The Anti-Capitalist Case for Standards

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-anti-capitalist-case-for-standards/

by kelseyfrog • 1 year ago

29 64 1 year ago

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

jongjong3• 1 year ago

Standards are a bad thing. Convenient isn't the same as good. They mostly help large companies to monopolize large markets. Without standards, there would be a patchwork of companies catering to different communities. It would create a lot of work opportunities, lots of competition and there would be adapters to bridge between different interfaces. It would be more hassle but it would improve everyone's work life 100x and would probably result in faster technological progress as more people would be able to have capital to innovate, in a more flexible self-directed way.

AlotOfReading2• 1 year ago

Who monopolizes floating point or electrical sockets? Whose lives would be improved if every product had a different, incompatible implementation?

I would actually go entirely the opposite direction and argue that many standards are so useful that it's inappropriate to lock them behind a paywall. They should be entirely free and public despite the costs to produce standards.

jongjong3• 1 year ago

Small producers would benefit. Producers who produce solutions that are most compatible for a specific community would benefit from other solutions not being compatible.

In such system, everyone would be a small producer. So everyone would benefit. It would be much harder to move cities or countries but that would be a good thing. Everyone would have a great work life. Everyone would have an advantage within their community over unknown foreign producers. Equality of opportunity would be maximized.

The biggest problem in everyone's lives today is their job/career. People spend all their time working. So the system should be optimized to make workers' lives better, not consumers' lives. Capitalism already looks after consumers naturally. The government's job should be focused mostly on producers.

It's not right that every aspect of the system looks after consumers when they don't necessarily produce much social value. A lot of their income nowadays is subsidized by money printing, not the result of past labor as the myth suggests.

saurik• 1 year ago

All of the monopolies I can think of are built on the back of a proprietary solution and every "patchwork of companies catering to different communities" is seemingly enabled by a standard...

jongjong3• 1 year ago

Look behind and you will find that this so called 'patchwork' all benefit a small number of centralized entities who define the standards, ultimately.

True decentralized communities do not require standards. They don't require global coordination.

The problem is that you don't even realize that they exist. If you're mainstream, your idea of decentralization is actually just a thin veneer. It's often all centralized behind the scenes. Made centralized using standards and an unhealthy obsession with cooperation on a global scale. Ignoring that small-scale competition is healthy and necessary to keep everyone motivated and doing the right thing.

Then they sooner or later fall victim to a big company like Microsoft with their three Es philosophy; Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

gessha2• 1 year ago

Standards are a bad thing. Convenient isn't the same as good.

We successfully communicate on this bulletin board thanks to standards and protocols. We will be in the Stone Age of computers if it wasn’t for standards.

readthenotes13• 1 year ago

"And so we return to where we started: the difficulty of imagining an end to capitalism. We do not claim to have a solution to that particular problem"

It's pretty funny to see such a blatantly biased article coming out of academia. Oh wait.

Meanwhile, I'll save my paychecks to buy the texts of some of those anti-capitalist produced standards.

In other actual anti-capitalist news, the NIH says we shouldn't have to pay twice for government sponsored research.

https://deepnewz.com/us-domestic-policy/nih-to-end-paywalls-...

fcarraldo• 1 year ago

Is deepnewz.com a reputable source?

readthenotes13• 1 year ago

In this case it appears to be close enough. Did you find something misleading in your investigations?

readthenotes13• 1 year ago

Edit to add: some history https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...

t1E9mE7JTRjf14• 1 year ago

The thing 'anti-capitalists' never seem to understand, is that it's not a top down system but bottom up emergent human behaviour. A function of consent/interoperability at scale beyond the immediate family/tribe unit. Thus hard to see an "end to capitalism". That would be like an end to language. We'd just re-invent it.

ryuhhnn• 1 year ago

I never understood the anti-capitalist argument to be that it’s a top down system (and thus is why it’s “bad”), I think the critique is more that capitalism will inevitably beget hierarchies and self-reinforces them. And to be fair, some earlier attempts at socialism also begot hierarchies, but now I’m being a little pedantic.

t1E9mE7JTRjf14• 1 year ago

I don't hear it referred to as a top down system either, but infer that. People talk about a world without it, or after it, as if it's one thing - which is why I described it as top down. Ie one corner stone you can remove. Like a monarchy, or damn. And indeed, the critiques (that come to mind at least) I've heard of capitalism all seem valid at first, until I realise they also apply to socialism, communism, etc. Thus so far I don't see capitalism as being relevant as people think, and stick with my - temporary - conclusion that it's an emergent behaviour.

thrance4• 1 year ago

Yeah yeah, markets are a natural phenomenon arising from human nature itself and nothing can be done to fix the issues they cause, so we shouldn't even try. We get your argument, it's as old as humanity itself, and was used to justify feodalism, slavery, etc.

grg05• 1 year ago

I wonder, where was GP during the cold war? Did he sleep through it?

t1E9mE7JTRjf14• 1 year ago

so we shouldn't even try

I haven't said that.

Do you have a point or view, which counters mine?

I wonder if it's capitalism, or the consent of humans with different values you reject.

grg05• 1 year ago

This is an old, unoriginal argument that is also completely baseless. According to this, people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution, right? And then capitalism just naturally emerged, of course. Not a single drop of blood was spilled.

Besides, there is nothing wrong with standards or the article, if that is what you are implying. The Internet, for example, along with the many standards that followed, is the result of government funneling money into the Pentagon, universities, and other research institutions. It did not emerge spontaneously. And then private enterprise has flourished on top of that baseline infrastructure, much of which is used unaltered to this day. If anything, we need more and up-to-date standards, not siloed proprietary technology that disappears on the whims of an acquisition or a bankruptcy.

t1E9mE7JTRjf14• 1 year ago

completely baseless

Can you say what is baseless?

people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution

Not sure where you're going with this?

there is nothing wrong with standards

I agree.

It seems you think capitalism and standards are at odds with each other? I'm trying hard to read points from your sentences.

karaterobot• 1 year ago

According to this, people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution, right? And then capitalism just naturally emerged, of course. Not a single drop of blood was spilled.

I didn't really want to wade into a pointless argument, but this is a very ungenerous reading. They didn't say any of the things you're implying they did. A system can be natural, inevitable, emergent and still require that blood be spilled to make it happen. Karl Marx certainly believed so.

Aunche• 1 year ago

Indeed even the Soviet Union depended on a proto-capitalist black market to make up for market deficiencies. In order to incentivize the elites to do anything at all, they had to exchange favors with each other, which meant that corruption became an essential part of governance.

aussieguy1234• 1 year ago

I've found what's happening in north eastern Syria to be interesting.

This area was previously under the religious fundamentalist rule of Islamic State, who were pushed out by a Anarchist/Libertarian socialist milita, around half of whom were women (much to the dislike of ISIS, whose fighters believed if they were killed by a woman, they don't get to go to heaven).

Currently it's the first example of a working Anarchist system.

No laws means that capitalism isn't illegal, so it still exists there.

But most of the economy is based on cooperatives and wages are three times higher than the rest of the country.

They smartly played the global power order, letting the Americans develop their oil and the Russians develop their gas.

Unlike what many may think, people don't go around killing each other without laws in place - which does happen in the rest of Syria under a statist (State based) system of government.

t1E9mE7JTRjf14• 1 year ago

I don't know where to being commenting on this, you've raised quite a few points. I've travelled to both Northern Iraq and Syria. Iraq while ISIS were there, Syria before the conflicts started. I'd be interested if there was a documentary / podcast / etc you could point me to, in order to better understand all that you're presenting. Either way, very glad ISIS was pushed back. I don't have the words to describe how horrible the situation seemed there.

superb-owl• 1 year ago

If I were King of America, the first thing I'd do is start enforcing standard protocols for things like auth, messaging, data export/migration, etc. Mostly relying on industry to decide _what_ the protocols should be, but making sure everyone adheres to them.

Data interoperability would make our digital lives so much better.

TOGoS• 1 year ago

I'd start by standardizing the interface between plastic storage tubs and their lids.

benfortuna4• 1 year ago

And standard sizing so they are both stackable and nestable with other tubs.

pessimizer• 1 year ago

You don't need an anti-capitalist case for standards. The capitalist case for standards is that you don't want firms to succeed though manipulation of the market because it keeps them from competing in productive ways (i.e improving product or process.)

Energy that companies spend on dirty tricks and dirty trick defense is waste, and makes us all poorer. But you can't expect any particular firm to unilaterally give up an incompatibility moat, unless all of them do. Government stepping in to set standards is solving a collective action problem.

And standards can also be bullshit. No mention of the OOXML debacle.

wmf2• 1 year ago

This is a rosy view of standards that ignores how often they are perverted for rent seeking.

benfortuna4• 1 year ago

Regardless of the implementation challenges, the theory is sound and that is the point of the article I believe.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe• 1 year ago

I don't understand what rent has to do with standards, care to explain?

wmf2• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

It's sadly common for standards to be patented with very high license fees.

tptacek3• 1 year ago

It's funny to me that a piece like this is as likely to polarize people away from standards as towards it, since the case it's making is essentially orthogonal to the most salient debate about standards.

benfortuna4• 1 year ago

You left me hanging - what salient debate?

tptacek3• 1 year ago

Probably lowest-common-denominator vs. innovation; there might be others. But the struggle between capital and labor? Not high on the list!

BlursedTarot• 1 year ago

This is beautifully written and frames the issue in a fresh way for me. I'm taking away an appeal to individuals and business entities to intentionally optimize for economic public good as opposed to profit and that to contribute to international standardization efforts is one practical way to pledge to that goal.

SpicyLemonZest• 1 year ago

I don't really understand this article. The authors don't seem interested in the details of either capitalism or standards development organizations. Just because they're nonprofit doesn't mean they're outside of the market economy! (ANSI must have forgotten about their purported commitment to "information sharing for free or nearly free" when they started charging $2500 for the complete 2023 SQL standard.)

Cordiali• 1 year ago

I'd agree with non-capitalist, but the authors are far too absolute for my liking.

The whole article hinges on examples of a non-capitalist mode of knowledge production being hard to imagine or conceptualise. Wikipedia is often used as an example of precisely that idea; I reckon I'd see it in that context at least once a month.

At this point, it's basically the standard example.

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

Well written article and very thought provoking!

The more universal a need is, the less it should be supplied by capitalism.

Education; healthcare: universal needs. When left to the private sector, prices explode and exploitation reigns. Because no matter the price, people will pay.

Las Vegas’ strip on the other hand, needs no government intervention. Folks there are spending money they can live without!

American culture worships the market as solver of all problems - which it is while there’s still growth. But when things settle in, standards allow new players to keep incumbents honest.

Regarding standards, neat that the “standard” for C is ANSI C. It calls back to a time when standards bodies were key to technology development. It predates even IBM’s XT and AT PC - a transition away from standards-bodies-driven hardware development toward market-leader driven.

Ultimately the universality of standards and ability for new players should always be maintained in every market - it should never be impossible to disrupt lazy incumbents. Standards are crucial to keeping markets and industries healthy.

Soooo how we doing over in social media?

Nevermark• 1 year ago

We don't need an end to capitalism.

Just an end to capitalism that perversely carves out an exception to normal reciprocal arrangements for using other people's property, for one of the most important categories of property: universally owned property. I.e. the environment.

Today, the value of our joint inherited environment has no systematic representation. The default is, do your damage until it is significant enough, and some white knight politicians, finally try to limit the damage with one-off narrow per-case idiosyncratic limits.

No wonder protecting the environment is near impossible. Legally and politically, our systems are tilted far into the direction of non-protection. Ignoring the literal reality of joint inheritance, and ignoring the tremendous value being mismanaged.

The default should be: reciprocal agreements in the form of cap and trade for all public asset impact. Most especially the environment. Exactly as it is required for impact anyone wants to have on another owners private property.

Then the legal and political default would be to protect the value of joint assets, and maximize the value back to the public of their use.

Then all the wonderful magic of capitalism, for optimizing the value of resources, would work for the environment.

This even creates an avenue for some universal income. We all should be paid for use of the non-human created, jointly inherited asset: the environment.

Instead of the default being endless over pollution of CO2, plastics, etc., the default would be all entities pay for what they use, and pay even more for what they use that requires fund for offsetting the damage. Suddenly capitalism and the environment work.

And we all get and dividend, reflecting our jointly inherited asset, on its use.

Value which will go up for everyone as the economy grows, without any form of wealth redistribution.

The numbers of top tier problems this would contribute solutions or partial solutions to, is considerable.

The Anti-Capitalist Case for Standards

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