I haven't accepted it. Out of all the websites i've designed over the years, exactly 0 have cookies for visitors. When there is login for members, then there is a cookie which is not used for tracking (but rather for providing the service the member asked for) and therefore legally does not require a consent banner.
Would that I could give you more than an upvote. Are these your personal or business sites, or for employers and clients? If the latter, how do you combat the hunger for analytics that drive non-users into users?
It's not all personal, but it's all unrelated to business. As an anarchist, I refuse to work on projects i find unethical, which includes any form of profit-driven project. Sorry i can't give you pointers on how to hack around capitalism, my only solution is pure abolition :-)
I should note that i'm also not a professional hacker. Programming/sysadmin is more of a passion than a trade to me, and i'm just a lowly amateur unworthy of much praise.
But to be fair, there's amazing non-profits and worker cooperatives building cool software (Framasoft comes to mind). If only more fellow hackers stopped working for evil bosses and started to work for public interest...
How does one find out more about this scene, and more importantly does it actually provide you with enough income to live on? (Rent is expensive in cities)
There's not exactly a centralized directory of cool tech coops, but there's a few places that list some or where they hang out. [1] There's also a fair bunch of coop orientation in the XMPP/ActivityPub ecosystems.
Some projects are driven by direct donations, some others via grants (all NLNet-supported projects) and business partnerships (Blender foundation), some provide paid services to fund R&D (SourceHut).
Overall, it's technically possible to derive a decent income from such schemes, but that's not exactly widespread. Many dedicated hackers will work for minimum wage or less, but some will arrange either:
- to reduce their expenses, by moving to cheaper places [2] or living in shared flats or communities; if you're organized as a collective even food and furniture can have close-to-zero cost [3]
- or to have a high-wage part-time job on the side, or support contracts to pay the bills; if you get half-time to work on your pet projects, that's already quite an achievement
Overall, building a cooperative economy asks the question of where does the money go? The more autonomy we can achieve, and the more money we can "recycle" into other cooperatives, the less of our resources leak into the pockets of the 1%.
So yes, if you make a really cool project people appreciate and/or can depend on for their business, you can sure make a living out of it: just be sure to use copyleft licenses (eg. aGPLv3) so you're not scammed out of your work by big businesses. But personally, i'm more interested in non-profits driving R&D with a vision (like Framasoft does with the Degooglize Internet campaign and eg. Peertube/Mobilizon project).
[1] for example libreho.st, chatons.org (french-speaking) for hosting coops
[2] for example in France, if you don't insist on living in the big cities, you can find places to rent for close to free once you subtract housing support from the rent ; i guess the same is true in many places
[3] skipping unsold food from (super)markets or growing food in the backyard; we could also mention utility hacking for free electricity/water but i can't say most devs i know do that
Hmmm...so you are an anarchist (so don't want government) but also think profit seeking is unethical?
I'm genuinely curious what mechanism you would like society to function under? Like why would people...do stuff if not for value in exchange?
Honestly the only thing I came up with is basically if you forcibly modified humans in one generation, making people want to help each other for no benefit to themselves. Then, abolish the government I'm the next generation so this group of modified-humans runs with no profit motive or government. So it's like super dark and authoritarian, but only for a little bit?
Anyway, this was a fun thought exercise for me so thanks!
> Like why would people...do stuff if not for value in exchange?
People do stuff because they're curious or bored. Because they want to help and feel useful. Sure if you've worked all your life, you may spend a few months just doing nothing and just reconnecting with your inner feelings and environment. But after a while i can assure you you won't be able to stand lying around: pathological laziness is very rare. [0] Many people without employment suffer from not having a sense of purpose.
But what about the tasks nobody wants to do, like collecting garbage? Why can't we distribute those tasks? Why would a certain caste of people have to do the unpleasant tasks for others? If some task is a burden to the community, it's only fair the unpleasantness is distributed somewhat-equally. If i lived in a big city, i personally wouldn't mind collecting garbage once or twice a year, and the value i would derive from that would be that all garbage including mine is duly collected. [1]
Likewise, why would i help another person with some task i'm competent with? It can come out of simple empathy, but there's another way to look at it. The capitalist system treats exchanges as a zero-sum game where if i don't get my share at every step of the way i'm getting screwed because someone else will have it. A Commune without private property [2] treats exchanges as some form of creative process: the more we share, the more we have, and the more we can share... the better off everyone is in the end.
> Honestly the only thing I came up with is basically if you forcibly modified humans in one generation, making people want to help each other for no benefit to themselves.
Haha, that sounds like a pretty cool scenario for a movie in which you're not sure if it's a utopia or dystopia. Can't wait for the trailer to come out ;)
> Anyway, this was a fun thought exercise for me so thanks!
Cool! It can be more than a thought experiment, though. No person (myself included) is going to come up with the solutions to all our problems. The point of anarchism is that distributing power (so that everyone has a voice) is a prerequisite for finding the better outcomes for everyone. This can be practiced in every field of life on a daily basis.
If you enjoyed the thought experiment, i can only recommend to read some more anarchist literature: i've personally profoundly enjoyed Emma Goldman's autobiography, among others. Submedia's Trouble [3], in video form, documents various questions/practices related to anarchism.
[0] I hear Devon Price has some good works lately on that topic, but i haven't given it a read yet.
[1] Of course in a better world, we wouldn't have a garbage-oriented society. Capitalism produces waste on so many levels it's hard to imagine a less-efficient system. I take this example because that's something all people who live in cities can relate to.
[2] Private property does not designate personal belongings. Of course in a free Commune everyone still has personal stuff. Property is the authority derived from a piece of paper over resources you have no use of.
TLDR: Capitalism is a form of government historically and in the present. Even if it was not (as suggested by right-wing libertarians like Ayn Randt), anarchism stands against all power over others (read authority/domination/privilege/exploitation) not just government.
"Property is theft" is a famous quote by Proudhon [0], who was the first person to coin the term "anarchist" to describe a desire for Freedom & Equality as complementary goals which should never be opposed. By this, he means that profit is always derived from someone else's exploitation downstream: for example, as computer people, even by working "ethical" jobs, we still widely profit from the exploitation of miners and factory workers in the Global South who produce our devices, and from the pollution and climate change (that also mostly affects the Global South) derived from that. It's also worth noting, as we've seen at the height of the COVID lockdowns, that the people the most essential to society (food/health, logistics, maintenance/construction workers) are also those who get the smallest share of the pie.
Private property is the State religion that makes it possible to have homeless people yet millions of empty dwellings, and that core tenet of capitalism is enforced by the Nation State and its police/military forces [1]. This, despite the fact that many jurisdiction (including the law in France since the liberation in 1945) explicitly allows authorities to requisition empty dwellings to prevent civil disorder ("trouble à l'ordre public"). Capitalism relies on early indoctrination (via childhood education) and a great amount of physical force/threats in order to perpetuate itself. Why do we have to pay to live? Because if you don't pay rent, some psychopaths with guns are gonna knock down your door and kick you out.
Would there be equality without a centralized government? Sure, some influential person could employ a militia (as already happens despite our having a central police [2]), but:
- the scale of that would be fairly limited to crush popular unrest, compared to a Nation State's forces
- without a central State to indoctrinate since childhood (preparing us for competition in a cruel world) and ensure millions of people live in misery (and have to take the job) it would be harder to mount such schemes
- the incentives would be more balanced: if we can live decently and quietly (as most people desire), what interest would i have to attack someone else's community for a corrupt overlord?
- power would be more balanced: in many parts of the world (including France), the State has a legal monopoly on justified violence which makes community vulnerable by not having a right to arm and defend themselves
Both outcomes are possible if we abolish the State from one day to the next (anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-communism). However, given the history of capitalism and the sheer amount of national force it took to set that up (eg. armies colonizing foreign countries, public schools to teach the young to fuck other people before they fuck you and that "copying is cheating"), i would argue that tearing down such centralized structures may bring us closer to our tendencies for empathy and mutual aid which are common throughout animal societies. [3]
Overall, anarchism is focused on distribution of power, responsibilities, and resources: in society at large, in the family, in the workplace, in interpersonal relationships... It's not focused on "rights" as a legal construct but on the practical power you can yield as an individual. Sure, in a capitalist society we are all "free" to own a castle just like we are all "free" to get decent healthcare: but if we aren't given the practical means to achieve this "right", it's entirely meaningless.
Or, as Bakunin put it: "liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
To finally answer your question, i'm not morally opposed to making a profit in this profit-driven society in order to survive. I'm also not morally opposed to cooperatives making a profit in order to build a parallel economy. What matters to me is the next step: how to build a society based on needs and desires, not profit. Or, as the old anarchist saying goes: "To each according to their needs, from each according to their capacity".
On a high-level, you need money because everybody else needs money: the carpenter needs to pay the peasant, who needs to pay the plumber, who needs to pay the baker... Workers cooperatives, when they have a sense of revolutionary purpose [4], can be a trojan horse that extracts money form our overlords in order to build material autonomy that can lead to the irrelevance of profit. Money is an abstract layer of indirection, and at each step leaks into the pockets of the owners.
Having lived for quite a while in communities where money is irrelevant [5], I personally feel that in order to achieve our goals, it's much more efficient to base the discussion on actual needs and how to build concrete autonomy [6] rather than center the talk about monetary goals in which we can loose sight of what we were trying to accomplish in the first place.
I hope to have answered your question.
[0] If you're interested in cooperative economy and don't read what he has to say about women and the jews, his writings are sound. Fortunately the more recent anarchist movement (since the last quarter of the 19th century) has evolved to be fundamentally incompatible with misogyny and racist sentiment and to be on the frontlines against such power structures (see for example the rise of anarcha-feminism since the 1930s).
[1] The military is not just a construct against foreign invasion, as seen throughout the history of the workers emancipation movement and the many times armies have been called to bloodily suppress strikes and other forms of popular uprising. Although since the second half of the 20th century, modern Nation States have developed "counter-insurgency" techniques in which the military becomes a last resort, and focus is placed on both propaganda and cooptation on one hand, and more vicious political repression on the other hand (targeted assassinations, legal proceedings, mutilation by police forces, etc).
[2] In the squatting scene, that's not unheard of. Bigger landlords often have ties to different strains of mafia. In other spheres of life, you could probably read about Pinkerton (the history as well as modern occurrences such as Amazon's anti-union campaign), about the Coca-Cola murders in South America, or about companies such as Ikea mounting their own intelligence agency.
[3] See also the recent HN threads about Kropotkin and his studies on mutual aid.
[4] Unlike recent straits of workers coops who have been coopted by capitalism (so-called social economy) which is only concerned about working conditions and not about broader social questions.
[5] We do use money to interface with some segments of society, but in a squat/Commune you can as an individual live without money if you don't have any, and still find purpose and access to resources. Also worth noting, some interactions with neighboring structures is not necessarily based on money: it's not uncommon for a local market/bakery to give away "dying" foods, for neighbors to help out one another on construction work, etc.
[6] Autonomy is not independence. Noone is truly independent, and autonomy accepts and accounts for inter-dependence relationships.
I was worried by the size of this reply that it was some kind of copy-pasta at first. That doesn't seem the case. I am genuinely interested in digesting this and giving you a thoughtful reply, but it will take some time.
I use Plausible, which gives me enough useful information to run my website, but doesn't collect any more than needed. It's a lot less useful than Google Analytics, but it's a big privacy and UX improvement for my readers.
