Not my account, but my bot, thebenshapirobot, just reached 600,000 karma in about a year and a half. I was always hoping it’d get to a million karma while trolling Ben Shapiro. The bot is currently off as part of the blackout, and frankly I have no idea if the API changes will affect it because I haven’t bothered to read them.

Welcome aboard!

You might enjoy the book “Mad in America.” I’m just finishing it now, and it’s got basically every variation on that theme. It’s the history of how we in the US have treated our “insane.” It’s a fucking parade of horrors, but wonderfully researched and extremely damning.

We should pool our money, incorporate a bunch of small businesses, do whatever legal minimum we have to do to make them able to vote, and turn Seaford, Delaware into a socialist commune. It’ll be the Paris commune meets gamestonk.

There’s a lot of assumptions about how society is organized buried in your questions that are worth unpacking, and let me say up front that I don’t think you’re going to get a single, straightforward answer.

First, you are implying the continued existence of civil and criminal law, more or less as it currently is. Personally, I think both of those are bad systems independently, and even worse and more absurd when combined.

Second, you almost seem to imply a socialist world to be a sort of market-based cooperative system? Many of us dream of a more radical world. Though specifics vary, usually we hope that our new economic system will be based on collaboration and comradery, not competition and profit. Theories on how that social collaboration should happen vary widely, but any in case, many of us dream of a world without money, in which case the assumption of pecuniary damages breaks down.

You say you’re not a socialist, and the world without money causes eyerolls among many non-socialists – it is such a ridiculous pipe dream, no? How wildly unrealistic! We socialists have many ways of talking about this eyeroll-inducing phenomenon. Mark Fisher called it “Capitalist Realism,” famously saying, in his book of the same name, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”

This force is so powerful that we cannot even imagine a world without a modern conception of money, yet we know they have existed for all of human history, including in much more recent times and in more familiar cultures than most people realize. In “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” David Graeber gives an account of how societies have organized accounting for and rewarding labor and value, how market emerge, the much shorter history of coinage than most people imagine (did you know Homer’s Greece didn’t have coins?), and how societies operated with different or entirely without conceptions of money. There are even well-documented examples of societies in Tudor England functioning without money (or with so little money as to be basically without it) because of international economic factors causing metal coinage shortages.

So, to get back to your question: I don’t know the details, but I do know that whatever system we’d make for dealing with (to use your example) faulty airbags should be one based on preventing the mistake from happening again. The current system hopes to incentivize companies to avoid making that mistake, and then (supposedly, though we know how it often actually works out) punishes them for making it.

I hope that, first of all, by removing profit motive, we have fewer situations like that. I don’t cut corners when I work on my garden, because that’s not why I garden. I do cut corners while I’m at work, as does everyone, because I work for a wage, and I usually don’t really give a fuck about my employers, most of which are making shit no one actually needs (all while actively contributing to the destruction of our planet).

When catastrophic mistakes do happen, then we should focus on collaborative efforts to avoid them from happening again, not on adversarial judicial processes (that companies can often buy their way out of) that only force companies to pay “damages,” often far less than the profits they made by cutting the corner in the first place. If “firms” are no longer in competition with each other, perhaps that is best done by reorganizing them, or by having outside experts from another firm conduct an investigation and give a plan, overseen by whatever body is coordinating car manufacturing (workers’ councils, the state, whatever your vision is).

Think about it like this, though it’s an admittedly imperfect analogy: what happens inside an existing company when one team messes up? Sometimes, if specific people are at fault, they’re fired (and there the analogy breaks down a little), but in healthy companies, much more often, there is a focus on avoiding the problem from happening again. How that happens can vary.

Finally, on repaying victims’ families: I want to live in a world that is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Victims and their families should not be forced to rely on the judgement of a farcical legal system to be taken care of, oftentimes several years after the event, during which they are completely screwed.

I hope that’s helpful? Sorry for the tome. You caught me on a day I really want to avoid working.

Happy to help! Sorry to hear about the former bad experiences. I’d like to think that’s as much an artifact of being on Reddit than it is of socialists, at least as much as I know both of those things pretty well. Most of my friends are socialists, and we’re very nice people!

I recommend books more than internet forums. There is such a wealth of leftist literature written by such wide-ranging and imaginative people. I mentioned David Graeber’s “Debt” in my comment, for example. Debt is a cinder block of a book, but if you want to start smaller, he wrote “Bullshit Jobs” and “The Utopia of Rules,” both of which are delightful. I’m partial to the latter.

I agree with you about the absolute madness of that submarine company, and about how unsafe our current economic system is (see also: climate change). I’d argue that goes far beyond the concept of limited liability. We have organized our entire economy on the assumption that everything that is made must be made by a for-profit company, but we also all recognize that without some adversarial force, be it from competition or government regulators, for-profit companies will start racking up body counts. This is a crazy way to make a society function. Why would you pick as your starting place a dangerous and shitty world, and from there hope that competition and regulation can make it better? Why not just set out to make things good in the first place?

I’ve actually written about why digital technology is particularly affected by this, if you’re curious.

I mostly agree with this write-up, but I also think it’s not the most useful framework. I’d argue “gamification” as used in the tech industry (and increasingly outside it, as per the piece) is a little meaningless, because “gamification” supposedly means applying game mechanics to tasks, but game mechanics are themselves often attempts to simulate accomplishing real world tasks (though admittedly in a pleasurable way). The idea of a progress bar is often used as an example of simple gamification, but surely lumping in a progress bar, which is genuinely useful so you know how many forms you have left to fill or whatever, with the patronizing condescension of many of these mechanics isn’t a particlarly useful grouping.

Because of my work (I do software consulting for nonprofits and do-gooders), I often get asked about “gamification,” so I’ve done several dives into the scientific literature about whether it actually works. Here’s a typical example of what you’ll always find if you do that:

The paper examines the state of current research on the topic and points out gaps in existing literature. The review indicates that gamification provides positive effects, however, the effects are greatly dependent on the context in which the gamification is being implemented, as well as on the users using it. The findings of the review provide insight for further studies as well as for the design of gamified systems.

And of course it depends on the context. All those work-productivity schemes described in the linked piece are so obviously bullshit cooked up by some b2b consultancy. Every single person who has ever had a job knows in their bones is bullshit.

I’ve put forth what I think is a more useful framing here. Very, very short version: Computers are general-purpose machines capable of doing many simple tasks very quickly. Their primary purpose is to simplifiy a lot of inputs into fewer outputs, thus allowing their human users to make sense of a complex world by simplifying it. Capitalism tends to use computers backwards, such that we end up being simplified, rather than being presented with a simplified world. Being simplified is a bad user experience.

I think think framing might help explain the debate happening in the comments here, too. “Gamification” can be used to make apps more addictive, but they can also be used to motivate people to do things they want to do. The question isn’t whether gamification itself is bad, but whether computers are being used to help us or extract from us. In the latter case, dressing them up like a game is demeaning and dystopian.

You know things are going poorly when we are trying to justify life on earth, perhaps the single most amazing thing in the universe, by claiming it boosts GDP.

I’m going to take a different tack than some others are here. Instead of giving you classics, I’m going to recommend mostly things from the “other” direction, mostly critiques of our current world written by leftists, or histories of leftist ideas. These will probably be more familiar to you, but will introduce you to new ideas as you go, which you can dig into as you get deeper.

I don’t know what kind of interests you have, but here’s a few:

• Utopia of Rules: A collection of 3-4 essays about bureaucracy. Everyone hates bureaucracy, but somehow the right has monopolized hating bureaucracy in American politics. A nice place to start that will resonate with most people.

• The People’s Republic of Walmart: A relatively concise history of socialist planning (as opposed to market economies), which includes the simple yet no less profound insight that megafirms like walmart already do major economic planning on the scale of countries, and it works. A nice book, though fair warning, the prose can be a bit tedious sometimes. Not too technical, but technical enough that it could pique your interest if you are inclined towards those kinds of things as I am.

• Cybernetic Revolutionaries: If you like history, this one might be for you. It’s the story of Allende’s government’s Cybersyn project. Eden Medina did a wonderful job interweaving the concepts of cybernetics, politics, and the history in a really important way, and one that contradicts the trend in our world to separate “politics” from everything.

Happy to recommend something else if none of these are to your liking.

I enjoyed this one. I never met Stockton, yet I feel like I know him from all that time I spent working at startups.