I hope this is a good place to post this.

Corporations need to make money, you know.

No they don’t, and I’m tired of pretending they do!

I’ve read this argument all over the Fediverse from ex-Redditors debating the objectives of the protests in response to the API changes, usually justifying why Reddit should charge a “low” fee to use their API.

I personally fled Reddit partially because the API changes will kill the app I used to browse. I’ll admit that my departure is not fully principled. But what made me pull the trigger was the realization that the protest was doomed because of the moderate, business-friendly goals it sought to achieve, and the lack of voices demanding something better. Put simply: it doesn’t ask for much. It seems like Redditors are okay with a gradual enshittification, but not a sudden one.

Even if spez backs down and decides to price the API at a level that the current Reddit developers accept, the fact that it costs anything means that someone cannot afford to begin developing a 3rd party Reddit app.

I feel like there’s a tacit “fuck-you-I-got-mine” attitude from large developers advocating for “cheap” API as opposed to free [1] API. If they’re not actively throwing new developers under the bus, then they are at least apathetic to their situation.

Corporations and the executives that run them are blood-sucking leeches on the backs of the people who actually build and maintain technology. The goal of the executive is to bring as much value into the company as possible, whereas the goals of tech workers are varied, but generally center around developing a product or service to be useful to customers. The lie of liberalism is that these goals are never in opposition, and that the goals of the executive are actually the goals of developers (and workers in general) in disguise, under the assumption that the average person is too stupid to earn their freedom.

The Reddit blackout has furnished an excellent example where “enshittifying” their platform to make more money off advertising goes directly against the goal to make a nice, usable platform for discussion. The executives clearly control Reddit, because the path thought to maximize profit is the one being uncompromisingly taken.

But I/they won’t build any new technologies and progress will stagnate if I/people can’t get rich.

Good. Don’t let the door hit you/them on the way out. Let’s bring in people who don’t want to be there out of tech. Disinterested people are the hardest to work with, because they’re always dragging their feet.

If that means all technology disappears forever, then that’s fine, because it would mean that our usage of technology was forced in the first place. This outcome strikes me as unlikely. I know damn well that I practically rely on stateful devices to remember things.

I’m currently teaching myself how to write audio plugins with the goal to give them out as FOSS, amongst other endeavors that, to an outside observer, look like “work.” I’m not at all interested in getting rich or generating profit. If profit is a precondition for your participation in a project, I’d love to take that burden off your hands.

But people need to eat.

Yes, and that should have nothing to do with a person’s ability to contribute to technology. I know that there are a lot people who would just lie in bed eating Doritos all day if all their other needs would be taken care of, but I am most certainly not one of those people.[2] Honestly, I don’t think that people would just chill on their couches for their entire lives, but for academic purposes we must consider the possibility that people are all “that lazy”. If that is the fate of human kind, then that outcome indicates that apparently we were all being forced to work anyways, so fine by me.

People should be paid for their work

People should unconditionally have access to resources to stay alive. Under capitalism, this is unfortunately tied to your productive output and the time you sacrifice to your employer or customer. In my view, it is still important to make it worth someone’s time, because it is (can be understood as) a strictly finite and non-renewable resource that is by definition required to live. However, there are many ways to make things worth people’s time that aren’t contingent on imposing a capitalist system upon people. Furthermore, people often do actually do things seemingly out of the kindness of their hearts for no obvious rewards. Liberalism forgets that some things other than making money are actually fun or important for their own sake. For example, I imagine that most of are here to talk to other people, profitability be damned.

So no, corporations do not need to make money, because corporations don’t need to exist. In my view, corporations ought not exist, but accepting merely that they don’t inherently need to exist is enough to follow along.

They don’t need to advertise to us either. Again, my view is more like “I’m not interested in buying what you’re selling, even if I am,” but it is enough to accept that advertisements are not inherently necessary. I’m not at all against public notices or promoting products, ideas, or services you believe in, but cramming such promotions into every nook and cranny of my existence is something I’m absolutely fed up with. Public notices need not be intrusive!

Although the Fediverse cannot be completely free of corporate bullshit as long as corporations exist, the decentralized structure of federation allows us to freely associate with (and by extension disassociate from) the people and groups we choose, because anyone can host an instance with their own rules. If we can get people and communities onto the Fediverse, this would represent a tremendous shift in the power to curate information away from corporations.

Because fuck corporations, and fuck their profits too. And I’m tired of talking around that impulse.

[1] By free, I really mean it as in “free as in beer” in this context. However, as a programmer and anarchist, I think that a fully FOSS API would be easier to work with for separate reasons. Even though the goal of an API in particular is to abstract away the details, I still want to understand what’s going on under the hood in case it’s doing stuff I don’t want.

[2] Well, maybe kind of. I love Doritos and I’m lying in bed right now. But I have a strong desire to move and create stuff after resting for some time, hopefully soon…