Some Thoughts:
1: Communism does not work
Personally, I think that the experiences with communism in these places:
- USSR
- China
- Venezuela
- North Korea
- Cuba
Show quite conclusively that concentrating power of any kind in the state is a bad idea. What is power? Well, in many ways, it is value-- except for one: Physical violence or coercion.
2: Capitalism does not work in today's society
The state retains too much power over individuals for individuals to be free enough to participate in capitalism, therefore, free markets and all that capitalist claptrap is just a load of shit. Here are some places where the state colluded with capital in order to produce a dystopic situation:
- United States
- Europe, today
- Europe, 1930s
- Zimbabwe
- Argentina
- Brazil
3: Marx was one hell of a thinker
Say what you will about the results of communism (which, bear in mind, would NOT have ever fit Marx's description) there's an undeniable power to Marx's corpus: he's moved many a nation from the grave on his strange brand of optomism and prosperity-through-mutual-struggle.
4: Marx could see all this coming a million miles away.
If I don't agree with his economics, then what do I like about Marx? Oh, just that he was probably the most accurate futurist of all time. He got the problems dead-on. I'm planning some manufacturing in coming months, and I'm looking into the "baxter" robot for it. This thing is most certainly bad news for American low-wage workers, sorry to say. Trouble is, it's going to do a better job than them while simultaneously costing about 50% as much (oh and that's just the first year).
5: @dantheman is a micro-marx
Sorry @dantheman, I know that you don't espouse any communist views whatsoever and probably think that Marx himself is a king bullshitter. I don't blame you for that, he'd probably say the same thing about you, too. What I'm talking about though, is the willingness to experiment. If the countries that implemented communism hadn't done so, or Marx hadn't voiced his mind on the topic, well guess what? Another thinker would have had those ideas, and another country would have tried them out. So weather it's win lose or draw on STEEM and Steemit, I'm quite grateful for the opportunity I've had to particpate in a totally new economic paradigm here.
6: Steem Power is fucking revolutionary
...and that is in part because it does not favor capital.... but at the same time doesn't actively disfavor capital. Honestly I'm wracking my brain these days to try to come up with a better way. @laonie, I hear your complaints loud and clear. If I come up with a solution that fits in the center of the venn diagram, I'll make sure that you're first to know.
7: Slower financial growth would have been better for steemit
The insane rise in valuation was good for no one. Given what I know, I don't think that it was planned in any way, shape or form. I think that's just how the game played out.
8: Society is going to get fucked up in coming years
Looking around here I see a whole ton of people on the margins, myself certainly included in this. I think that we are the tip of the iceberg. We're going to be better equipped for life at the margins than the masses, too. We've had some practice. Look weather it's good or bad automation is going to happen and it's going to be quite the radical transformation of society. It could be a nudge towards the much-much-better, or as @rampant says, it could be the beginning of a very dark stage in history. We just don't know. Remember: *fucked up can be good, fucked up can be bad, and we know it will be fucked up. We just don't know if it's the "I'm fucked up" of someone who just smoked a joint, or the "they fucked me up" of someone who just got their ass kicked.
9: Massive inequality of access is a problem
Inequality itself is in my opinion a good thing. Take me, for example, and compare me to Bill Gates. I'm not him! Therefore, I don't have all the same things / lifestyle that he does. This is good. Life would be really boring as hell if we all lived the same way. BillG's level of access to government is the real problem with inequality between him and I. He can leverage that in myriad ways to compete with me in an unfair manner. There is a similar problem on steemit, which is caused by a combination of these factors:
- Lack of documentation
- A weak API
- Distribution of too much steem to too few insiders
10: Steem Power is a really great experiment towards solving a tough problem
When you read the whitepaper, you'll notice that @dantheman spends a great deal of it waxing philosophical on startups, and he's right to do so. I'm going to take this opportunity to say that if we go with the proposed changes and nix SP, I intend to operate an "original steemit," possibly with a divergent codebase and content set; possibly with the original codebase and content set. I think that SP is a concept with real merit.
11: I'd really like to get @dantheman's thoughts on applications for systems like SP in the real world
Look: It might just be the best combination of communist and capitalist tendencies that anyone's come up with yet. We've hit some tough questions in planning out @steemitcity and getting thoughts straight from the horse's mouth would be great.
12: The right scale for steemit may have been much smaller than where we aimed.
Or maybe, there needs to be hundreds of Steemit's. I cannot really say for sure. There's a great deal of value in niches.
13: Steemit explored:
- Reputation systems
- Concepts of Value
- Community building
- Building wealth as a community
- Alternatives to unpaid social media
And all of the above were important problems, and still are. So, even if this site goes belly-up, which I do not think is in the cards, mind you, it will remain an important event in the history of the web. Steemians, no matter what your profit/loss on this experiment was, know that you've been a part of a world-first that has already planted concept seeds in thousands of people. Soon, those seeds will germinate....
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