Steemit... 'Is it Communist, Capitalist, or Maybe Both?'
There are many on this platform who rail against the use of bid bots because the use of bid bots is not conducive to a sharing atmosphere.
I do not disagree with this assessment. The use of bid bots, as well as the implementation of bid bots, is in fact not conducive to a sharing economy.
I would ask though since when should an economy be about sharing? As far as I am concerned the benefits of a free market economy naturally flow towards those who are able to enterprise in the most effective ways.
Today, I am speaking to the idea of individual rights. Some Steem holders, they’ve invested heavily in their business venture and they’ve done so for the sole purpose to capitalize off of their endeavors.
This is all fine and well according to my opinion because people ought to do what they want with their property. Or more succinctly, I am in fact a strong advocate of property rights.
What am I getting at? When the Steemit project first started it was geared towards a sharing model.
I don’t think the founder(s) envisioned the idea that people would use robots in order to delegate their Steem Power in exchange for Steem Backed Dollars.
Nevertheless, the end result was that it happened and the free market was what allowed for that. So where do we find ourselves now?
We find ourselves in a position where people familiar with the older model are resentful of the innovation that bid bots brought to the marketplace.
I have to be honest; I was a bit resentful too. I came to Steemit and it was one way, then I took a long hiatus and suddenly it was way different.
Almost overnight the merit of my content no longer meant jack diddly shit. I was not pleased with this fact, just as everyone else in my position was not.
However, if you place yourself in the shoes of someone who had purchased their Steem Power and is using the free market in order to capitalize off of their investments, aside from the devastation that they’ve potentially caused to the communist marketplace, they are in fact choosing to live as capitalists.
So what now, there is all of this talk of stringing up the capitalists via hard forks, or persecuting the minnows who are simply trying to adapt to the new reality by penalizing them for their use of bid bots, yet, if you consider these things from a freedom perspective the answer is quite simple.
We must live and let live, either that or choose a side, would you prefer to advocate communism or capitalism? There is an #informationwar going on about this topic and whoever wins that war might dictate the future of Steemit as a platform.
In closing I shall mention one thing, worst case scenario if the communist mentality wins out the market will probably be flooded with SBD’s and the SBD will plummet in value.
Either that or Steemian capitalist will continue to capitalize even if they are crippled by hard forks and the content creators will foot the bill.
I think we all need to take a hard strong look at our perception of property rights, do property rights belong to the individual, or do they belong to the community?
Should we try to manipulate the community to believe that property rights belong to the community, or for that matter the capitalists? Or should we just live and let live?
I personally think that there is room for both, I think there is room for charity (voluntary communism) as well as room for massive gains (or capitalism).
In fact, the sooner that we accept that both of these types of folks live in our world, the sooner we can decide which one of them we want to be, or for that matter when we want to be either or.
Bidbots aren't capitalist, but rather communist, and gift economies aren't communist, but are neither capitalist. There are many more economic models than communist and capitalist, although most are more like one or the other. I'm not an economist, and haven't made a study of the field, so don't expect a lot of jargon from me.
Suppose a guy is wandering in the wilderness and finds a beautiful stream in a glade in the woods. He falls in love with the place, builds a cabin, and dams the stream to make a pond, where he raises ducks, and uses the water to irrigate his crop he grows in the glade. Free enterprise, right?
One day a war party shows up at his door. A village downstream has been afflicted with a drought because the guy has dammed their stream and diverted their water source. Do they scalp him, or walk away because he's just entitled to do whatever he wants?
The rewards pool is being sold by bidbots. Like the forest stream, it's not theirs to divert. What bidbots do isn't free enterprise, it's essentially theft of a common resource no one has a right to sell. The enclosure movement in England caused people to die, so bidbots are relatively benign, yet the principle is the same: profiteering by taking from people what they don't take from you first.
Communism is a form of collectivism that involves a state that takes all resources, say, the rewards pool, and doles it out equally. A couple things. We've never seen an actual communist government, because no state ever doles things out per the rhetoric, but parcels out far more generous portions to a favored few. Also, that's pretty much what bidbots do. That's why they're more communist than free enterprise. But capitalism is also more communist than free enterprise.
Being similar words, community and communism sound like they mean the same thing, but they don't. When I was a child in Paris, I lived in a community (actually a smaller town just outside Paris) where the people had various free enterprise businesses, or worked for large industries or government. The streets were lined with small shops that each specialized to a degree that was astounding to me. There were Boulangeries, Patisseries, and other shops, all specialized kinds of bakeries. There was a fishmonger, a butcher, a tobacconist, etc.
That's free enterprise, and on Steemit, it's like posting your own content that the community can 'buy' with an upvote. Bidbots are like Walmart coming in and replacing all the little shops and shopkeepers with their megastores. That's far more collectivist than it is free enterprise, even if they are able to undercut the local shops on price long enough to bankrupt them before they jack up the prices and become profitable.
Walmart has deep pockets, capital, with which it can afford to sustain a lengthy period of taking losses while the shopkeepers can't. Capitalism isn't free enterprise, it's monopolism, corporatism, and rapine destruction, rather than progress.
That's bidbots.
That's capitalism and collectivism, both quite similar in many respects, rather than opposites as we have been indoctrinated to believe.
Free enterprise isn't capitalism, it's people employing their share of a resource and adding value, like air, water, land, etc., not seizing the whole of the resource like the enclosure movement in England that caused devastating economic catastrophe for the common people that had shared the grazing lands for centuries before it was fenced to keep their flocks out.
It's not communism to say we all have a share in air, water, and land. It's the fact of life, of the nature of humanity. Which deer owns the forest? Which otter owns the river? Which human owns the cropland in N. America? Monsanto, a legal person.
That's not free enterprise, it's piracy.
What you pose is exactly what John Locke said, and that is the true spirit of the free market.
Thank you for that. I really do need to study philosophy
more and I mean all philosophy, including that of those
whom I disagree with. I like what I hear about John Locke.
You might be interested in this @vieira I watched the
whole thing, all twelve hours, and enjoyed it very much.
I feel you man, and your ways with analogies are superb. All I can say though is if you remove the corporate profits from Jeff Bezos' enterprises or Bill Gates for that matter what choice would they have but to pull stakes and sell?
What does it benefit them if they are not to benefit? Most people in this world will never do business in such a way where they merit that kind of money, most people are not that needy of money (or greedy) however you decide to look at it.
My only point with this article is to get people to try and see this from a point of individual rights as opposed to what is best for the collective good.
There are lots of things that are for the collective good. If we shut down a popular shoe shop that uses a check mark as it's symbol then slaves who make those shoes will no longer be utilized to sell overpriced shoes in America.
However, they also will be out of jobs if we do that. If we call people who drink or smoke the enemy because they support products that kill people.
Then maybe we need to ask ourselves about people who support automobiles and peanut butter because these things too kill people on a larger scale maybe, I do not know the exact statistics.
As far as Moreshitshow is concerned that's another story entirely. When an organization is doling out cancer as their business model, if they really want to be a person, let them have individual rights, and let them be prosecuted for biological warfare.
I think you're supporting Crony Capitalism, and not the free market. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, are entrepreneurs who benefit from the legislation, and who enjoy special benefits. However, that does not mean that you are necessarily wrong about the voting bots, the truth is that I do not have a clear position on the role of the bots in the Steemit community, so for now I continue to support the current system.
You know, you might be correct if you think of voting in terms of the political realm. Just when I thought I saw Steemit in every way possible you bring in a new paradigm for me to consider. I've actually never thought about Steemit in the realm of politics but now with your analogy of crony capitalism, you have inspired me to.
There are just so many ways to view this platform, so many different paradigms and I think we all generally tend to fixate to one, either that or jump between many. I have the curse of being able to see it from the standpoint of many paradigms.
You follow that with a comment about individual rights. I strongly urge you to examine both Bezos' and Gates' histories, and you will see that they gained their stakes through quite nefarious means. Gates literally stole almost every flagship product that put Microshaft on the market, DOS from DRDOS, and Windows from Macintosh. He also did a lot of other things that swindled his friends and folks he did business with, in order to gain shares in Microshaft, and business with big companies. Bezos' employees presently need welfare to make ends meet because he pays so little, and does such shady deals in his HR. Neither would have what they do if they respected individual rights.
Corporations don't need to be what laws and rapine swindlers make them. Many small corporations are owned by folks that care about and respect each the other's rights, and large corporations could be held to the same standards--but government collusion panders and grovels at the feet of big money, so they can be pirates, just like @bellyrub was.
Monsanto is just like them. The problem with making corporations legal persons is you can't hang a corporation for murder. The individual directors and officers of corporations cannot be afforded the shield of such a legal fiction to prevent their prosecution for the crimes they commit via corporate business undertakings.
People do the acts that corporations and states are claimed to have made. Corporations and states cannot act. They're just agreements. People act, and are responsible for their acts, no matter what agreements they make. It is the people working for Monsanto that are guilty of the crimes that Monsanto commits, no matter what pieces of paper they wave around say.
Publicly traded corporations have a fiscal responsibility to make their shareholders a profit. The more the corporation grows the more shareholders there are and more the shareholders their are the larger are the gains that need to be made.
This forces them to keep growing and to have to keep innovating for new ways to make profits. So I wonder if Jeff for example is just an evil person or if he is simply complying with the standards laid out for publicly traded corporations.
Notice I did not mention Bill. This was intentional. His vaccine endeavors and thoughts on population control seem like they might border along the lines of evil and I'm not sure that his pursuit in these endeavors has anything to do with being a slave to his corporate creations.
Why do corporations have charters? Have a look at the history of corporations, and you will see that corporations have evolved from folks that were granted profits from doing a thing that was necessary to advance civilization and do good for society, into what you have noted: a mechanism which is solely intended to profit stockholders.
Yeah, corporate charters used to be rare. Now,
seemingly everything has been turned into a
corporation.
yep, that pretty much hits the nail on the head. A capitalist’s aim will always be to destroy competition and the free market as those are 2 things that stand in the way of profit. I think it was a self affirmed communist in Lenin who said something about Capitalism being the final form of Imperialism.
You have a gift for parables my good man. Do you ever let your voice out in any way, as in radio or podcasts?
Curated for #informationwar (by @openparadigm)
Relevance:Bid Bot War
Our Purpose
Property rights are definitely individual rights and the under-pinning of western civilization. However, many of us who oppose bid bots do so not because of macro-economic capitalism v. socialism concerns, in fact, it can be argued that bid bots are ANTI-Capitalist and forced-redistributionist...i.e. more like a socialist command economy system. Many of us object to the anti-quality-content impacts of the practice.
That is interesting. If the Steemit code is set up in such a way where the largest stakeholder is the one who can dictate where more rewards go it kind of makes sense, because it is an incentive to purchase SBD. Yet, if you remove that where is the incentive to purchase SBD? Ergo, if there is no incentive to purchase SBD then who would purchase it, and wouldn't the value of it remain stagnant? I would posit that if you take capitalism out of Steem you'll end up with another doge coin.
Most awesome post. Would you care to discuss this topic on steempunk radio? I like the mondragon economic model, but there is a lot of bounds between capitaliam and communism. Think outside those borders and we get into the realm of chemistry, where solutions are brewed. I have radio air time at noon eastern, for 2 hours, please let me know if that fits your schedule.
This offer is open to valued customer also.
Namaste' ... karl
I very much appreciate that you would be so kind as to invite me to your radio show. I am, however, a private person and do not feel comfortable sharing my voice on the public internet. It’s not just radio as I will not use my voice in online gaming either. Thank you again for your kind offer. I am truly honored that you were willing to receive me as a guest and I shall check out your radio broadcast as I am an audio learner and listen to the radio quite frequently.
Most welcome, thank you
Thanks @lennythyme. I have some challenges technologically, as my computer is so old and broken I don't even have a mouse anymore. I doubt I can make the mic work. I actually try not to turn it off, because I don't know if it will turn back on =p
I hope I can find a computer someone will accept Steem for, as I have no other means of paying for one. If I had a spare, I'd be willing to try to fix on one or the other at a time. As it stands, if I try to fix this one, it could fail completely and then I'd be offline.
Can't have that!
This is absolutely some RED China / BLACK mirror shiza going on here in the Steemit world, no doubt about it in my mind. The only reason I support it and well,, love it is that it is totally voluntary. If I were forced to use the site by a communist government I'd be running for office to change that right quick. If we had to use or not use what this site has to offer it brings an entirely new and insidious element that I would want to fight to the death. I think when it comes to property right these spaces seem like common ground, the place where we take a flock to eat and shit but very few actually groom and maintain it. The analogy may be stretch but I really think it fits. Some folk will only keep to their corner and either work to make it pretty or productive and that can make them protective of things they don't really own. In most cases given the right amount of time, a common area will either turn into a dusty waste or a toxic dump, those that don't become private property in the end. Could be a false observation but its the one I got ;)
I feel you man and I love the black mirror analogy! I'm dumbstruck every day by how Steemit does not match the real world, ergo the title of this post. I'm still trying to figure it out for myself. How it should be looked at and whatnot. I'm told that Dan Larimer will have a constitution for EOS and maybe something like that, voluntaryism, will be good. People can go into it knowing what it is or knowing what is acceptable or not according to a common understanding. If they do not like the constitution they can simply choose to not purchase EOS stakes. However, when it comes to Steemit, there are just so many ways of looking at the platform. Whereas when a platform comes out with predefined parameters it just may end up putting a halt to all of the bickering, propaganda, and dogma.
to seek perfection, as lofty a goal as there is I'd say. Apotheothesis ,,,, spelled wrong perhaps lol,,,,,, but a beautiful concept non the less.
I read articles and comment before I read the rest of the group comments, I like to keep my 2 cents shiny :) but valued-customer has a good point.
I think we both fell right into the status quo paradigm and need to check out new angles for sure.
I love @valued-customers' analogies and I highly respect his opinions. However, I wonder whether or not in this case if he is correct?
If I were to for example put myself in the shoes of an investor with 100k to drop on SP. I would want to know how I could benefit from said investment.
If according to Steemit rules, I as an investor, could dictate relative to my investment a certain % of rewards then maybe investment would be merited.
However, if there were no benefits for me as an investor, I probably would not invest.
I would suggest that if you remove the capitalism element you remove the value from the SBD and if you remove the value from the SBD then we all suffer equally.
What say you?
Capital gains.
Since before history began, there have been both investors and profiteers. Investors seek to grow the entity they have invested in, so that it becomes worth more, and their investment therefore becomes worth more. Think BTC going from $1k in May 2017 to $20k in December 2017.
Profiteers, OTOH, seek to extract as much value from the entity as possible as quickly as possible. Think KKR and 'Barbarians at the Gate', or @haejin.
There's a Yuuuuuge difference.
I'm gonna defend free enterprise to the death. Capitalism is the enemy of free enterprise.
We've been handed definitions that aren't entirely true in our indoctrinations and the propaganda we are subjected to daily. Start from first principles and work your way through the fog of war that propaganda is.
People are what matter, at the beginning, and at the end.
I don't disagree with you, people most certainly are what matter. On the topic of people, I noticed you mentioned @haejin.
I think he gets a bad rap. He generates crypto charts and does a short analysis of them repeatedly, every single day like clockwork.
I think that there are many that don't understand his work and therefore they don't value it.
However, I try to look at what he does from his shoes.
I may not comprehend the meaning of the mathematical waves that he studies but I think that he may comprehend this stuff.
In fact, I've seen him on YouTube discuss these things. He's totally into it and very passionate about it.
The fact that he upvotes his own content to me it only means that he values himself and his work.
I know that is an unpopular viewpoint on steemit but I'm willing to say it.
I think if this place became unconducive for people like him he'd pull up stakes in the literal sense of the word and you'd see a dip in the value of SBD.
Granted, that would probably lead to people buying the dip, however, there would be much fewer people buying the dip if it were not profitable for them to do so.
While I don't follow @haejin, nor am an investor any longer, I have strongly defended him from the flags. I have stated repeatedly that I think his taking 5% of the rewards pool is great for Steemit, because if that doesn't force the whales to rethink their own strategy, nothing will.
Nonetheless, @haejin isn't taking the upvotes he gets from @ranchorelaxo and powering up, he cashes them out. That is not the strategy of an investor, but a profiteer, and why, and only why, I used him as an example.
When you talk about buying the dip, you are talking about capital gains, and that is an opposite strategy to what bidbots do. They aren't buying SBD, and they lease their Steem. Almost none of them are powering up, but are instead continually cashing out.
They aren't investors, but profiteers.
Hmm... I think that would be investors would only invest if they saw a profit to be made. Right now the way Steemit is coded it rewards the largest stakeholders with the power to divert where a larger percentage of the rewards will go.
Maybe Steemit got that right, or maybe they got it wrong? Maybe it's the reason that we are having this conversation. I say that because it seems like the carrot being waved in front of the donkey is the ability to capitalize off of one's Steem investment.
If you take that ability to capitalize out of play then it may no longer pay off to be a stakeholder in general and they, the profiteers or capitalists, however you look at it, they might simply dump all of their Steem back to the marketplace.
I've got a feeling if they tinkered with the code in such a way as to make everything fair with respect to the reward pool it would suddenly become an unattractive place for investors. It might end up causing the experiment to fail.
I do not know how right or wrong that theory is but maybe one day we will find out with one of these hard forks.
Earning steem, watching the graphs on how much it's worth, buying and selling on the exchanges, what could be more capitalist than that? I'm struggling in the system due to the communist reputation system but the money aspect is right up my alley. I don't mind working within a system where just about everyone can make it, seems to appeal to both sides of the coin atm. It's fun ride figuring it out for sure.
steemit is this game
Capitalism is this "air"
Communism is this concept
Thank you for that @toninux, very illustrative!
Personally I think it comes down to whether you want a de-centralised platform which ensures pluralism prevails or a centralised platform dominated by those with deeper pockets and/or control over SP. Both capitalism and communism are in practice centralised systems so either of the courses you’ve suggested will ultimately leave some people feeling that they are on the outside looking in.
Can we change the short-term self-centred thinking that seems to dominate most aspects of human civilisation and find a different way of doing things?
Good point. Some people fear that if too many large stakeholders get together they will be able to control the future of the platform.
If this is true my only question would be why would they kill the golden goose? You'd think that they would do what is best for Steemit based on self interest alone?
I may be wrong. There are real world examples like Di$ney who f#cking destroyed $tar wars and Ro$anne just to make political statements and engender themselves to social justice warrior tw@ts.
However, long before Steemit gets pwned by a conglomeration of stakeholders SJW's will have gone the way of the Dodo bird. It's possible that it might be an unfounded fear, of this I am uncertain.
The same reason the big 19th and 20th Century logging companies decimated the old growth forests of America and never replanted a tree. When the forests were all gone, they took they money and went into another field.
They weren't investing.
That's the tricky part though as far as Steemit is concerned. In order to keep making profits you need to keep your Steem Power or equipment in the forest.
If a heavy self upvoter removed his SP then he would no longer be able to upvote heavily.
Which would mean they could no longer cash out and profit regularly. It seems like a clever way of keeping people invested.
It's more like a magical forest where the trees keep replenishing themselves every month so long as you keep your equipment in the forest.
Another analogy might be a Bank. If you think of Steemit Inc. as if though it is a Bank what they are doing as allowing greater rewards to go to the largest depositors.
Someone who deposits a million dollars into a bank might get 50k a year in interest payments if he does not touch that money. Then he can skim that off the top or live off of that and collect another 50k the next year. That's at a 5% APR.
Steemit seems very similar to that model if you ask me.
Unless of course the very actions that these big logging companies (to continue your analogy) take ultimately decreases the value of the timber. How long are the investors going to stick around? In the end, we are talking about capital not the fixtures and fittings or the business itself. That same capital will move very quickly to more profitable ventures once the party is over or another, better opportunity presents itself.
Do you think that maybe Steemit was wrong to let those with the most SP dictate where more rewards go? I think it's possible that if they did not do that you'd have less investors. What do you think @talesfrmthecrypt?
Time will tell if it was the correct decision but I’m sure you are right that from an investment point of view being able to buy control and larger rewards is key to attracting the money in the first place. Perhaps ultimately that is what Steemit inc. wanted to happen and it is they who are the ultimate profiteers in this project.
That's a good point too. It really is
tough to say and there seem to be
so many different paradigms on
how one can view it.
You’re assuming that individuals act in a rational self-interested way. Modernist theories like capitalism and communism make similar blanket assumptions about the way people behave as the basis for their doctrine. However, people are equally short sighted and stupid. We don’t see the bigger picture or worse yet we see it but ignore it in favour of short term gains.
The challenge is to convince people that what is good for the steemit community is intrinsically good for them at least in the longer term.
I would suggest that if they could somehow magically stop the capitalists from capitalizing or the profiteers from profiting then they'd all pull stake and leave. Steemit would become less desirable for new investors because why invest in something that is not going to serve their interests?
Some people hopped onto the Steemit bandwagon early and invested tens of thousands. I think these folks did it for business purposes, some of them. Others may have done it for ideological purposes.
Yet the few crude minded business people, their SP investment is part of what backs the value of the SBD without them SBD loses it's value. I'm curious to see how the other cola will attempt to solve this problem when they roll out, or if they will consider it a problem at all.
I guess the answer is to convince people to not be just be a profiteer or capitalist. Something which you suggest at the end of your article. Incentivise people yes, but incentivise them to act in a manner that is better for the longevity of the platform rather than just their own short-term interests.
I’d also hope that contributors to the blockchain can see that there is value in a free, fair and open system beyond just the amount of the reward pool that they can access.
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