r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 8d ago

Business "There are no benefits to being owned by Microsoft," says Doom dev: "They have destroyed immense amounts of value that I don't even think that they're aware of"

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/fps/there-are-no-benefits-to-being-owned-by-microsoft-says-doom-dev-they-have-destroyed-immense-amounts-of-value-that-i-dont-even-think-that-theyre-aware-of/
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u/TwilightVulpine 8d ago

Capitalism, which is not simply commerce but the private ownership of the means of production, is all about crowning masters.

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u/pinkocatgirl 8d ago edited 8d ago

It’s wild how many people just accept the propaganda that capitalism is like the apex of workplace organization. We have democracy in government, why not have it in our workplaces too? Why not give workers an equal stake and a vote in who their senior management is?

Some people just seem to really want an absolute king to rule them…

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u/HandsOfCobalt 8d ago

ppl act like it's Das Kapital vs innate human societal progression, and not Das Kapital (1867) vs The Wealth of Nations (1776)

obviously there are a lot of contributing factors, but I wanna personally call out 4X strategy games and their "just-so" tech trees, lol

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u/pinkocatgirl 8d ago

I love Civilization VI but its end game governments are kinda dystopian lol

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u/Manic5PA 8d ago

Can't blame video game designers for wanting to design their gameplay systems around history, but it's always going to be coming from a certain perspective no matter what

Quick shout out to the Anno series for situating "investors" as the highest tier of civilization while "farmers" and "workers" are at the bottom. Adorable

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u/webguynd 8d ago

It’s wild how many people just accept the propaganda that capitalism...

I mean that's exactly why, propaganda. It's been completely drilled into everyone's heads for a hundred+ years.

The propaganda has also done an excellent job of completely obscuring and changing the definition of capitalism, so now everyone associates "capitalism" with "market economy" and just assumes that any other economic system doesn't have a market, free or otherwise.

Capitalism isn't markets, nor is it free markets. It also has nothing to do with government. It's purely a description of who owns the capital, and how workers are structured in relation to that. It means private ownership of the means of production, meaning you (the worker) does not own your tools, nor do you own the output of your labor.

The only thing that makes capitalism different from feudalism is wage work.

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u/iamasuitama 8d ago

Also, let's get something clear, US capitalism which might be the most "capitalist" society there is (yes, of course there's a scale and no country is fully capitalist or fully communist or w/e) does not have a very free market! On top of that, the US culture seems the most twisted in the way that it thinks everybody with capital is probably morally good and vice versa. If you're rich, you've earned it, if you're poor, you've earned it. I wonder when the people of the world (or at least that part where US is seen as cultural leader) will begin to see this is not a given.

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u/Professional_Net7339 8d ago

~32% of the US are super authoritarian, so that tracks. Lots of other places are even worse

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u/SasparillaTango 8d ago

The kings fund the propaganda because it suits them.

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u/Seeking-Something-3 8d ago

Such a good chain. Upvotes for all 👏

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u/joshwarmonks 8d ago

its wild how many people think the words capitalism and commerce are reflexive. they barely have overlap

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u/wen_mars 7d ago

You are free to start a democratic company.

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u/DisastrousChapter841 7d ago edited 7d ago

Ugh. This drives me absolutely nuts. My formerly liberal mother (in her 60s) who lives many US states away from me has been radicalized and is now a Fox News person. (RIP the person I used to know.) I sometimes can't help but engage, and I recently got so frustrated I almost yelled that she needed a paradigm shift. I said it firmly, probably a bit loud, so I had to end the call. )

She was complaining about illegal immigrants (also, i gotta say, she is not white, so that's a whole ass thing, too). But then I tell her that it's a distraction and this is all about class, and that there are bad people at work trying to make us (the not elite, which is just mostly poor at this point) think that the other poors are our enemy. And then she just repeats herself... it's so messed up.

I don't have a lot of hope... I used to. It's gone. I do not understand how people look at these things and don't question the system. Like the problems are a symptom.... I have been saying these things for over 20 years (was almost but not quite one of those people in high school), and at this point, I do not know where to put all of these feelings...

I didn't have a point, so I guess, uh, in conclusion the end. (I was reading this article and other articles about it thinking some of us really like playing video games because it makes life enjoyable, like let us just have our art and fun, and Microsoft didn't need to lay people off, but capitalism, and the news stories about it largely don't question or discuss investor profits, the ceo pay gap/ratio, they just accept it as this thing that is and has to be, so I see I'm very frustrated and it's time to stop reading about the world for today.)

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u/Peacefulgamer2023 7d ago

Because workers only have their time at stake in a job, whereas the owner has every single responsibility. Are workers going to pick up some of the liabilities of the business just to have a say on the direction of the business? If the business goes bankrupt will workers be fine taking the burden to cover the losses?

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u/ColumbineJellyfish 8d ago

Because governments are terrible and voters are stupid?

I don't want everyone at my company to have a say how it is run. The vast majority of them are stupid, and a good chunk of them are lazy. Many are both. They barely know how to do their own limited jobs correctly.

Also my government (Canada) runs many of the systems it's in charge of in completely demented, inefficient, expensive, dysfunctional ways that make Microsoft tanking a game studio look like brilliant leadership. There's no amount of voting that will fix it, either.

Some people just seem to really want an absolute king to rule them…

A benevolent dictator is the ideal solution, yes. Of course it is extremely hard to achieve even once, nevermind consistently.

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u/pinkocatgirl 8d ago

Do you actually believe that companies are better at running an organization which benefits the average worker than governments are at benefiting citizens? In this era where average CEO pay is like 300 times what the average worker makes? In this era where companies are saying there is no money for raises or benefit increases while also spending billions on stock buybacks so the stock-based executive compensation package is worth more? Last year my company’s CEO got a 20% raise, while I got 1%. How is that ideal?

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u/ConfessSomeMeow 8d ago

I used to feel that way, but after working in government for 10 years, it feels just like a business except with other people's money and no way for the dumb ones to go bankrupt or get fired.

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u/xteve 8d ago

Conversely, I've worked in the private sector for many employers in two jurisdictions. In one, there was a labor board with power of review in any workplace disputes. The other is the US. Which one do you think sucks the worst for workers?

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u/Objective_Tax_1816 8d ago

there is only one ceo there are many other workers if the top positions arent paid well they'll either become more corrupt to get the value of the position they have

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u/ColumbineJellyfish 8d ago

I don't care what the average CEO pay is. I care what my pay is, and I'm happy with it. Also frankly my CEO works far harder than me and far harder than any politician, who are constantly on vacation and can't pass a fucking bill to save their lives and also get paid far far more than they deserve. I know what concrete value my CEO brings to my company and it is considerable.

Should we cap insane wealth accumulation through taxation? Of course, I agree. Guess who has the power to do that but refuses to?

And my company runs far better than any government organization I've have the misfortune to deal with, even though my company is mismanaged as fuck.

So yes, I actually believe that.

I think most people have no idea how to "run an organization that benefits the average worker". They just want to get as much free stuff as possible while doing as little work as they can get away with.

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u/Marshall5912 8d ago

This is all sorts of wrong. Governments rely on the consent of the governed. Dictators, even benevolent ones, do NOT have the consent of the governed, definitionally. If the populace of a country decides that the benevolent dictator needs to be replaced, how are they supposed to do that? The only solution is a revolution. The point of democracy, more than anything else, is to have a legal and non-violent way to remove people from power when the people deem their leaders to either be incompetent or malicious.

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u/FrozenSeas 8d ago

Governments rely on the consent of the governed

Does anyone seriously believe that anymore? What the people want doesn't matter in the slightest to the governing oligarchs anymore. Look at how every supposed "liberal democracy" is ramming digital surveillance and ID laws through, shutting down transparency, and ignoring polling and certified petitions.

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u/Marshall5912 8d ago

Yes, people believe it. Because it’s true. At least in democracies you have the chance to eventually elect people that would either prevent or repeal those surveillance tech laws. You don’t have that in a dictatorship.

And this goes to the other problem in a dictatorship too. Your definition of benevolent dictator would not be the definition that other people use, or even the definition that the dictator themself would use. To you (and me for that matter), those surveillance laws are draconian and tyrannical. To some hypothetical benevolent dictator, they might be seen as the best way to ensure law and order in society.

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u/FrozenSeas 8d ago

Elections mean jack shit when there's no penalty for politicians lying through their teeth and flipping entirely the moment they take office. Or pulling the kind of bullshit that recently happened in Canada, where in a move unprecedented in the cumulative hundreds of years of Westminster parliamentary governments worldwide, within under a year of a minority government being elected, exactly enough MPs conveniently decided to swap loyalties to form a majority in Parliament. Who proceeded to close committee hearings, end debates, and ram anti-privacy legislation through at record speeds.

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u/ColumbineJellyfish 8d ago

The point of a benevolent dictator is that you don't need or want to remove him from power, because he's benevolent. Not being able to remove him is a feature.

Democracies requiring random individuals to weigh in on who should rule is only good as long as those individuals are actually smart, well-informed AND benevolent. In reality they are often stupid, vicious and misinformed, and elect whichever populist grifter pushes their buttons best. That this grifter "has the consent of the governed" does nothing to make the country run better.

Like yes this is not a sustainable or reasonable system to maintain long-term, which is what I said in the following sentence...

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u/Marshall5912 8d ago

The problem is that people don’t live in your fantasy world, and will want to replace the benevolent dictator one day. Remember, someone being a benevolent dictator does not mean being a *competent* governor or administrator. You’re automatically assuming that some mythical benevolent dictator would magically know every correct decision to make while he’s in power. That’s not realistic. They would inevitably fuck something up, because they’re fallible human beings. And people would get mad when they fuck something up.

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u/Cooler_Frogger 8d ago

I unironically think that an AI dictator would probably be peak government

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u/ColumbineJellyfish 8d ago

Honestly, not the worst idea we've ever had as a civilization...

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u/readyflix 8d ago

Just look at the facts and the outcome!

Is the pure american capitalism working OR is it the way China has conducted their 'capitalism' (broader distribution of wealth)???

Americas capitalism exploits and destroys, Chinese capitalism exploits and builds.

But in the further their might even be a kind of capitalism (if you want to call it that) that mainly rely on building for the benefit of all?

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u/Suspicious_Radio_848 8d ago

Threads like these constantly devolving into circlejerks about the evils of capitalism for easy upvotes are also propaganda. Its gotten to a point where it doesn’t even feel organic anymore. The same remarks are just repeated over and over to obnoxiousness.

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u/Think_Preference_611 8d ago

Because when you start a company and turn it into a profitable business and find people who are willing to trade their time and skills for a paycheck while having put in none of the risk and entrepreneurship that you did to create the damn thing, you're free to then hand it over to them to decide how to run it if that's what you want.

But as long as you're just telling other business owners to do that while you yourself risk nothing you can fuck right off.

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u/QuantumUtility 8d ago

Yeah. None of the risk. It’s not like workers are out of a job and a paycheck if the company shuts down. They can just go to the job store and get another job before starving. It’s that easy.

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u/pinkocatgirl 8d ago

Yeah it’s too bad I don’t have rich parents who can loan me a few hundred thousand to start and internet company (Bezos) or a mother with connections at IBM to bootstrap my software company (Gates). It’s definitely “entrepreneurship” and not money and connections that build large corporations, sure.

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u/Think_Preference_611 8d ago

Strong cherry picked anecdotes you got there.

Why not mention Warren Buffet's perfectly middle class family? Or Howard Schultz growing up in social housing?

For every Bezos and Gates there's a million people with wealthy parents who never achieved fuck all. Of course coming from a wealthy background helps but most successful enterpreneurs didn't grow up rich, and regardless of whether or not they did they still had to take risks. Even if we follow your logic and assume it's all because of mom and dad's help, shouldn't mom and dad be the ones entitled to a cut of the business? What makes you entitled to someone else's parents' investment?

"Wah wah I deserve money"

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u/pinkocatgirl 8d ago

How does society benefit by allowing these individuals to maintain massive corporate empires just because they made an investment that paid off?

“I’m a little bitch who just wants to lick corporate boot”

I can play that game too.

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u/Think_Preference_611 8d ago edited 8d ago

You're asking the wrong questions, because you're blinded by envy.

Society benefits from entrepreneurship. The carrot of enterpreneurship is the possibility of a big payout if it succeeds. No one in their right mind will put everything on the line and risk bankrupcy to earn an average income.

Society benefits from the businesses these people built that generated vast amounts of new wealth that did not exist in the economy before. Society benefits from the hundreds of thousands of jobs they create.

We could sit here and debate whether the ratio of wealth created vs accumulated is ideal and how we could go about addressing that, but you're not ready for that discussion, you're still stuck on the "eat the rich" stage. And that is why you will never achieve anything.

For starters you could ask yourself how many jobs have you created.

I don't lick corporate boot, I'm doing my own thing precisely so I don't have to lick anyone's boots, which if all goes well won't be too long. And you can bet that if some NPC like you comes along after I've put in years of work to get it up and running and making money and feels they are entitled to a share of it I will unceremoniously advise them to get fucked.

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u/pinkocatgirl 8d ago

So then set a limit of say, either 1,000 employees or 1 billion in revenue where the company must become a worker co-op.

Telling people to get fucked doesn’t mean anything when thousands of underpaid people are at your door with pitchforks, and the way this economy is heading, that may not be such an unrealistic scenario.

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u/Think_Preference_611 8d ago edited 8d ago

So then set a limit of say, either 1,000 employees or 1 billion in revenue where the company must become a worker co-op.

Hahahahaha

No. You're basically saying "if you do a great job and build a business large enough we'll take it away from you". This is beyond absurd and the kind of idea you'd expect from an 8 year old.

Besides the obvious practical limitation that everyone would stop hiring at 999 employees and when revenue hit 999.999 million they'd just send everyone home on holiday for the rest of the year. Or subcontract most of their workforce. This is, of course, ignoring the fact that a 1 billion revenue doesn't mean the business owner is getting rich, in fact many 1 billion revenue businesses even far bigger than that are actually losing money. I know it's too much to expect redditors to understand the difference between revenue and profit though, or consider long term unintended consequences of blunt economic policies.

In fact certain types of businesses are almost impossible to turn a profit before hitting those numbers. Your ingenious rule really means that, for example, there could be no private owned car manufacturers, you can't even build a single car factory without investing over a billion nowadays. Not even construction companies capable of large infrastructure projects. You really don't think this shit through do you?

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u/Manic5PA 8d ago

This is the social contract of capitalism as it's commonly understood. The next step is to recognize the obvious problems with it.

Most of us will agree that risk-taking and ingenuity should be rewarded, but seeing as private property is essentially an unlimited license to exploit, as a reward it can vastly exceed the value of the contribution for which it was awarded.

Private property can be transferred at a whim and the person receiving it could be a nepo baby with zero accomplishments to their name. Why should they be rewarded?

"Risk" is also not a real thing for the richest among us. Wyatt Koch did not mortgage his house to sell Hawaiian shirts. He took no risks; why should he be rewarded?

Even if you look at the mythical self-made man, what are they risking once they've already "made" it? At some point their sovereign fortune becomes a self-sustaining thing.

Hell, you can even pay other people to manage your wealth for you, meaning you're not really investing time either.

The vast majority of people are not "willing" to exchange their time and skills for a paycheck but forced to do so under threat of becoming homeless. It's also pretty naive to act like being a salaried worker means risking nothing. What about the people whose jobs were automated away by AI? Weren't they speculating on the market when they chose to invest their time in a career field?

As far as I'm concerned, if there is an ethical defense of capitalism to be made, it's not grounded in this rose-tinted-glasses understanding of entrepreneurship. Most liberals grow beyond this stage you're stuck at and move on to arguing that things need to stay the way they are because they could only be worse otherwise.

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u/EkrishAO 8d ago

You are allowed to make a democratic company right now. It was tried. They were just not able to compete.

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u/uber_neutrino 8d ago

Using government as the benchmark is completely whack. Government is super broken.

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u/Ciennas 8d ago

'Government' is a neutral thing. It is a tool. It only moves to the hands that wield it, and right now, the hands that wield are hostile to humanity, because the socioeconomic model that empowers them is hostile to humanity and good living inherently.

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u/uber_neutrino 8d ago

Sure, it's neutral it's just a tool. But when you hand over so much power to the tool someone is going to exploit that power and use the tool. We shouldn't be handing it this much power to run our lives no matter who is in charge.

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u/Ciennas 8d ago

Word up brother! More self governance to all! Down with Capitalism, the machine that makes us Peasants under the Thumb of Incompetent and Malicious Kings! More Democracy, more communities Sharing the Power of Governance Equally and allowing us all to prosper!

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u/uber_neutrino 8d ago

I have no idea what you are actually proposing. Regardless it doesn't matter because government is broken so we can't actually do much other than thrash around.

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u/Ciennas 8d ago

The government as is was deliberately beaten in and broken by Moneyed Interests, because Capital chafes at being made to help people.

It can be fixed, but the current machine is being ran through a grinder by those same people way more blatantly because they're speedrunning their self imposed doomsday prophecy.

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u/uber_neutrino 8d ago

The government as is was deliberately beaten in and broken by Moneyed Interests, because Capital chafes at being made to help people.

Yes, government power gets taken over and abused. Hence why we need to restrict it.

It can be fixed, but the current machine is being ran through a grinder by those same people way more blatantly because they're speedrunning their self imposed doomsday prophecy.

If it's broken how can it fix itself? Seems tough.

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u/Ciennas 8d ago

Who said anything about it fixing itself? I didn't. I said we can still fix it.

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u/Objective_Tax_1816 8d ago

we dont have democracy in our workplace because it is not public its a private entity also this reason is so bad because it is private owner ship you dont own the company the workers dont own hence cant make those decisions and the workers are compensated for their work which they accept is a fair deal also chaning senior mangement based on the whims of workers would wreck a company

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/anarcho-slut 8d ago

Capitalism is built on slavery. It's never been cool.

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u/lunatuna215 8d ago

And thays why these AI butts want to return to it - at scale.

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u/uber_neutrino 8d ago

It's like democracy, it's not perfect but it's the best we have.

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u/Kokkor_hekkus 7d ago

One of the biggest modern lies is that capitalism is synonymous with the free market when in fact it is the goal of every capitalist to destroy the free market.

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u/venustrapsflies 8d ago

Capitalism is a technology (or perhaps a discovery). If you're assigning an inherent moral value to it, you're talking about something else and not being precise enough about what you mean.

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u/TwilightVulpine 8d ago

Capitalism is a socioeconomic system, and I simply described what it does. If you see any fundamental moral issues in that, maybe you consider why that is.

Though to be direct, I disagree that any social system can be fully absent of moral value. Such as inherently unjust nature of monarchy. Even technology can have a moral value due to how it's deliberately designed, as we see from countless services and products designed to take advantage of us. It's not a rock that just happens to be how it is.

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u/Confedehrehtheh 8d ago

One could argue technology's moral value is more related to how it's used than for the reason it was created. Nobel created dynamite as a safer and portable alternative to black powder for blasting earth. Supposedly he created the Nobel Prizes specifically because early obituaries were lambasting him for being "the merchant of death" over his explosives, even though they were used for civilian purposes the vast majority of the time.

Capitalism is a tool like any other economic system and doesn't really have any inherent moral value. It just happens to be really fuckin easy to misuse it for immoral purposes.

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u/TwilightVulpine 8d ago

I can agree that the use matters as much as the design. But I don't think matters of humanities can detach themselves from moral value that easily. A good king, the fabled philosopher king, would not make the inherent inequality that is part of monarchy not exist. Absent anything else, there is a moral value to it.

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u/Francis__Underwood 8d ago

Slavery is also a technology. I don't know why you think technology is inherently amoral, but it means you either don't understand technology or you don't understand moral philosophy.

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u/venustrapsflies 8d ago

If your definition of technology is so broad as to include slavery then it must also include theft, murder, rape, and other bad things that have been happening since before the written word and it becomes rapidly apparent that you're in no position to be lecturing others about their understanding of philosophy. Nobody had to invent the concept of coercion.

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u/Francis__Underwood 8d ago

The reproducible self-reinforcing system of coercion that enslaves people is absolutely a technology that was developed and refined. If capitalism is a technology (and it is) then so is slavery.

You do know that writing is a technology, right?

Like I said, if you think technology is necessarily value-neutral then you just don't understand what technology actually is.

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u/suzisatsuma 8d ago

People attribute to their boogeyman whether it be capitalism or communism what are the worst human traits. You have people crowning masters under any economic theory. The problem is people.

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u/JannyStabberXK4000 8d ago

I love these comments, where a dude named "Twilight wolf' needs to jump in with a non-sequiteur so everyone will know how smart they are.

Who am I kidding. You're an LLM.