this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2020
0 points (NaN% liked)
Asklemmy
43406 readers
1309 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes, it's fair to say he's kind of a dick but it's not the full story. His goals for electric vehicles and universal internet access are noble ones. Wanting to put people on Mars seems like a waste of time to me, but so are most human pursuits and this one's at least interesting. His use of social media is juvenile. His attempt to help the kids trapped in the cave was ham-fisted attention-seeking. I don't give a toss if he smokes weed, that's not my business.
I'm not going to try to put him on a single-axis scale of good/bad. Doing so is a popular hobby among those who wish to have endless arguments with the "other" on social media. The guy's useful for some things but not others.
the fact that people think that a person behind something as anti-consumer and for-profit as tesla would try to build universal internet access just out of the goodness of their hearts of insane to me
that's like saying facebook provides the entire world with a free platform to express their opinions
He is a capitalist applying capitalist solutions to problems. You don't have to like capitalists but for all its flaws the system does function, and taking a profit is table stakes. The consumer who opts in to his way of doing things gets a car with a reduced dependency on fossil fuels, advanced safety features, and some level of self-driving capabilities. On the flip side they are deeply proprietary, in constant communication with the mothership and very expensive. For everyone else, Tesla is pushing the industry along so we will get more EVs to choose from sooner than we might otherwise have done. Can you really say his activities are anti-consumer? I don't think so - it's just that you and I are not his target consumer.
The real damage of Facebook is their monopoly created through network effects. I am not anticipating a monopoly on electric cars or internet access any time soon.
I would argue against the Capitalist system being functional. Capitalist propaganda has created a mythology of attributing to itself many accomplishments which should really be attributed to human labour. All of its flaws are cast off as “simple facts of life”.
Much of the foundational technology in communications, the Internet, and medicine were initially developed in government (public ally funded) labs, where profit was never a motive. All capitalism has done is give us thousands of variations of similar technologies, at the expense of countless other technologies - and in the process has forced humans into wage slavery / actual slavery, destroyed our coral reefs, and is heating up and polluting our planet - driving us toward extinction.
Even if we build the perfect solar panel, or do make it to Mars - where sustaining life will be much harder than sustaining life on Earth - that won’t save Earth, and it won’t solve the problem of the endless commodification and exploitation which is the capitalist system.
At some point we need to stop acting like mindless automatons and abandon capitalism, and work toward an actual sustainable system which isn’t hostile to life.
— Posted from my iPhone (which was created by exploited human labour and natural materials, not capitalism)