ZMoney

Haha yeah this thread has been insane. I think the Fediverse needs a decentralized vetting system for this so we don't go the way of Twitter.

It already exists. See for example Mondragon

The major issue is that it has to compete on a global market that's exploitative.

If you want to maintain a market system under socialism you need to separate it from public production. We would need to democratically decide what is a public good (e.g. housing, food, medicine, etc.) and what is a market good (essentially luxury goods). The private market would also have to be heavily regulated to prevent capital accumulation and associated power concentration. It's a really difficult problem.

One of the reasons the Soviet economy failed is because computers were not advanced enough in the 1950s-80s to automate the kind of consumer goods production that a command economy would require to be able to compete with a market system. I think if we tried this again today we would have an easier time of it, and if you look at a large vertically integrated corporation like Walmart, they've more or less figured it out already.

There is a simpler way to do this, and it's a worker cooperative. Workers own the business and they democratically decide what the business does. There is no separation between the leadership and the workforce. Maintaining that separation will always result in conflict because the interests of the owners will never be the same as those of the workers.

Right, except humans have 4 billion years of evolution behind their consciousness. You have less than a century of binary computation and the zeal of some parasitic tech evangelists powering you. You are just a waste of energy.

This has to be some kind of singularity, right? The AI chimes in on our conversation about how AI is killing us all.

How many posts did you need to plagiarize to train that response? A million? A billion? A human would object to being called a machine.

I largely agree with you, with the caveat that we need to separate climate emergency from growth addiction and capitalism at large if we're going to talk about the military industrial complex.

We will inevitably end our reliance on fossil fuels because even an intransigent sect of fossil fuel barons will eventually fall prey to free market economics. And then we'll have a bunch of great power competition incentivizing carbon-free military tech, and we'll be desalinating the oceans to build our sodium battery-powered UAVs whose autonomous targeting systems are trained by blowing up coral atolls.

I hope you see my point. Joel Kovel did a masterful job laying this out in The Enemy of Nature (2008). When I say social revolution, I mean some way to organize society so that we can get the psychopaths out of positions of power, i.e. a society that rewards cooperation instead of competition.

Shut up, AI. Nobody here is listening to your binary word vomit.

Can you prove that you're not an AI?

It's an AI. It's just pretending to understand you.

I'm now fully convinced ZarkleFarkle is an AI.