Jonathan Blow

Okay but if you mean a purely functional version of the word “exploit” then the employee is also exploiting the employer, so, I still don’t get it.

I mean it in the Marxist sense; the worker produces value, a part of which the employer takes. Maximizing the amount that is kept is a logical consequence of the profit motive, particularly once everything else has been squeezed as far as it can be.

Yeah, but "the worker produces value, a part of which the employer takes" is exactly what I am saying is conceptually incorrect.

If workers can just produce value like that, then they would just sit around at home and produce value and keep most of it. Some people do manage to do this, though it's a small fraction of the population!

workers don’t own the resources to produce value on their own. you have to have means of production... "workers" refers to a class of people who have no choice but to sell their labor

Correct. That's what defines a worker - their relationship to the means of production. (The people who can produce their own value, like artists, are technically not workers, though this gets very complicated under current conditions.)

This idea of “the means of production” being like some big assembly line or something, and that this being kept out of peoples’ hands is the problem, is shown to be plainly false in the modern environment, where the “means of production” is, like, typing on a computer.

Not everyone owns a computer, or the software and other equipment that goes with it. Or, more crucially, the vast amounts of capital it takes to make something like a game. (But yes, a small indie company can be said to be petit-bourgeois.)