Why the Web is Communist

hi I'm Bob slime I recently graduated from computer school and I want to talk to you about computers and why capitalism is like the bullies that steal my lunch money and held all of this relates to the larger Star Trek Canon like I'm not a nerd I'm a dangerous tough boy radical who does toughy stuff like crying about cartoons today I'm gonna talk about the web I know nerd bullshit right wrong the web is radical because it's communist as hell when I say communist I probably mean it in a different sense than you understand it I mean a stateless classless moneyless society predicated on the maxim from each according to their ability to each according to their need I do not mean a society in which the state controls industry even if they do so based on the idea that they will eventually create a stateless classless moneyless society organized around the maximum from such a society may refer to itself as communist but it has not yet achieved communism and in my opinion wouldn't that being said the web what is it some kind of internet no long story short and fairly accurate the web essentially allows your browser to behave like a file explorer' does on your computer files on the internet are given a unique address that you can type from anywhere and retrieve those resources using what's called a universal resource locator or URL or url' if you're nasty the internet existed before the web but it sucked files were organized into strict top-down hierarchies and as we know hierarchies make everything worse the big breakthrough that the web brought to the table is that you can hyperlink resources together so if I'm having a conversation with you about the film Ghoulies three Ghoulies go to college and I want to convince you to watch it I can share a link to the trailer and then you'll see that and have to watch it because it's so awesome now the Ghoulies are about to learn what higher education is all about brewskis that's something we take for granted nowadays but it represents probably the biggest shift in human communication ever like since we invented language the web was a seismic shift in the way that information is shared one that we're still trying to come to grips with today and the only reason that it works the only reason that it became as ubiquitous as it is now is that its communist is all hell furthermore everything that sucks about the web everything that makes it annoying or difficult and sometimes even dangerous to use is the result of capital insinuating itself into what is naturally a communist institution I got a question for you how much did you pay for your web browser how much did you fork over to Google or or Mozilla or Microsoft for your web browser how much did you pay to use the programming languages that the web is built in like HTML or CSS or JavaScript and so on I'll go even further how many of the websites that you visit every day even cost you money and I don't mean like from your internet service provider obviously you have to pay to be on the Internet and obviously there are some websites to charge you money probably websites you use every day like Netflix or Spotify but the overwhelming majority of them give their services away for free and that's a little strange don't you think some of the most complex and useful software is just thrown out there and available for anyone to use for free to find that a little odd but not really right most of these allegedly free services are supported by advertising or by selling user metadata to people who will use that metadata for advertising in fact you may have gotten an ad for professional diaper eating champions Prager University before this very video even now Dennis Prager is paying for me to be able to tell you that I think he gets an erection at the idea of children starving to death in the third world because of the dipshit neoliberal policies that he thinks you're imbecilic enough to believe in Dennis Prager smells like farts thanks for the cash sucker see that's the thing about advertising it's kind of a crapshoot I mean you don't know if your ad is gonna be effective you don't know if your ad is gonna be put with something that makes it look bad and even if it all works out most people use adblock anyway and they're not gonna see it advertising is risky and it's the prerogative of big business to avoid risk to avoid risk to their profit margin not to like their employees or customers or the environment or their complicity with war crimes what I'm trying to say is that I don't think that many of these companies would prefer to stake their profitability on advertising a much surer bet would be to just charge you for the thing that they made and that's not unusual is it I mean there's plenty of suckers out there that actually pay for software programs like Photoshop can just have yearly release schedules with incremental upgrades like a really weird EA sports game and people will just buy it again and again even though they don't really understand the difference between the versions or why it's supposed to be better or where the way the frig the type tool went where did the type tool go if they could just charge you for their stuff they would but they can't because no one's gonna pay for it if they do and if they try it someone would come along and build the same thing give it away for free and eat their lunch you gonna pay for an email address when Gmail is free if Google decides they want to start charging for Gmail anybody in the world can just look up how to build an email service from the free resources on the web and just make it themselves the only way you can get away with charging people for something on the internet is if only you can make it where only you have the right to legally sell it that's why pages like Spotify or Netflix can get away with charging you because they have all the stuff you want like Netflix has after life a good day is well I don't go around wanting to shoot random strangers in the face and then turn the gun on myself you can't put afterlife on your website because Netflix owns it and also why would you want to so you really can't make your own Netflix not without a lot of money but anyone could make Twitter almost the entirety of Twitter's tech stack the software used to power it is free and open source meaning you could download it tomorrow and if you know what you're doing you could build a Twitter or many Twitter's if Twitter tried to charge people for using its service then someone would just come along and build a better Twitter and it wouldn't be hard to do because all you have to do is build a Twitter without Nazis on it someone please do that not I'm not gonna join Mastodon don't ask so Twitter has to rely on advertising if they want to make money making money is kind of a big deal for Twitter it's kind of the only reason they do anything and the people who make Twitter all the employees need that money so that they can buy food and pay rent under capitalism if you want to give something away for free you've got to make money doing it obviously companies like Twitter or real companies like Google or uber or Amazon are not communists these are the most capitalist institutions on God's green earth and they control and operate large swathes of the web I'm not deluded about that and on the surface that might seem to contradict my thesis here's the thing though all of those companies have discovered that if they want to build a product that people are actually going to use they have to rely on communism to do it look at your to the website that you're on right now what brings you to your tube is it the ads do you come here for the ads do you come here for the original content do you come here because of the expertly curated recommendations you come here for the videos the videos the goofus is like me make by ourselves why do you go to Twitter D is it because you like having your metadata sold to advertisers so that they can target you with more specific ads or do you like the tweets that millions of people post every day providing countless hours of free entertainment for everyone which is the thing that you like these businesses rely on the fact that you're willing to work for free not because you're being compensated but just because you want to make the world a better place or give something to the community one might say that you're giving according to your abilities so that others can have what they need and it ain't just YouTube bozos like me neither okay look at Wikipedia perhaps the most useful tool on the Internet based on the idea that a common resource like knowledge is more useful and more beneficial if everyone has access to it and control over it and sure that means that there's the potential for abuse anyone can come along and vandalize a Wikipedia page but here's the other thing in a regular encyclopedia if they print wrong information because they they were paid to or the guy who runs the encyclopedia like has an interest in doing it or there's a political bias you can't change that you can change it on Wikipedia so Wikipedia is not unique in its potential for abuse it is however unique and that it's built by volunteers volunteers giving free labor for the benefit of the Commons in fact just one man stephen pruitt has personally edited almost 1/3 of the 5.7 million wikipedia articles he didn't do it because he got paid to he did it just to enrich humanity's understanding of the world on the basis that everyone having access to a common resource makes that resource more valuable and useful that my friends is a communism he did a communism which is why it's so funny that both he and Wikipedia founder jumbo Jimmy Wales or libertarian Objectivists eat shit einer and communists win again and it ain't just the pages themselves either the tools used to build those pages are built and distributed the same way tools like PHP or nodejs or MySQL or my sequel if you're a plebeian do not at me for all open-source meaning that people volunteer their code which you can view for free to make software that's more dependable and robust these tools and hundreds of other ones like them that you probably prefer and are going to complain that I didn't talk about are all just out there for free and and anyone can just have them and use them to make cool stuff we're so often told that the only way to incentivize hard work is through profit and competition nobody's gonna just work for free for the better of their community it only gonna work if there's a reward for them personally like a nice t-shirt or a copy of crash bandicoot or a hundred and fifteen billion dollars and yet thousands of highly skilled workers build cool shit and give it away for free every single day and that's within capitalism where if they don't make money doing something they're gonna die imagine the work that they and by they I mean we could be freed up to do if if we didn't have to waste a third of our lives toiling away for some rich dipshit to go on an ayahuasca retreat on their golden yacht powered by cocaine and this same dynamic plays out everywhere on the web do you like a video game that cost billions of dollars to develop well hundreds of volunteers are just gonna build thousands of hours of free content for that game just because it's fun do you have a very specific and technical question that you need answered well just go to one of the thousands of unique discussion forums where highly-trained people provide their expertise to the community for free on the basis that everyone benefits from that cooperation maybe you just want to chill out and be entertained maybe see a funny video about a very crazy pizza website and boy howdy wouldn't you know it there's billions of hours of free entertainment crammed into every little bit of the web wait wait wait wait hold on thought slime you busted you said yourself earlier in this video that you make money off of your videos you can't claim you're doing any of this for altruism and yeah you got me it's true I do partially at least do this as a job because they gotta have the job to be alive but do you know what would be a much more lucrative job anything but particularly making fun of videogame feminism or pretending like Jordan Peterson never had it like a worthwhile thought in his miserable life if I wanted to make a lot of money on YouTube that's what I do I would just grift conservatives they're the easiest people in the world to make money from you just say racial slurs at somebody and then the money comes in that's all you got to do I don't do that because I'm at least partially motivated by making the world the cooler and chiller place and sure maybe I'm not entirely altruistic in my motives but do you know who is the people that pay me not preggers you they eat children I'm talking about the people that give me money on patreon they don't have to do that nobody's making them they don't really get anything from it the videos are free no matter what I mean there's like a doodle that'll be at the end of the video that's it and yet almost one in a hundred of my subscribers chooses to donate at least $1 to me anyway just because they like seeing this garbage and they want me to make more of it what is crowdfunding if not just a highly individualized and atomized form of communism operating within capitalism it's people asking you to give what you're able to other people so that they can have what they need YouTube fashion blogger Harrison Baum misen recently played a play Donkey Kong Country for charity it's 2019 and he raised I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say this all of the money on planet Earth for a charity called mermaids that was being defunded due to a hateful misinformation campaign conducted by noodle dick swamp people in the wake of that enormous outpouring of generosity I have seen many other content creators just do live streams and make money for charity just because they can because that's what happens if you just get out of people's way they're just spontaneously generous and giving to one another even in the neck and system we're not having money can literally kill you people are willing to be generous with their money now let me just stop here for a second and address the elephant in the room there are some smug O's in the comment section right now giddily pointing out that all of this is happening within capitalism and they think that's very clever so if you if you see them saying that please tell them that they're very smart and they're very very big brains because they need that positive reinforcement at this crucial stage in their development you're my special guys you're my special little guys I love you so much and yes that which attempts to ameliorate some of the damage done by capitalism is is naturally going to happen in capitalism like you like imagine in a classless moneyless stateless society organized around blah blah blah like what would a crowdfunding website dear like imagine him a guy needs brain surgery under communism he wouldn't go to a crowdfunding website he would just go to his doctor and explain that that he doesn't have the money for the surgery and then his doctor would look at him and go what are you talking about money I don't even know what that is and I certainly wouldn't require it as something that you'd need for surgery everybody should be able to get surgery if they needed otherwise people would die what do you what are you talking about also I can't operate on you you were my son but the guys dad is a capitalist who would never give surgery away for free how is this possible [Applause] the doctor is the man's mother this has been another thought slime brain tickler I'm not delusional in this particular way I know that companies like patreon or Kickstarter or IndieGoGo or GoFundMe or slimes give a short loop the middle are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart they're all capitalist institutions that profit off of the generosity of others to others by merely owning the means by which that generosity is funneled none of them have altruistic intentions but their users do their users are given what they can even in an economic system that applies enormous pressure on them not to do that so you might think I have this rosy and optimistic view of the tech sector but I don't their goblins I don't believe that CEOs are thought leaders had anything to do with this the web just kind of organizes itself communistic lee because that's more efficient cooperation and shared resources is a whole hell of a lot more productive than competition and artificial scarcity the only reason we think otherwise is because the people who own everything stand to benefit in a competition so of course they're gonna tell us that that's just more productive and it's better for everybody it's pretty convenient for them don't you think this wasn't a grand vision that emerged from Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos his brain it's just how people organize themselves if you don't force them not to and boy howdy do they want to force you not to when mobile devices like cell phones started becoming the hot new thing tech companies smelled an opportunity to make everything about the web more profitable and therefore worse you might notice that unlike personal computers mobile devices tend to be locked into only allowing licensed software to be used here in Canada it's actually illegal to jailbreak your iOS device not simply the pirate software or download an app which does something already illegal the very act of modifying your own iPhone to run software that for whatever reason Apple doesn't want you to run is illegal that's like if IKEA could make it illegal for you to use their forks with spaghetti that wasn't made by IKEA if this and I started this analogy without a roadmap of where it would end up web traffic from mobile users has gradually become the main source of all web traffic and that means that bit by bit pun intended the freedoms that you and I take for granted the freedoms which allowed us to build the web in the first place are being sold to the highest bidders now software which may have been free in the past suddenly becomes monetizable by big tech companies now even developers who want to give something away for free might find themselves unable to pay the fees or may find themselves unable to live up to licensing standards the big tech companies impose on them now tech companies have the power to control exactly what you're allowed to put on your devices and remove it without your consent here remember earlier when I talked about how everybody kind of works for free on the internet and how cool that was well it also sucks tech companies make a lot of money off of the free labor of their users and thousands of open-source developers they incorporate that free labor into their products and then privatize those products and just have that money if you contribute a million lines of code to an open-source software project that Amazon uses to make a billion dollars you're not going to see a cent from that and gradually our eagerness to work for free has been exploited by tech companies for so many little small things that we don't even notice it anymore hey will you review this game it'll help our algorithm sort it hey this article is a stump you can help improve Wikipedia by expanding it hey since you're already logging in to this website anyway do you mind helping us fine-tune our image recognition software we promise we don't use it to help a police state identify dissidents at a protest oh wait whoops hey like and subscribe to my video how did how did that one get in there what I'm getting at here is that while I firmly believe the web was built by people behaving like Nest's it still benefits capital like everything else in our economy the web proves I think pretty conclusively that people are willing to work altruistically for the greater good of their community the fact that people will do that in an economic system that actively exploits and punishes them for doing it speaks to a profound sense of charity at the heart of the human spirit one that we have been conditioned to ignore these resources being made free and available to everyone has produced the most profound cultural shift in living memory it was built on the labor of thousands of unpaid volunteers and the proceeds are being funneled into the hands of an elite view there's a name for that particular kind of robbery capitalism you take something that rightfully and naturally belongs to everybody and enclose it so that you have exclusive use over it then you can sell it back to the same people that helped you build it in the first place we are meant to feel grateful to tech companies like Google or Amazon for bringing these innovations to our doorstep but the truth is they didn't build this stuff we did they owned the infrastructure but they don't own it rightfully they just own it legally by rights it should belong to everyone it works better when it's in the hands of everyone here's the thing I really want to stress though it's not just true for the web that's true for everything that same process of enclosing and privatizing resources that should belong to everybody occurred with everything in our economy the web is new and most of us have watched it develop over our lifetime so when changes are made we notice but at some point the same process played out for everything from food to housing to entertainment to public space to family life all of those things gradually became ways for a few people to funnel money away from most people and if we weren't used to it we would be outraged by it and I can prove that do you believe in net neutrality if you know what it is chances are you probably do the idea of no neutrality is that ISPs shouldn't be allowed to charge tiered bandwidth speeds for various websites every all information on the Internet be treated the same and in doled out in a fair way instinctively when you hear of a goblin like Ajit PI working for for vampires to undermine net neutrality you understand that that's a bad deal for you but for some reason we're all just willing to accept that that's how the rest of the economy should operate [Music] please like and subscribe to me on youtube for more of this I I have a patreon I would these people gave me money in it you can do that too if it would mean a lot to me cuz that I would use it for living his don't have a job right now there's other videos you can watch also click around youtube.com watch my videos or other people's videos probably mine would I would prefer if I'm being honest with you I would prefer if you watched mine [Music] please stop sending me news about Garfield I I don't care about Garfield if you have news about Garfield eats great news about Garfield I don't care

Channel: undefined

Views: 120,662

Rating: 4.8965654 out of 5

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Id: WdgjljQSbj0

Length: 25min 32sec (1532 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/HumanBehaviorByBjork]

I think a lot about how the culture of computing in its infancy before all computers were almost entirely just machines for optimizing the extraction of capital, was incredibly utopian and idealistic. To the people in universities who invented all the technologies that makes modern computing possible, usually with public money, computers were full of revolutionary potential. Even in the politically repressed years of the late 80s and early 90s, there was the sense that the internet was going to radically democratize knowledge, art, and all of society, overthrow old hierarchies, foster understanding between previously separate populations. Now, obviously it didn't turn out exactly how people thought it would, but I think there's a real need to uncover and build upon that dormant radical tradition.

[u/Sekenre]

Thanks u/thoughtslime as a 25 year veteran of the internet and Free Software I appreciate your attention to this topic on the from a left perspective.

One interesting factoid: the term "open source" was coined as part of a re-branding effort aimed at getting big business and capital involved in the process of creating this commons. It was mostly successful in dominating the conversation over the more revolutionary "free software" movement.

See: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

[u/nobeardwilson2]

Thank you for this video!! Great job!

[u/BlackHumor]

I'd also like to give a shoutout to AO3 here.

The story of AO3 is kinda similar to the story of Wikipedia, except while Jimmy Wales and company just had a cool idea one day, the people behind AO3 very deliberately decided to take their fanfic out of the hands of corporations due to one too many censorship debacles with alternate platforms like Livejournal and fanfiction.net.

It's now the biggest fanfic platform on the internet, and has (somehow) been nominated for a Hugo.

[u/morbidhyena]

Lovely video, thank you! This one has a really genuine positive vibe.

[u/j33yw3ly]

Ironically I see a anti-commercial counter culture emerging over the hierarchical pre-web gopher protocol with gopherholes like bitreich.org, sdf.org and circumlunar.space.

There are plenty of old computers, wifi routers and cans to build our own infrastructure with software like cjdns by the likes of darknetplan, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi](fabfi) and simply create a open guest network on your wifi router if you can.

[u/WeaponizedDownvote]

I like how the techno libertarians like Jimmy Wales got tricked into doing a communism

[u/bit_of_hope]

Oh boy, I'm a little late on this one but might as well write out the rant that's inside me about this one.

So, a major concern is the centralization of the web onto platforms owned and controlled by capital. Video material goes on YouTube, discussion on Discord (or whatever is the wheel of the year), Medium gets all the long-form essays and shorter quips go on Twitter. Facebook is where you're still staying because of those couple of friends who you don't share another contact channel with and all this content is aggregated on Reddit for you to wade through.

Just imagine for a second YouTube going offline all of a sudden. Recall all the tears being shed over the Library of Alexandria and put that into perspective. Also think of all the pain and trouble caused by YT's demonetizations, copyright strikes, UI fuckery, hiding subscriptions, the stupid bell thing, what have you. None of this would be a problem if everyone hosted their own content, or even if the web were decentralized into independent communities federated together over the worldwide network.

The technology is obviously there. Technically it's entirely possible for the web to be full of mini-youtubes with the redundancy, resiliency, and independence benefits that would entail. Funny that TS should dunk on Mastodon of all things, since the same ActivityPub protocol that lets Mastodon instances talk to each other also allows federation with PeerTube, a decentralized platform for hosting video.

A part of why things like the Article 13 are so dangerous is that now running your own PeerTube instance becomes a risk, since if you wish to make your instance public, you must somehow implement an automated filter that recognizes copyrighted content. A $700B evil company can't get it right (as evidenced by the frivolous matches made by ContentID) so how the hell is anyone else expected to deal with it? Net neutrality and EU copyright directive are mere drops in the ocean of greedy shit ISPs have done to keep out competition. Protocols like BGP at the heart of internet basically work via in-club mechanics where Tier 1 ISPs co-operate to give each other internet for free and sell access to lower tiers. This makes the barrier for entry into the backbone world incredibly high.

There are also things like IPv6, which has been held back for 20 years now because ISPs realized the artificial scarcity of IPv4 addresses makes their allocations a monetarily valuable asset. My ISP outright refuses to sell me a plan with a static IP address or native IPv6 support. These are made up numbers which were never intended to be worth anything. IPv6 spec even recommends handing out billions at a time because they're designed not to run out in foreseeable future, but IPv4 addresses have run out and there will never be more. And that's why the precious few on the market are valuable, because most users still need one. And it's not like all of the addresses are actually in use, but why would you put them on the market when they're consistently appreciating in value? It's like investing in digits of pi if after we decided you can only use the ones you own and only the first four billion will ever go on sale.

Even with all this, self-hosting is still pretty doable and costs less money than most people spend on haircuts in a year. Unfortunately, the technical skills required are still fairly specialized. For most people that means we're stuck with these platforms, which often offer subpar service, frequently make changes for the worse, and might disappear catastrophically at any time.

I'm not gonna try and convince comrade Slime about the wonders of Mastodon, but I highly suggest it or other fediverse platforms like Pleroma or Friendica to anyone not too put off by its UX design, which in Mastodon's case should be fairly intuitive to Tweetdeck users. Pleroma in particular tends to get a bad rap due to some controversial views expressed by some of its developers, but it's honestly an ideal Twitter alternative particularly for self-hosting on light duty resources. You want a Twitter where you can remove the nazis? Fediverse is that.

It's not my place to shame anyone for using the profit-driven capitalist platforms (no ethical consumption under capitalism and so on) but I implore that those with the ability to do so support Free (both as in free beer and especially as in free speech) decentralized and independent platforms as an alternative to the capitalist hegemony. Sometimes where you post a piece of content counts as praxis.