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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Replying to @arthur_affect @MT6572A
Facebook isn't powerful because of its servers - it's powerful because of the network effect, among other things. Google has spent a lot of effort many times to take a slice of the social media pie and has failed each time - and it's not because they don't have servers.
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Replying to @itsybitsydots @MT6572A
Facebook is more than just a brand name -- it's a walled garden, and control over physical access to computing resources is what allows those walls to exist
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Replying to @arthur_affect @MT6572A
But lots of people have physical access to lots of computing resources. That doesn't make them competitive with Facebook. They can try all they want It's a combination of brand, code, and the actual data stored on specifically Facebook's physical infrastructure that holds value.
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Replying to @itsybitsydots @MT6572A
I'm not saying Facebook's "secret sauce" is having particularly GOOD servers, any more than I'm saying that real property is valuable on a city streetcorner because the building is a very high-quality building (it's often a shitty building)
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You're still not getting what I'm saying -- the value is that Facebook has that data on its servers *and the power to restrict access to it* They have the right to a lock and a key In a society of truly "free information", there would be no such thing
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"Truly free information" means no locks, no keys, all computers and all hard drives belong to everyone No passwords, no encryption, equal access to everyone This is usually held up as a "ridiculous strawman" by FOSS advocates because, well, our imaginations are limited
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A World of No Passwords would be what you'd need to *actually have* "true freedom" that would prevent a Facebook from existing Just like absolute freedom in terms of real property means trespassing ceases to exist, anyone is allowed to be anywhere at any time
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