Are folks really pressuring independent artists, authors, etc., not to promote their work here?
Do you also picket your local independent cafe and mom and pop stores? What happens if you succeed in shutting them down? That’s right, you end up with a McDonald’s in their place.
Please learn to separate capitalists from folks trying to survive under capitalism. Independent people trying to pay their rent isn’t advertising, it’s existing. What Coca-Cola does is advertising.
#fediverse ❤️ #indie
When in doubt, remember… as in comedy, so too in life: always punch up, never down.
It's easy to forget the original motivation for a tenet and slip into dogma. I certainly have curated a hostility to intrusive advertisement that spills over to a dislike of self-promotion. I can empathize without excusing someone taking that mindset too far. We aren't post-scarcity yet, folks 😮💨
@aral Absolutely. I enjoy people promoting the stuff they build, it's a completely valid way to talk about their ideas. That's what building stuff is, how else will we discover them?
This place is not just about witty banter - that's fun, but it doesn't really show me what's out there.
I want people to build things and i want to know about it and engage with them.
Corporations doing bland advertisements though? Completely different thing, and i definitely don't like that.
@chrisg @aral where do you draw the line? A corporation is a collection of people. The accomplishments of large collaborative works aren't worthy of free speech?
OSS has such a good concept of "free" -- as in freedom -- and that is why it is so successful: it can be freely used in the real world. So strange for an OSS project to them reject that paradigm.
@Thoracius @chrisg @aral That's ridiculous. Corporations are about greed and hoarding resources to appease shareholders. People on the base level are kept desperate enough with low payments and lack of better employment to work there as the lesser of two evils.
Don't you dare equal THAT to an artisan selling craft to pay the rent.
Freeze peach truly is the preferred excuse of assholes ugh
@aral
I don't like putting Nazis everywhere because it trivialises Holocaust and total collapse of Europe but ok.
IMO some big brands are more than welcome here. I'd prefer to reach them out here than to open Facebook if I need to communicate with them.
They can't buy traffic here so civil communication is a must-have, otherwise they will soon be forgotten.
Assuming, again, they pay for their instance. No indie maintainer should keep big accounts for free.
@hey Well, given how nearly every tech billionaire these days sounds like a mini Mussolini in the making and given the cushy transition from neoliberalism to nigh-on fascism we’ve seen in various so-called democracies this past decade, enabled in no small part by the infrastructure of authoritarianism constructed by Big Tech, I don’t think it’s a trivialising comparison. Think of it more as a warning to try and avoid repeating the past.
And yes, at the very least we shouldn’t subsidise them.
@aral as with everything it should be down to behavior and context.
My instance is okay with most folks as long as they aren't being spammy or begging.
I think they have some actual rules, but are loosely enforced, unless people are being a dick.
Quite frustrating that some people are arcing up about actual creative types wanting to make a living, and occasionally sharing ways their followers can support them.
Compare that to accounts here that harvest followers purely to grow an 'audience' that can be sold for influence. Or worse, accounts that steal other people's creative work (photos for example) to do their follower harvesting.
I agree with the message, but not with the ideology.
Capitalism is not the problem. *Corporativism* is. *Globalization* is.
Market forces are good. Profit-seeking as a way to collectively determine the best allocation of resources is good. Exchange of capital for labor and services is good.
What is bad is to have *corporations* with so much money/power and a faceless "executive board of directors" who deal with a production system that affects people on the other side of the world.
There are many small business owners who are doing a lot more than just "surviving under Capitalism". And this is something that independent artists and authors should *aspire* to, instead of being pushed to feel guilty about it.
The idea of "indie artists" is only possible because we live in a world that can produce so much wealth that we can actually afford to have people not working on something else. Only "Capitalism" could bring this. No other means of production managed that.
To wrap up: the idea that people are only selling things online to "survive" seems to me like an expression of victim-culture.
if people want to sell things online, great! A society where people can simply say "I've done this, and it can be yours in exchange of X" seems to me a lot healthier than one where people can only support themselves if they are deemed worth of pity and show *strict* compliance to some vague notion of "community values".
The initial use of the term “capitalism” in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 (“What I call ‘capitalism’ that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others”) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 (“Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor”).[20]: 237 Karl Marx frequently referred to the “capital” and to the “capitalist mode of production” in Das Kapital (1867).[26][27] Marx did however not use the form capitalism, but instead used capital, capitalist and capitalist mode of production, which appear frequently.[27][28] Due to the word being coined by socialist critics of capitalism, economist and historian Robert Hessen stated that the term “capitalism” itself is a term of disparagement and a misnomer for economic individualism.[29] Bernard Harcourt agrees with the statement that the term is a misnomer, adding that it misleadingly suggests that there is such as a thing as “capital” that inherently functions in certain ways and is governed by stable economic laws of its own.[30]
> regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor
> capital does not belong to those who labor
the term is primarily about who owns what and who calls the shots, not merely whether or not whoever it is that’s calling the shots should respond to feedback from market forces
> capital does not belong to those who labor
That definition is a bit outdated, don't you think? Liberal professionals very much have access and get to keep capital. Small business owners still work on their business and still get to keep capital. Even workers of large Corporations (e.g, the car industry in the XX Century, tech in the XXI) still get to keep a sizable portion of the capital accumulated by the Corporation.
@xjix @aral "commerce" has never been a term for a economic means of production. Maybe "Mercantilism" was such a thing, but that certainly involved a lot less of what people can do today.
In any case, this is arguing semantics. Farmers that is able to go to a bank to buy insurance for their crops or to finance the purchase of a tractor is very much a feature of Capitalism, it's still very desirable and that does *not* require large corporations to function properly.
It is a matter of balance. If an account is treated purely as an Etsy alternative, nobody is going to follow.
If they engage, their book signings and their attendance at markets will be noticed by a network of followers.
The Fediverse is not a marketplace but I would certainly buy things from those I follow. Setting up a 'shop' is going to rebound. Stop with the 'techniques'. Be yourself. Inform, illustrate. But go steady on 'promote'.
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