Romancing Sisyphus’ Stone

Someone on 🦞 wrote “The sooner we stop romanticizing open source development, the better for everyone” and it made me wanna uninstall my compiler, format my entire disk, get a library card or something. Or go grab the copy of Ecclesiastes from my own shelf.

Charitably, they might mean it as a worker’s right issue, that workers are getting underpaid because hacking on free software is so romantic, but I don’t care how much bathwater you wanna throw out. There’s just some things that are part of the treasure chest of life, reasons why I even open my eyes in the morning.

The solution to capitalism sucking on our marrows isn’t “learn to accept that the world is a gray void”, or I hope it’s not.

Lately, it feels like we’ve been heading towards a future where all we do is polishing the robots’ boots. In some sense, a corporation is a kind of robot; they’re run by algorithm (they’re incentivized to maximize profits for the owner class) and market pressures.

Keep infrastructure free

Exploitation

The owner class

Update

Milo Fultz wrote on Merveilles Town:

> I wonder if that person’s root issue is that they feel neglected or are worried about their future security, in that they see the value of their work in a human sense but are not in their ability to live.

If so, I feel the same way as them🫂

> If people felt able to do what they felt driven by in that child-like sense without fear of losing their livelihood, I think the romanticisation would go away, since those in power wouldn’t be able to wield it the way they do now