this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
337 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
58011 readers
3076 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The issue is that capital is power, it's not just spending money. So the moment you stop using your money as capital to exercise power over others you stop being a capitalist.
The thing is though, nobody got wealthy without using that power, and that process is self-reinforcing. It's a kind of addiction. By the time you're a hundred millionaire you're surrounded by flunkies whose paycheck depends on you sticking around and letting them wield your capital power on your behalf. They will strenuously advise you to keep your investments, and it's hard to work against that pressure.
You are insulated from the day to day minutiae and the consequences of your decisions, and you have to justify in your own mind the decisions that got you here. To break out of that requires a profound crisis of conscience, but you're extremely wealthy and you are insulated from any consequence that could possibly cause that crisis.
I completely agree about your assessment of capital, and that’s sort of what I’m saying. Its really really uncommon for someone to get life changing wealth honestly. But statistically you have to have some outliers, I think ConcernedApe(the guy who made Stardew Valley originally all by himself) is a good example of what I’m talking about, dude is rich as fuck now that game is on all platforms and sells well, but I don’t think he’s a problem because as far as I know, he’s just using his money to keep making games, obviously that could change. But if he just keeps doing what he’s doing I wouldn’t consider him a capitalist even though he is rich.
Obviously this is all a digression about exceptions to the rule, which is fuck the wealthy