I feel like people dunk on the "you're criticizing capitalism from your iphone" callout without acknowledging its fundamental correctness. Innovation and the production of consumer goods are two things that capitalism really is better at, whatever your political stancehttps://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1255758942833172490 …
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I realize any attempt to discuss this founders instantly in the swamp of definitions. But I think of capitalism as kind of like an engine for economic activity. Saying that it can make things go fast doesn't imply that you have to be against seat belts, air bags, toll roads, etc
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It's a shame that a couple of the old line socialist economies weren't left over after 1989 to illustrate that purely as a method of organizing an economy and broadly raising the standard of living, socialism was unworkable. The USSR had the biggest microchips in the world
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I also find it interesting that all sorts of quality of life metrics in the west, like real wage growth, flatlined with the death of the old Communist bloc. It makes me wonder if the ideological battle didn't serve as a check on some of the worst aspects of monopoly capitalism
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But all that said, yeah, if you're tweeting from your iPhone about consumer capitalism being irredeemable and wrong, your beliefs about the world are incoherent. There's a reason it's an iPhone, and not a WePhone!
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Replying to @Pinboard
I can’t tell if this is trolling or serious. We didn’t choose to be born into a capitalist society where the best tech is both necessary and philosophically problematic. Should we be uber-principled and try to photosynthesise to avoid participating in this choiceless hell?
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Replying to @MarkDSimmons
This is a serious argument. My point is not to avoid technology, but to seriously address the fact that it was only a free enterprise system with significant protections on private property (one also seeded by massive government spending) that was able to produce a tech economy.
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Replying to @Pinboard
I remember how almost every innovation that came together to make smart phones came out of government labs and academic blue sky research and only then got iterated on by the industry, once the principles were established.
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Replying to @MarkDSimmons
That is absolutely true. But it's important to recognize the role of the iteration, too, and the Silicon Valley startup economy that grew up around it and fed off of it (I mean the late 20th century one, not the clown car we have today). Both ingredients were necesary
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They were! The failure of socialism to provide basic consumer goods was the reason so many people hated living under it
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