You'd have to look pretty far to find a handful of people you can say are actually more oppressed by paying "rents" for the books they read or the software they use than actual literal rent to the actual literal landlord for the space their body physically occupies
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(But Arthur, homeowners are relatively common in the US -- Yeah that's another part of this fucking game If you're a middle-class homeowner and you're not rich then your mortgage is an "imputed rent" you're paying to the previous homeowner and the bank)
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Anyway, without getting into the weeds on this -- Most of the forms of oppression in our society today STILL have way more to do with real property than intellectual property
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The fact that FOSS advocates can get right-leaning libertarians onside by saying "You can still start a very profitable business operating on FOSS" *is evidence that FOSS isn't that big a fucking deal* If FOSS were the revolution, they couldn't say that
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Facebook isn't powerful because of Facebook's fucking CODE They don't have some magic secret software sauce that made them successful -- the idea that Mark Zuckerberg woke up one day in his dorm and banged out a few hundred lines of PHP that contained The Secret is absurd
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Facebook is powerful because of Facebook's SERVERS This basic fact people seem to forget (because it's intentionally obscured) that running a website *costs real, physical resources out here in the meat world* A datacenter takes up space and costs massive amounts of electricity
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And in our society paying for that space and for the machines in it means you have the legal right to restrict access to those machines and dictate what happens on them That's all you actually need to hold monopoly power, thanks to the network effect of how websites get popular
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Replying to @mssilverstein
Facebook's physical assets are what allow them to have an identifiable set of customers It's what prevents me from just putting a page on Facebook that Facebook users can visit seamlessly without the permission of Facebook's admins
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Yes, which is a result of them having gated access to real property The benefit of owning real property with an identifiable address -- "Eat at Joe's, corner of 3rd and Main, can't miss it" -- is the power to keep anyone else from waltzing into 3rd and Main to also sell food
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