The anti-commercial bias in much countercultural and activist thought is self-defeating by design, and is actually a product of internalized bourgeois ideology.
Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class gave us terms like conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste.
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Dmytri
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Dmytri
in reply to Dmytri • • •Strivers, hucksters, hustlers, workers, and self-promoters are seen as low-class, as their activity proves they lack what they need.
This ideology is internalized by everyone.
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Dmytri
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Dmytri
in reply to Dmytri • • •But building movements requires resources.
If we look down on the activities needed to secure them, we only disempower ourselves.
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in reply to Dmytri • • •what about virtuous rich communities tho, don't we want everyone to be rich? How do we do that?
no such thing, no, we do not.
my version of we wants:
everyone to contribute meaningfully without the unknown, unseen suffering of others. in a global context. no cheap chinese goods made by slave labor, no dumping toxic waste for indian children to sort through, no oppression anywhere for the convenience of any one, at all.
it is the work of generations. generations of colonial exploitation built and continue to reify the current unjust systems, locally and globally.
our inheritances (you and i and every human who will see this conversation) include debts to others. to those who physically construct the digital tools we use, to those who have less clean water and more polluted air to support our lifestyles, to the nonhuman living world that has been destroyed and continues to be mined and clear cut and mutilated for our daily life to continue.
honorably making amends is our entire life's work.
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in reply to ❣️a standard deviantifa +/- gravy • • •accepting our responsibility to work, of proactive reciprocity, and then doing that work is how we have a virtuous life.
richness in community, in living in harmony with the humans and nonhuman world locally, in the love with share, in expanding our capacity to love... in recognizing the abundance in existence, wallowing in the pleasure of service to the life all around us.
this is my favorite framing at the moment:
theecologist.org/2025/may/28/p…
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'The praxis of reciprocity'
The EcologistDmytri
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in reply to Dmytri • • •i'm not sure what you mean by anti-commercial. commerce, like profiteering and the stock market, i work against. trading goods and services with informed consent in a just, regulated system? i am for.
adverts forced and snuck into daily life, i am against. adverts where folks go looking to buy things, in and around market places, i am for.
capitalist-extractive practices, i work against. worker-driven practices, i support. a fully informed and consent based supply chain, with just practices, i work for.
serving the needs of a community through labor (services / production) is often commerce.
the enslaved humans doing forced labor in china i refer to: (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang…)
Chinese concentration camps in XUAR province, where religious and ethnic repression is carried out against traditionally Muslim peoples, classified as ethnocide, ethnic cleansing and genocide
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Dmytri
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in reply to Dmytri • • •what do mean without? adverts, is what i mean by marketing. places for sales is what i mean by market place. we have newspaper delivery four days a week and there are adverts there, where our community expects them to be.
without money? why would we stop using currency? the market places in my city use money, in both brick and mortar and pop-up markets (we have both a weekly "farmers" market that pops-up / blocks out a portion of the parking area in one of ours and a monthly speciality vending event).
workplaces... ? i've lived in a few different cities and states in the u.s. and all have human-owned (non publicly traded) workplaces, most have co-ops, some worker owned.
i have no interest in colonizing a "greater population". i am invested in serving my local community... in buying from and selling to humans i am accountable to and who i hold to account.
edit: it is a process of generations to shift from exploitation to informed consent. doing the work, is the work of my life.
Dmytri
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in reply to Dmytri • • •activists that i know and counter-culture folks working for system change are not anti-commercial, they are anti-capitalist, anti-exploitation. they are paying a living wage to service workers and using collective non-hierarchal models, buying from consignment and resale shops and new books from human owned bookstores or indiebound.org.
they don't build a business to cash out to chains and live off the profits (which harms the community). mastodon for example... is moving to a nonprofit model instead of being sold to a media company.
i guess if i'm understanding your thread, i'm hoping to shift your framework towards incremental prosocial change as a viable option for making one's living.
Dmytri
in reply to ❣️a standard deviantifa +/- gravy • • •@melioristicmarie well, technically what you are describing is not outside of capitalism, but for sure more social, less exploitative practices is the goal.
However growth is also a factor, especially if the goal is supporting all humans.
You mention Mastadon, currently my favourite social platform despite my technical concerns, however it's import to understand that Facebook acquires more users every couple of weeks than Mastadon has in total, in all it's history, it's growth rates and daily usage rates trail facebook by even worse margins. Mastadon employs, maybe, a couple of hundred people world wide. Facebook employs 10s of thousands.
This is important.
Of course, Mastadon is not the best example, since it's not really selling anything, but I in general projects that avoid scale struggle to become engines of change, and in the end, many people just decide that liberating everyone is too hard, and they're ok just having things they like. But the risk is that slips into lifestylism, not an engine for change, just a privileged cul-d-sac, sheltering some lucky communards from the storm, often temporarily.
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in reply to Dmytri • • •british empire, pro-colonization sort of thinking? one idea is the best for a fictional universal human? so better to subjugate all for their own good, patriarchy?
i can see better why your original toot had a burke's peerage flavor of leisure as a signal for wealth... the whole breeding program system definition of landlords and such.
i do not believe that any person can know what any is best for a person in another part of world. i believe informed consent is the only moral interaction method, and in a person's right to self-determination.
facebook is an marketing site based on deception. i studied it in grad school. it is a social harm, not a pro social system.
i prefer small and honest over authoritarian paternalism.
Dmytri
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in reply to Dmytri • • •your theoretical framing seems to be that there is a right way for people to be better off, and if one could just spread that right way over all people, for their own good, all people would be fine.
i recoil at this universalism.
Dmytri
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in reply to ❣️a standard deviantifa +/- gravy • • •@melioristicmarie I've been discussing peer production, free software, decentralization, etc for decades and am often cited by people and communities working on these topics. What are you asking me exactly?
Here are some slides on a presentation of mine about facebook specifically.
dmytri.surge.sh/spark
What is Facebook?
dmytri.surge.sh❣️a standard deviantifa +/- gravy
in reply to Dmytri • • •earlier you stated that facebook was a preferred platform to mastodon due to the number of new account sign-ups.
i am asking what you understand to be the difference between them, other than new account sign-up.
from my perspective (also a researcher and co-author in a.c.m. conferences who has been cited for my work on facebook), i understand them to be fundamentally different.
my example of the transfer of mastodon "ownership" to a nonprofit was to cite a case where selling out for the benefit of the creator at the expense of the community was the path not chosen. an example of a prosocial business transition model.
Dmytri
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in reply to Dmytri • • •"...it's import to understand that Facebook acquires more users every couple of weeks than Mastadon has in total, in all it's history, it's growth rates and daily usage rates trail facebook by even worse margins. Mastadon employs, maybe, a couple of hundred people world wide. Facebook employs 10s of thousands.
This is important.
Of course, Mastadon is not the best example, since it's not really selling anything, but I in general projects that avoid scale struggle to become engines of change, and in the end, many people just decide that liberating everyone is too hard, and they're ok just having things they like. But the risk is that slips into lifestylism, not an engine for change, just a privileged cul-d-sac, sheltering some lucky communards from the storm, often temporarily."
specifically, you seem to be suggesting that an engine of change needs to scale. i disagree.
Dmytri
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in reply to Dmytri • • •"that" ? the slides are... not academic, or related to my question. i'm not sure why you lean on them as an artifact in this conversation.
is scalability your metric of success?
Dmytri
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in reply to Dmytri • • •i disagree. your position is colonial in nature.
that one person or group believes they have a solution for any person or group outside a community in which they are a member, from my position, is immoral.
Dmytri
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