Oddbean new post about login | logout the hippies were right just early https://m.primal.net/Ldjd.jpg
Open source is capitalism. That’s why the Industrial age titans hated it (free market capitalism). They wanted monopolies (the equivalent of preferred closed source those days) to manage business cycle volatility. They argued free markets were too difficult to invest within…not enough certainty of future cashflows. Naturally, they bought off enough politicians to get their way. John D. Rockefeller’s son (JDR Jr.) married Senator Aldrich’s (main supporter of the creation of the Federal Reserve) daughter.
How can we move up the stack and create open source organizations? What do you think is preventing people from building more in the open?
software is infinitely scalable and costless for the marginal user/beneficiary. I think that’s why it’s the first place we see this. Would be nice to do it with open source organizations… and I do think we’ll get there… including open source organization of society (what today we call “government”). But people’s time is not scalable/“costless” like software so I suspect it’ll take success in very specific categories to show us the way to do this with organizations.
It's all tooling. Just as democracy was made possible by printing press, public key crypto makes possible the transition of "evil" privately owned modes of production to international commons/coops. Democratising capital is very hard, all the tools we are building make it way easier. The multinational monopolistic Corp is only 300 years old after all, and is a temp inefficient blip ripe for being replaced. The crazy part is everyone wins! Monopolistic multinational Corps becoming commons, means ancaps also get their free/fair markets of competing private capital/industrialists. I call it the Adam Smith Invisible Bitch-slap Economic Theory, as its actually in-line with Smiths original definition of the "Invisible Hand".
