In high school around the turn of the millennium (:chomsky-yes-honey:) I lost marks on a paper where I stated that a need to move to IPv6 was due to address space exhaustion, and that in the future even toasters would have IP addresses. I was told I was wrong and toasters would never have IP addresses.

The future may be awful, but I can rest easy knowing that I was indeed right :gaddafi-happy:

Try now - I switched it out for an archive link. Apologies, there was a weird looking ID in the URL and out of paranoia I’d removed it. Clicking it worked for me, but the was probably some weird caching going on :bordiga-despair:

He was a minor online British left figure back in the first Bernie era, and used to be in the Chaposphere. He even had a spin-off podcast with Amber, until he was cancelled for sexual harassment.

These people are simply not the same as us, comrade. With the utmost non-violence (hello :fedposting:), they need re-education to end the alienation and come to terms with the harm they have caused. Even the “Bed, Bath and Beyond” people will need to make amends.

So one thing I’m trying to understand with the base and the superstructure is with respect to tech startups and the approach to engineering that they take. Basically:

1. Start ups are in a constant cycle of chasing venture capital funding, needing to show constant growth of users/customers at fairly regular intervals
2. This leads to a myopic focus on quality in engineering, as it is (incorrectly) deemed as a hindrance to delivering new features that would allow for increased growth. (In reality, the initial cost of focusing quality is quickly surpassed by the drag of poor code and technical decision making forever increasing as it is left unaddressed, but I digress).
3. Further to that, early employees of the company are strongly incentivized in the short term, by relatively large stock option grants. These grants are generally exercisable after 1 year, and most folks will move on to another company after 2 years. As such, there is no incentive for them to fix the engineering mess they have created if the company is growing - someone else will be employed at a later date to solve that problem, for significantly less equity in the company. These later employees are effectively doing the work of repairing the poor work that the early employees left in their wake. A technical debt Ponzi scheme, if you will.

So given all that - where is the base and the superstructure? Is it all base, as it is a combination of means and relations of production? Is tech bro “fuck quality” culture the superstructure here?

Sorry if this makes no sense or is baby brained, I’ve been stewing on this idea of tech debt being a Ponzi scheme for a while and I want to be able to talk about it correctly from a materialist perspective. And I’m not the brightest at this stuff :comfy: