"ford gobikes are gross" is a sentiment i share but it's not a coherent materialist analysis; it risks sliding into reactionary praxis

the fundamental problem with these bikeshare programs is the privatization of public space. bike shares in abstract would be unambiguously good for the communities they're in, but the harm of private enclosure outweighs that good. the solution to this one isn't to destroy the bikes but to socialize the program, to bring it under democratic control by the community it serves

@morganastra yeah Seattle tried that. unfortunately the director had a weird scratch back relationship with the bike vendor and it was set up badly. now we have companies doing it all, funded by VC money. tbh though I totally hear you about the privatization of public space.

@pnathan if it is run by private companies they are certainly not doing it well, even if the problems are not yet visible without an analysis

@morganastra @pnathan

> they are certainly not doing it well

Every now and then, some private company DOES actually handle something well. Rare, but it DOES occur. (I do like to hope sometimes that it's because Enough Good People Can Make Any Org Not Be Shit, but -- realistically, I realize it may well be the "even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day" phenomena.)

And I'm not advocating capitalism by any stretch -- I think it's almost always destructive and awful. :\

@sydneyfalk @pnathan what i meant by that is that the profit motive is inherently opposed to the social good, and so regardless of the intentions or the quality of management of individual actors resourced managed via private exclusion and rent seeking will always tend toward an accumulation of capital and the alienation of individuals

@morganastra @pnathan

That's mostly what I assumed you meant.

What I was getting at is that

> will always tend toward

means that SOME outliers, accidentally or otherwise, end up accumulating capital and alienating individuals to a smaller degree than they provide use to customers.

Whether it's just a "good people can make a bad system kind of still do somewhat good things", or a "failed capitalism sometimes causes good things but doesn't fail enough to self-destruct", I'm not certain, tho.

@sydneyfalk @pnathan the system of capitalism means those outliers are either "corrected" or destroyed, though. any such accidents are short-lived at best. (see also: every actually-useful app/website that never makes a profit and goes out of business after two years of running on VC)

@morganastra @pnathan

> the system of capitalism means those outliers are either "corrected" or destroyed, though.

I understand that would happen if, somehow, capitalism were perfect. But it's not -- sometimes those outliers do all right, lucking out into an environment that's hard for the general capitalism machine to leverage into a profit-slurping device.

Like I said earlier (IIRC), I'm not advocating capitalism by any means. I have seen a rare few corps that weren't straight up evil, tho.

@pnathan @morganastra

(and to clarify on that term: I'm being wide there, there's a nonzero number of businesses with very few employees, there's the rare old "slow-growth" business that seems to have avoided all the horrendous pitfalls and shark megacorps trying to eat them, etc.)

@sydneyfalk @pnathan yeah, I mean corporations under capitalism are usually not evil, just amoral and operating in a system that enforces they tend toward social harm

@morganastra @pnathan

yeah, I can definitely full-on agree with that

(of course, personally I'm starting to think society itself tends to promote social harm :\ my cynicism is, um, complicated -- but yeah)

@sydneyfalk @pnathan there are pretty clear counter-examples to that in societies with socialist economies though! art and science and self-actualization flourished in the USSR during the times they had breathing room from US and Western European aggression. Cuba today has made incredible strides in dismantling the colonial culture of racism, sexism, and homophobia and building a truly equitable society, as have the Zapatistas. Anarchist Spain, for the brief moment in history it lived, was a shining beacon of mutual aid and communal interdependence.