryptography to be regulated as commerce (not munitions) and for strong internet privacy to be a standard globally
This kind of question is tricky as you donât know what communism or capitalism means from their perspective. These terms have become distorted and taken on many different meanings in the process of dissemination and interpretation. so when you mentioned the C word earlier, many people might have understood it differently from how you intended, leading to an amplification of misunderstandings based on their misconceptions. Therefore, itâs wiser and more desirable to emphasize specific principles rather than any â-ism.â No one should be bound or hijacked by an ideology; instead, they should pursue concrete values.
âI support freedom, global equality of opportunity, kindness and cooperation, human welfare and progress.â me too, vitalik đ€
Yeah but thatâs also known as socialism, why canât we just use the word for it that weâve been using? Because some people have negative associations with it due to propaganda⊠But the ruling class will do that for anything that threatens them. Call it something new but if it threatens the plutocrats theyâll make sure itâs demonized just like âSocialismâ and âCommunismâ
Commonist, perhaps?
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creative commons
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Communism vs the commons vs capitalism vs Web3 Let me weigh on the apparent semantic âcommunismâ debate going on in the Web3 community
- contemporary communism was both an expression of an ideology for the material organization in favour of working class interests on a transnational basis and a project to manage industrial society through state planning. The first failed when the social-democrats voted for the war budget in 1914, choosing their nations above universal solidarity. Those that opposed it settled for the second definition, fueled the Russian Revolution, but the Party substituted for the working class self-management and fused with a planning-based state bureaucracy. That project failed in the 60s, when the Russians closed down their internet because it would undermine state and party control, but it survives in a hybrid form in China, where it has been very successful in developmental terms, but it doesnât seem to be an exportable format. What has remained from the communist project is a state- centric vision of societal development, which is in a way, a continuation of the old imperial project, where the market is a disciplined and ruled minority, not the ruling class. It remains an alternative vision of managing the overall common good of a complex class-based civilization. Nevertheless, outside of the Chinese context, there are no social forces remotely capable to organize themselves in this way.
- The alternative to this contemporary communism is the market-centric rentier-based oligarchy, with its short-termism, existing in various forms, and called capitalism by both its supporters and critics.
- But there is a third alternative, and that is the commons, which historically concerned the local community management of resources to preserve them in the long term; then the social commons of working class solidarity and the mutualized forms of knowledge sharing and production that emerged with the internet. These commons are voluntary, exist outside the state and the market, and are the reason why we have Web3 and other technological forms. It makes a lot of sense to start thinking of commons-centric social forms that can preserve cosmo-local resources for the long term. Calling this third alternative communism can only weaken its appeal. It is unrelated to the state planning of the economy in a totalitarian industrial society.
- Web3 is a fusion of market functions, public authority functional equivalences, permissionless contributions and digital commons. Itâs a meta-container and integrative post-industrial format, again unrelated to the competition between rentier capitalism and state planning that was at the heart of modern rivalry.
Do you support workers having democratic control over their workplace and sharing in the wealth generated by their work?
Calling out something using one word is just a lazy way to call something out, definitely meaningless
i thought that communism and capitalism in pure ideological form donât really exist anymore in most of the globe. arenât most global states a hybrid of different ideologies including communism/capitalism?
Consider communism obsolete and it will suck you up into an inescapable unavoidable unchangeable oppresive way of life. Donât be a fool. Communism never ended. Cold war never ended. One side simply went dark. They just got so many faces these days. Theyâre everywhere, literally⊠even in Ethereum and the EF.
a lot of current concepts and mechanisms like capitalism and communism are not fit for the information age, where prosocial behaviour and ownership are redefined. would love to hear your thoughts on /addresso as a stepping stone into a wider, semantic dweb woven with symbolic AI.