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Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing" (pluralistic.net)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I do agree that the workers should be paid, but they have absolutely no say in what the company does at the top. It might be that a lot of them don't agree with the company's actions. Only way to remedy that is to democratize companies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

When tech companies say they want to "democratize" they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer "votes" with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we're somewhat failing ourselves here.

In the context you present, the companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.

Furthermore, I don't necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.

But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.

Edit: spelling.