My partner and I were talking recently about apple watches and how if they existed under a different system then they could really be for the greater good. What are some other things that would have been very good under communism?
Video games. Good indie games tend to be better then good AAA games.
Art in general. Less artists being forced to produce soulless corporate art would be a good thing.
Science. No more scientists begging for grants from corporations and having to be beholden to private companies. No more being paid to pretend that lead is safe so you can keep your job type scientist.
Political, heavy-on-dialogue RPGs?
Fallout 1 and 2 (1997, 1998) Dragon Age Origins (2009) probably others, but those are the ones that immediately spring to mind
Automation. Imagine getting a fat check every month because your job got automated out of existence.
the purest pleasure in existence is automating your own job away. and the fucking boss has the audacity to turn around and be like "here's your next ticket".
Movies, youtube, and the internet. The actual interesting stuff fueled by genuine interest would be predominant rather than buried under a mountain of soyface thumbnails, react videos, disney/marvel products, paywalls, and astroturfed reviews and forums.
the internet
Such promise. I remember all the buzz about the information superhighway and the early internet utopians that thought we were headed to a golden land along with neoliberalism. Boy that didn't turn out well, did it?
Guess it was the inevitable conclusion for a network created by DARPA, leads to fascism.
yiffy torrents, some people say their encodes are bad though, can't tell myself but i use rarbg just in case.
Amazon is unironically based as fuck, it's just the union busting and other capitalist bullshit (dumping product to maximize profits) that make it really evil. When you consider what they did to get big, most of it is just infrastructure stuff. You can't really say that about a lot of companies who base their value on extraction rather than creation. Socialist-alternate-reality Amazon is probably universally adored.
This is why I always say that the idea of breaking up Amazon is stupid, and what we need to do is nationalize Amazon. And Walmart too while we’re at it.
Breaking up monopolies is socdem nonsense about "competitivity" and "big business oppressing small businesses", while having infrastructure from a monopolized company built up is likely to make the transititon to socialism easier.
Exactly. Small businesses are just as evil as bit ones, and economies of scale are real. Walmart and Amazon are amazing feats of logistics and human labor. To be able to go to nearly any town in the country and go to the same store you know that will have most of the items you’ll ever need, or to have those items delivered to your door in a very short time, are amazing things. The problem is the ownership.
A case could be made that Amazon is proof positive that, with modern technology and logistics, a planned economy could actually work.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2822-the-people-s-republic-of-walmart
Space exploration.
Most of it would be done with drones and probes, which is fine and a lot less wasteful than oligarchical space tourism.
Humans can perform way more experiments than drones, just being able to hold a shovel and manipulate other basic tools changes everything.
"Most of it" is the load bearing part of what I said.
Also, what you said shouldn't be carte blanche for oligarch tourism and other parasitic rerouting of NASA funding. That Tesla car commercial in space came at the price of several cut NASA programs when you look at government subsidies going to :melon-musk: versus NASA's budget cuts.
Obviously I’m not talking about the oligarchical space tourism, but I do think there’s something to be said for just sending a human because we could. Sending humans to the moon accomplished little that couldn’t be accomplished by robots, but it was also fucking cool as hell
"Cool as hell" shouldn't be priority number one, or two, or three during an ongoing planetary crisis.
Lots of people saw the Tesla car commercial in space as "cool as hell" and it was subsidized by the same government that cut NASA's funding and canceled actually useful projects for comparable amounts of money.
also don't forget that a lot of it currently exists to service imperialism.
this deserves to be an entirely seperate post but disposable ubituitous personal computers aren't sustainable. the unchecked extraction of lithium and coltan is not sustainable. if we want microchips to exist in the 22nd century, we will have to design them to last longer and benefit more people rather than just enabling megacorporations to harvest gigabytes of redundant data on the consumption habits of one citizen of the imperial core for a total of 5 years before going into a landfill.
I think the issue is disposable part, the west probably chewed over enough coltan 3 earth over from 80s onwards
I think there’s great possibility in developing Sodium and potassium based technologies to replace lithium- the issue is they are going to be heavier
Which is fine for a phone or grid storage. Lithium is only useful where weight savings = efficiency savings Like vehicles. But car bad and an electric train could probably be fine with heavier batteries.
Organized sports. The world Cup and the champions league would be awesome if the sport weren't so corrupt and money driven
Still remember when the Champions League actually fills with league champs from all over the European league. Now the first, second and third loser able to get in
Idk I like to see the best teams regardless of what country they're from. But the countries' leagues would be a lot more equal if money weren't part of the equation, so it would still be fair to fans in smaller counties
Too bad the govern body is too corrupt now, that they can't have a system that distribute the money more fairly. When the money is concentrated in one league, it causes that imbalance, sadly.
Yeah I'm pretty pessimistic that fifa will ever be able to improve something again until it's replace with The People's International Football Association or something
It's suck, because I used to love watching the game, but now it feel hollow, predictable and don't have the time to catch it. I might still follow the national team scene though, not amerikkka of course, following either China or my home country, Vietnam.
Yeah the games drastically less fun to watch when I started watching in like 09 :sadness:
Automation. Machines taking over everyone's jobs should be amazing, less work for same productivity? Amazing.
But under capitalism, the people who lose their jobs to machines get nothing and the piggies at the top pocket the difference, so we have to be scared of it. Fucking dystopian.
Let's get extremely specific about something kind of dumb because it's something I thought about when it first came out: AirTags
They're honestly a really cool piece of technology. A mesh network created by literally millions of devices, different model years, entirely different types of devices (phones, laptops, tablets), all talking together to be able to build a map that can find these other, low power devices, detect when you've lost them, and guide you to their location with an insane granularity. Under capitalism, however, this comes with the caveat of only existing inside the singular walled garden of Steve Jobs' phylactery, and all of that location data is harvested to be mined for any other crumb of value that can be extracted from it, wasting probably thousands of labor hours to more effectively learn that you take public transit to get to work.
The next hot trend in the gig economy will be private Stasi agents that follow people around and spy on what they consume.
Advertising. It would be minimal and functional and not consume more resources than production of the product itself.
Being able to travel whenever and find work to do via a relevant app on your phone would be great in a communist society. Under capitalism it's the gig economy hellscape.
School. Being able to study and explore your passions without poverty and debt hanging overhead by a horse hair is almost unimaginable. I enjoyed my time (mostly) but I always wonder "what if".
