Top Meta executive said the company’s name change was a success because it beat out coverage of the ‘Facebook Papers’ revelations::Meta’s Chris Cox explained to employees the company’s rebrand succeeded in driving press coverage amid whistleblower disclosures.
Software engineers (the ones who work in firms producing nonfree software) have little to no class consciousness since none of them actually have meaningful ownership of the code they produce. They are just laborers of a greater executive/shareholders’ visions. This way, they get to deflect blame since they were “another cog in the machine.”
Software engineers will not EVER push back on these companies because they have no hutzpah materially (worker ownership) or socially (Corporate mindshare). Opponents of free software correctly point this out but never go further than “i just need to make money.”
Why try to make enemies? I’m the kind of person you’re talking about and I’ve absolutely pushed back and even left jobs over ethical issues.
No need to stereotype and create artificial divisions. We’re on the same side.
Yeah, this and the other reply was helpful. What I said wasnt constructive and I apologize. This kind of thing just gets me super edgy and I channeled it in the wrong way. Thanks.
Y’all made up… lol. Now unionize!
That is not true, even though it uses socialist terminology.
No worker has any meaningful ownership of what they produce, other than perhaps a petty bourgeois solo worker or one in a two-man shop. That’s the entire point of capitalism, that people sell their labour for less money than the product of their labour (products which are owned by the capitalist in question). No worker has ownership over their products.
And if, what I assume, you meant abstract, creative or emotional ownership, “alienation from the product of one’s labour” is a driving feature of capitalism, the fact that people’s work is so abstracted and removed from the final product, their decisions and creativity overridden, that they have no emotional connection to their own work and the products that they work on. Everyone has that to some degree. That’s a main feature of capitalism, to keep people from feeling entitled to the product of their labour since they feel like they barely contributed to the end product.
These are things that drive people to more class consciousness, not less!
The reason why IT workers on average tend to have less class consciousness than other workers (for example manual labourers) is that they are comparatively well paid and are routinely made to feel like a privileged group within their class, removing them mentally and materially from anything resembling a workers’ struggle or true poverty, fatal health issues (like heat strokes in construction workers currently) and so on. They simply aren’t “suffering enough” yet to have that kind of revolutionary consciousness, because the economy is still holding up for many of them. And even that is changing.
I agree free software would give the workers back a certain degree of what they lost through alienation.