secret300@lemmy.sdf.org
on 20 Jul 2024 01:18
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Good for them
autotldr@lemmings.world
on 20 Jul 2024 01:20
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.
Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers.
The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica.
(Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)
Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
The original article contains 165 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 11%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Deceptichum@quokk.au
on 20 Jul 2024 01:45
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Better be careful they don’t clip through any windows.
dinckelman@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 02:14
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Finally some good news out of Bethesda
nalinna@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 02:36
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Seeing the rebirth of unions in tech companies might be one of my favorite things about this timeline.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca
on 20 Jul 2024 02:39
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Not nearly prevalent enough or fast enough, let’s gooooo!
Coasting0942@reddthat.com
on 20 Jul 2024 03:00
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A few years ago a tech friend literally couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 14:02
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I’m at a tech company. It’s nowhere near prevalent, nor do I think many employees actually want it. I’d love for it to happen, though, and IMO the first place it should happen is the video games industry.
Agreed. I think we’re in the, “fuck around and find out,” era of tech company unionization, and I’m fortunate enough to work for a company whose legal team is smart enough to know that a reasonably happy, fulfilled, and compensated workforce is significantly less likely to even start discussing unionization, and so I don’t think that my company will see it anytime soon, if ever (which I also think is fine, for the record). But to your point, with the way that the vast majority of the video game industry treats their employees, I hope that every single one of those large game companies ends up joining a union, because the employees deserve better.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca
on 20 Jul 2024 02:39
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✊
popekingjoe@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 03:12
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Hell yeah good for them.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 03:20
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Congrats! Now you guys can use collective bargaining to ensure you’re paid for every single bug you code. This is huge!
Seriously though, unions are good for the industry, I’m happy to see this is continuing at ever more software companies.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 11:42
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Unions work in ancap just as well as IRL, thus I support unions.
Regulation doesn’t work IRL and doesn’t exist in ancap.
Why do people here hate ancap again?
Khanzarate@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 12:51
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Unions don’t work without a central state.
If there isn’t an organization larger than a corporation making it keep to a line, a corporation will end up as a monopoly. If a line of work for certain skills is completely monopolized by one company, a union can’t ever get bigger than them to enforce anything. Its a stalemate that the company can end by training scabs and a union can’t end at all. That’s assuming the company doesn’t just start murdering Union heads which is probably the first thing they’d start to do without an organization larger than a company to call on.
Of course, maybe we could unionize everyone into a people’s union, for the purposes of having a bigger entity than a corporation that can defend the people. Pay some Union dues to them to get some police-equivalent people to make companies toe the line. But corruption exists and while the USA isn’t really for the people today, that is pretty much how the USA started.
Unions as we know them rely on regulations like anti-monopoly laws to exist.
Although for the record I don’t hate anarcho capitalism, I just think it’s more of an ideal. A more realistic but comparable system would include a government to protect union rights and prevent oligarchical behaviors while still being mostly hands off on an industry with a Union, letting the union enforce safety and related guidelines.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 13:47
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Ancap does not allow murder, but ancap also doesn’t protect patents and trademarks, so from stage one a monopoly can’t form. In some perspective it can.
Although for the record I don’t hate anarcho capitalism, I just think it’s more of an ideal. A more realistic but comparable system would include a government to protect union rights and prevent oligarchical behaviors while still being mostly hands off on an industry with a Union, letting the union enforce safety and related guidelines.
This is what just a bit under half of ancaps think.
Almost all other ancaps want panarchy, which is more or less the same, but involves a central entity to prevent outright mass violence, while all other functionality is under exterritorial jurisdictions under it.
There’s a negligible minority of complete idealists.
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 14:18
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That is minarchism. Still fails as a society model at every metric we judge a good society model with, but you aren’t an anarchist. You just like the folklore because it sounds cool.
Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
on 20 Jul 2024 15:00
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Dude is just a different flavor of typical Neo-Lib conservatism. Just tries to pretend to be something else while voting straight R in every election
I once spoke to someone who comes across as libertarian at my workplace and asked them why their resistance to oppression and authoritarianism by the state doesn’t extend to the economy, in that private owners run fiefdoms and both oppress and dictate the actions of their laborers.
The answer was that “I guess I just think there’ll always be some oppression”
This is the kind of critical thinking we’re usually dealing with. These people will lick boots as long as they’re not democratically elected and instead just inherited or purchased. They are OK with dictators and kings as long as there’s no DIRECT violence, no matter the actual harm and violence done to the working class.
Mine work should be a valid career path for children not wanting to go to secondary school
jorp@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 13:10
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Ancaps are like monotheists to anarchism’s atheism. You’ve given up MOST oppression and hierarchy but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism.
Abolish all hierarchy, end all oppression.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 14:06
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but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism.
We actually don’t, we worship voluntarism, taboo on aggressive violence and personal borders, the rest is up to free interpretation from these axioms.
Also it’s not monotheism, rather a system like Taoism in the wild.
But I’ll return to this:
but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism
There’s an issue with no evolutionary mechanisms in a society.
A person who doesn’t know how to survive and doesn’t get help from others dies. A person who knows or gets that help doesn’t. On this level there are no problems as we assume that people help each other, if we are talking about “usual” anarchism.
Now, people form communes. Communes require organization. We don’t want them to have hierarchy, but the situation where everybody respects the rights of others won’t hold by itself. If you expel those who make trouble, then a sufficiently intelligent sociopath may persuade the majority to expel those they don’t like. Other than it being the problem in itself, this will eventually make sociopaths more likely to be the leaders of communes, and form hierarchy. If you don’t expel those who make trouble, you’ll need hierarchy right away to re-educate or jail or punish and otherwise discourage them somehow. These are all with the assumption of common property.
But if we have private property and voluntarism, so every person is a faction in itself, as if they, pun intended, had sovereignty, - we have an evolutionary mechanism which reduces the advantage sociopaths have. It doesn’t negate it, but you may collect power, expressed in property, as an alternative to power expressed in social ties, and the existence of the latter you can’t abolish. So we prolong the life of communities.
And there’s another consideration - property can be collected both by honest and dishonest means, the former meaning someone’s opinion is more valuable on practical subjects. Power as social ties is usually of the “dishonest” kind. Even without private property, frankly, someone of more use for the commune has more weight, but private property allows to account for that more easily. When your understanding who is more useful for the commune and who is less useful for the commune is skewed, it’ll have smaller chances of survival.
And then how do you share resources with a commune part of which you don’t want to be? What will make them behave in the spirit of brotherhood and equality and such? Same if you are a smaller commune. Will they declare you antisocial or something, capture all those resources for themselves and leave you to die?
(With ancap to share resources and various devices of existence property is preserved, and other borders erected, and systems on basis of voluntary agreements are offered to prevent violence.)
jorp@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 14:14
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weird how this flavour of “anarchism” is pretty identical to conservative politics
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 14:29
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I’ve specifically put parentheses to leave the hypothetical situation where I’d like to see answers as the last paragraph without them.
I’ve literally explained how with property you get a mechanism for communal cooperation without hierarchy.
You don’t seem to differentiate private property and personal property and also I learned long ago not to bother debating with ancaps because the rational ones tend to un-cap themselves on their own eventually
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 14:37
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The difference would exist in a world where you have a mediator making it. How would you differentiate them without such?
Say, I have a longbow, a tunic, leather pants and shoes and arrows on me and a piece of cloth I sleep on. Is that piece of cloth personal or private property? Say, for me they are all the same, but somebody near me needs that cloth. I say no, because I need it too. They say I’ll be fine with half of it. I say no without disputing whether half of it is enough for my needs. Who’s right?
EDIT: Ah, also I’ve already, as you say, “un-capped” myself like 10 years ago, being tired of the emotional component of ancap, and was trying to be realistic and open to new ideas and such. I don’t regret it, I’ve learned a few more things, it was cool and all.
But in the end realized that what I have is simply an evolution of ancap. Even when I’ve been reading Trotskyist articles and imagining ways to build that. Thus I’m calling myself ancap.
The only things comprising ancap are moral constraints, all the rest is good until it doesn’t violate them. Say, ancaps are fine with ancom communes existing and interacting between each other in pretty ancom ways. The only situation where ancom won’t be a valid ancap is when ancoms prevent someone from leaving their heaven if that someone wishes so or try to conquer the neighboring Ancapistan for agricultural land.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what private property is. Also I’m not sure if you understand exactly where capitalism begins and ends compared to other concepts like money, trade, and markets.
The gap there is again the concept of private property and how economic production capability is owned and operated.
It’s shocking to me how much trouble people have imagining non-capitalist systems, propaganda has successfully conflated the idea of capitalism with economy, and with freedom. You’re more a victim of that than anything else, so no hard feelings.
Anarcho-capitalism is a contradictory ideology and there’s no way to reconcile those two things together. Capitalism must be rejected in any egalitarian society.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 15:23
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I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what private property is.
That’s damn certain, I’ve only seen any discussion on the possible separation of such 1) in Russian language, 2) it’s specific to your ideology, so requires clarification of terms.
Also I’m not sure if you understand exactly where capitalism begins and ends compared to other concepts like money, trade, and markets.
Same with this. People mean all kinds of things saying “capitalism”. It requires clarifying which exact meaning you are using.
It’s shocking to me how much trouble people have imagining non-capitalist systems, propaganda has successfully conflated the idea of capitalism with economy, and with freedom. You’re more a victim of that than anything else, so no hard feelings.
Well, no hard feelings, but when I try to extract specific statements from this sentence, I get none. A bit similar to the Imperial ambassador’s words from “Foundation” book.
Anarcho-capitalism is a contradictory ideology and there’s no way to reconcile those two things together. Capitalism must be rejected in any egalitarian society.
Anarcho-capitalism does not necessarily involve capitalism (depends on the definition of that). It’s a name that stuck.
Yikes dawg how does one communicate with someone whose ideological landscape is full of missing definitions and contradictory definitions? There’s a lot to untangle here and I’m not willing or able to do that for you. I can only suggest reading more anarchist sources. I typically share this one as a decent conceptual intro theanarchistlibrary.org/…/peter-gelderloos-anarch… although I don’t agree with everything it says.
I’m finding it difficult to be talking to an “anarcho-capitalist” who doesn’t seem to agree or identify with either anarchism or capitalism nor have confidence in their understanding of the terms.
Maybe don’t be so quick to label yourself, let your mind explore without the baggage of assuming what you are a priori.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 15:49
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Yikes dawg how does one communicate with someone whose ideological landscape is full of missing definitions and contradictory definitions?
That’s not what I’ve said. I’ve said that your definitions are subjective to your own ideology. Thus they require clarification when used.
There’s a lot to untangle here and I’m not willing or able to do that for you. I can only suggest reading more anarchist sources. I typically share this one as a decent conceptual intro theanarchistlibrary.org/…/peter-gelderloos-anarch… although I don’t agree with everything it says.
I’ve read Kropotkin. For everything good, against everything bad, no specifics, no mechanisms, and how animals don’t hurt each other for power (in fact they do).
I’m finding it difficult to be talking to an “anarcho-capitalist” who doesn’t seem to agree or identify with either anarchism or capitalism nor have confidence in their understanding of the terms.
I’ve even explained to you how ancap is just a common name and what the ideology called that actually is. That your brain skips anything you don’t expect from this conversation is your own flaw, sorry.
Maybe don’t be so quick to label yourself, let your mind explore without the baggage of assuming what you are a priori.
That’s amazing.
jlou@mastodon.social
on 20 Jul 2024 18:25
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Here are a few anarchist and anarchist-adjacent sources to go into specifics about institutions that an anarchist society might have:
The Possibility of Cooperation by Michael Taylor - A critique of Hobbes's argument for the state with modern game theory
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 19:24
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Thank you, this is exactly what I dream of getting when engaging in arguments over anarchism in the Web.
jlou@mastodon.social
on 21 Jul 2024 03:24
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Capitalism is inherently based on dishonesty. It routinely treats people as things in the employer-employee relationship. When the factual and legal situation don't match, that is morally a fraud.
Postcapitalism would consists of various intersecting and overlapping voluntary democratic associations managing their own collectivized means of production. Within these groups, there would still be a notion of possession of the shared asset.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 21 Jul 2024 06:50
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It routinely treats people as things in the employer-employee relationship.
No. A contract can only be signed by two equal sides. If you mean emotionally and in planning - well, do you treat your employer as people or as that thing, system, which allows you to get money in exchange for work?
Postcapitalism would consists of various intersecting and overlapping voluntary democratic associations managing their own collectivized means of production.
Does this mean that such an association is the basic entity? Because any system where a human is not the basic entity is unacceptable for me.
there would still be a notion of possession of the shared asset
Specifics? When I leave that voluntary association, what of possessions stops being managed by it? If I enter it with some “means of production” and leave it after some time, with what I leave?
How does possession of those means overlap between associations?
Does the described mean that a person can’t have property, but an association can?
jlou@mastodon.social
on 21 Jul 2024 16:38
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Capitalism puts de facto persons into a thing's legal role. Consenting to a contract doesn't alienate personhood. As labor-sellers, workers are treated as persons. The issue arises with the workers as labor performers. The employees are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but get 0% of property and liabilities for the results of production. Instead, the employer has 100% sole legal responsibility.
Individuals are the basic entity. Groups' rules vary @technology
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 21 Jul 2024 17:18
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The issue arises with the workers as labor performers. The employees are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but get 0% of property and liabilities for the results of production. Instead, the employer has 100% sole legal responsibility.
That’s true, but cooperatives can legally exist where workers share those.
It’s rather that dynamic of power makes bad behavior advantageous, but what would change this in “simple” anarchism?
Ancaps imagine aiming for maximal granularity and variability, so that the same kind of abusive behavior wouldn’t fit all cases and rules’ combinations (same as with epidemics) and there’d be market mechanisms functioning due to scale (things generally look better when there are, say, 100 microsofts instead of 1). They assume that those variability and granularity won’t be reduced through open violence (conquering of subduing jurisdictions with differing rules on something) and enforcement of monopolies (trademarks, patents, licenses and such), because of everybody being armed to the teeth and usually there’s still assumed some centralized state which will keep the situation from coming to open violence.
In case of “simple” anarchism I see contempt for ancap concepts of solving this, but what are the alternatives?
No anwer is too stupid for me, even new genetically altered humans (I’ve literally encountered an opinion that an anarchist society may require this to make humanity more empathetic, LOL).
Individuals are the basic entity. Groups’ rules vary
This doesn’t seem to be different from ancap+panarchy when described so abstractly.
jlou@mastodon.social
on 21 Jul 2024 23:01
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Cooperatives existing doesn't solve the problem as it doesn't address the violation of inalienable rights in all non-coop firms. Consent doesn't transfer responsibility. The solution is to abolish the employment contract and secure universal self-employment as in a worker coop.
Markets have a place, but non-market mechanisms and mutual aid should flourish within groups. Ancaps see the logic of exit, but ignore the dual logic of commitment and voice e.g. democracy and social property @technology
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 22 Jul 2024 05:14
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Consent doesn’t transfer responsibility.
I agree.
Ancaps see the logic of exit, but ignore the dual logic of commitment and voice e.g. democracy and social property
Ancaps delegate this to free will.
Including
… but non-market mechanisms and mutual aid should flourish within groups.
Only how do you form a group with its resources without property of individuals as its components?
jlou@mastodon.social
on 22 Jul 2024 12:52
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So you agree that the employer-employee contract must be abolished due to it violating workers' inalienable right to workplace democracy?
The way collective property works is that each group member that possesses collective property self-assess and declares the price they would be willing to turn over the possession to another group member. Then, they pay a percentage fee on this self-assessed price to the group. Groups democratically decide what to do with the collective funds @technology
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 22 Jul 2024 13:05
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So you agree that the employer-employee contract must be abolished due to it violating workers’ inalienable right to workplace democracy?
No, just that you can’t offload responsibility via contract. I agree though that contract under clear pressure is negligible.
The way collective property works is that each group member that possesses collective property self-assess and declares the price they would be willing to turn over the possession to another group member. Then, they pay a percentage fee on this self-assessed price to the group. Groups democratically decide what to do with the collective funds
So a group can make the fee zero and thus have a usual ancap community?
jlou@mastodon.social
on 22 Jul 2024 13:35
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The employment contract is such a contract. It involves a legal transfer of legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of production from the employees to the solely the employer. However, there is no corresponding de facto transfer of de facto responsibility. The contract is unfulfillable.
Groups set exit fees for transferring out community value. They can lower the exit fees for mutually-recognized groups, and exclude "groups" with no public goods funding @technology
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 22 Jul 2024 13:53
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The employment contract is such a contract. It involves a legal transfer of legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of production from the employees to the solely the employer. However, there is no corresponding de facto transfer of de facto responsibility. The contract is unfulfillable.
Funny that I have never looked at it from this particular point.
Groups set exit fees for transferring out community value. They can lower the exit fees for mutually-recognized groups, and exclude “groups” with no public goods funding
Can one person be a group?
jlou@mastodon.social
on 22 Jul 2024 14:17
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1 individual can be a part of many groups. Being a part of zero groups would make people pay steep exit fees for every economic transaction with you and you wouldn't be able to access any group collective property, group currencies or receive mutual aid that these groups provide. There would be strong economic incentives to participate in these groups. Since all firms would be mandated to be worker coops, these groups would be a new way to provide startup capital to new firms
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 22 Jul 2024 14:27
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OK, the economical parts have more constraints than ancap, but the whole idea is similar and understandable.
What about violence? If a person commits murder or theft, how do the rest deal with it?
If there’s an argument over something, how does it get resolved?
Same question as “how do law enforcement and courts work in ancap”, only not for ancap.
jlou@mastodon.social
on 22 Jul 2024 20:26
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Abolishing the employment contract isn't more constraints than ancap. It is part of legitimate contracts' non-fraudulent nature.
Groups enable the large-scale cooperation needed for an ordered stateless society.
Groups could have judicial systems. Judicial agreements could exist between groups. Thieves would pay damages to the victim. For serious crimes, there could be expulsion from group(s) and blocklists
For arguments, groups could subsidize agreement across social distance
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 23 Jul 2024 06:12
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Abolishing the employment contract isn’t more constraints than ancap. It is part of legitimate contracts’ non-fraudulent nature.
I meant in general - two sides in ancap may voluntarily decide whatever concerns them both via any mechanism they come up with, but if that violates the rights of others, the others of course are not obligated by it in any way, or if it transfers responsibility in this case, others are not obligated to follow that transfer.
Here we have something less relative and more static.
Groups could have judicial systems. Judicial agreements could exist between groups. Thieves would pay damages to the victim. For serious crimes, there could be expulsion from group(s) and blocklists
OK. This is as bad or as good an answer as for ancap, because it’s the same answer.
In general what you describe is technically a subset of ancap+panarchy, which is what I meant by more constraints.
jlou@mastodon.social
on 24 Jul 2024 00:06
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The ancap vision lacks necessities for stable stateless societies besides the dual logics of exit and commitment. By having some rights be non-transferable, it prevents them from accumulating and concentrating maintaining decentralization and preventing collusion to form a state. There is no middle ground, in the ancap vision, between full economic planning of the firm and completely uncoordinated atomized individuals in the market. The groups I describe provide that. @technology
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 14:09
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Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. You need hierarchies to protect private property, otherwise the whole thing just collapses on itself because there’s no significant force to prevent theft - and not just by communities, be it states or cities, not following the principles of that selfish flavor of liberalism.
Even if everyone lived in an “ancap” dystopia, that doesn’t make everybody magically immune to greed, and some would happily bend the rules and loot, kill or steal, even if they agree on the social contract.
I really don’t think these idiots deserve the label “anarchism”. I like to go with “neo-feodalism” because this is what their dystopias can only resolve to ultimately as soon as wealth is concentrated enough (which is inevitable without corrective action currently undertaken by the state in normal societies).
I’m not saying this for you as much as I’m saying it for the lemmings that might not be too familiar with their nonsense.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 14:12
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Because many ancaps don’t agree with you about unions. Are you sure you’re not a market anarchist?
Not everyone here is an anarchist.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 14:27
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It was a rhetorical question ; unions function through negotiating together most of all.
laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 20 Jul 2024 15:26
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If regulation didn’t work, corpos wouldn’t fight so hard to dismantle them every step of the way. If they didn’t work, we wouldn’t see things get markedly worse every time they’re removed.
And ancap just sounds like all the worst bits of libertarianism taken to their illogical extreme and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable so why do any people here not hate ancap?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 15:46
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If regulation didn’t work, corpos wouldn’t fight so hard to dismantle them every step of the way. If they didn’t work, we wouldn’t see things get markedly worse every time they’re removed.
OK, they work, just both ways. Corps work to make them work more for them and less for everyone else. Since they have more power, they slowly succeed.
And ancap just sounds like all the worst bits of libertarianism taken to their illogical extreme and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable so why do any people here not hate ancap?
Ancap is one of the words for libertarianism.
and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable
I think a society valuing freedom and non-aggression above the rest in not that.
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 16:01
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History is a great teacher. Without a powerful state to curb the influence of the owners of capital like when the US dismantled the standard rail in the early 20th century, what is going to prevent the natural concentration of wealth in the hands of an all-powerful lord, since accumulation is the endgame of capitalism?
What you describe can only ever become a nightmarish dystopia that would bring about a new era of feodalism. And nobody except a few sheltered idiots are falling for that shit.
And what you seem to describe in your other comments is actually minarchism and not anarchism, which handwaves the complexity of anarchism away for a flavor of “extreme economic conservatism but I don’t want to pay taxes”, which is incredibly shallow and selfish, on top of being actively against your personal interest.
Worth highlighting that, at least in my opinion, regulation by a state isn’t the only way to rein in corporate society-destroying impulses. If all “corporations” were worker owned and operated by the laborers you’d have lots of people “in charge” who like havingclean water and air in their community.
This is a critique of capitalism first and foremost, not of the “anarchist” part (again, admittedly debatable).
laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 20 Jul 2024 23:51
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Absolutely agreed on that… Got a fair number of companies I’d like to see taken over by the people working them or the communities they serve
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 15:46
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Mostly because it has more to do with feodalism than anarchism proper.
next up: microsoft closes bethesda game studio, reassigns all assets to other departments.
… still glad to see it though. i’d love to see tech giants brought low by all the workers just withdrawing their labor.
CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 03:30
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This is what’s next for Bethesda, but it’s smart of them to only unionize after Bethesda has started on their next “independent” project. It all depends on how ES6 does. If it isn’t a smash hit with decent reception, Bethesda will be absorbed into Microsoft I guarantee it
Windex007@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 06:37
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If it depends on how ES6 is received they still have another 6 or 7 years
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 18:38
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Though with a union, they have an organization set up where they could tell ms to go fuck themselves and start a new studio, especially with non-competes losing their teeth recently.
ICastFist@programming.dev
on 20 Jul 2024 18:57
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Considering the assholery that Obsidian went through with New Vegas, I fully expect the higher ups to do everything in their power to fuck up TES6 if it means the end of the union, one way or another.
affiliate@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 04:57
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Well it’s not the company that did it, it’s the workers
Fedizen@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 14:02
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This will help standardize contracts across the business and ensure things like credits, benefits, etc are done in a systemic way
explodicle@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 14:24
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As a decades-long Bethesda fan, I think this might improve product quality from what we saw in Starfield. It’s clear that somebody needs to be able to talk back to King Todd.
Maybe if they’re not so alienated from their work, we’ll see more of other people’s creative vision.
Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
on 20 Jul 2024 14:31
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Starfield is Todd Howard making his Homer Simpson car. It’s a pile of shit no one wanted.
Wogi@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 14:38
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What are you talking about, he revolutionized the walking simulator. Now you can jump real high too. And instead of traveling places you just loading screen everywhere.
TheDarksteel94@sopuli.xyz
on 20 Jul 2024 15:27
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You can jump further too, but only if you rebind the jump button :D
ICastFist@programming.dev
on 20 Jul 2024 18:54
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I do think that’s more Emil Pagliarulo’s car than Todd
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
on 20 Jul 2024 14:49
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This is the first thought I had. Capitalist apologists would probably say the exact opposite, that owners need to be able to abuse workers to get more and better work out of them, but that’s basically never true. Owners owe so much to their workers’ creativity - even in fields where you wouldn’t expect - and they are deeply unaware of it.
pyre@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 16:22
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to be fair, a forest fire might improve product quality from what we saw in starfield
applebusch@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 21:04
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Fire is a natural and necessary part of many ecosystemsm. It keeps parasitic insect populations down, stuff like ticks and chiggers, and some plant species rely on fire to prepare the soil for seeds and even is required for some plants to release their seeds. In dry ecosystems like the western USA it also consumes old dead plant material, reducing the fuel available for future fires and reducing fire severity overall. Many foresters and fire fighters advocate for increasing prescribed burns, essentially forest fires that we light on purpose in cooler and wetter times of the year to consume the fuel without risking a catastrophic fire that is difficult to control. I just think that’s neat.
ToyDork@preserve.games
on 21 Jul 2024 22:10
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Everyone should know this. The fire he said “This is fine” about was a metaphorical one, after all. But then, Unionization has been important to have in the economic ecosystem as well, so it might just be that greatly-needed wildfire in a forest with too much corporate rot.
SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 19:16
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This will be great for the workers, but I don’t think it will necessarily fix the issues in Bethesda’s organization when it comes to game development (and it won’t make them worse either).
Given what we know from Starfield, Bethesda is really lacking when it comes to planning: they aren’t doing a good job at establishing a compact vision for the final product which also results in having issues to establish an agile workflow to get from start to finish. In the best cases, this results in ludonarrative disonance where the story isn’t really supported by the mechanics of the game (example: Fallout 4’s story incentivizes the player to hurry up and look for their son, but they assign a lot of resources into making sandbox mechanics such as those related to base building); in the worst cases, this results in teams returning the ball to each other all the time because they aren’t properly coordinated to build things in the way other teams of the studio needs them, which loses a lot of time and becomes even more glaringly obvious the larger the project is.
The silver lining is: this problem isn’t so noticeable when the designers have the template of Oblivion in their minds and they’re making Skyrim, but it was going to be completely exposed when making the jump to a new IP (and thus a new universe), with a new engine, with some large design jumps such as ceding ground to dynamically created areas; so ES6 doesn’t have to be as much of a low point as it has been Starfield, as long as they’re conservative in their design choices. I’d vastly prefer the leadership of Bethesda to be completely reorganized, which would allow them to innovate by taking well measured risks, but I don’t have much hope for that scenario.
Either way it’s a good thing, a major company unionizing could lead to the whole industry unionizing
SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Jul 2024 06:33
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On that, I agree.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 14:33
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And I doubt the studio will see the end of this decade under Microshit‘s umbrella. Nonetheless I applaud the employees. Their success might be short lived but it‘s a success all the same.
Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de
on 20 Jul 2024 15:25
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5.5 years? No way they’ll shut down this quickly. The next Elder Scrolls alone will carry them into 2030. (As much as I would enjoy you being right though…)
CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 16:40
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If starfield is anything to go by, the new elder scrolls might be a step back from modded skyrim.
You assume TES6 isnt going to be pure trash like FO76 and starfield but… um… I dont share that same outlook. If anything TES6 will be the final nail in the coffin when the masses get their hands on it and see the buggy outdated mess they get.
Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de
on 20 Jul 2024 18:16
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I didn’t say that.
I expect it to be about as awful as Starfield. However, unlike Starfield (which didn’t sell horrendously by any source I can find, just not great) it has incredible brand recognition behind it. I have no doubts it will sell based on that alone as long as it looks like Skyrim 2 at first glance.
Edit: right after posting I figured out how to formulate what else I wanted to say but couldn’t find the correct words for: “Sadly profitability and quality don’t always correlate.”
BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee
on 20 Jul 2024 18:44
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neither of those games are pure trash. unless all you ever play is 10/10 masterpieces and nothing worse than that
zaphod@sopuli.xyz
on 20 Jul 2024 19:39
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5.5 years?
Might be just enough for another remaster of Sykrim.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world
on 21 Jul 2024 23:14
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Or Microsoft will just close the studio and outsource the IP. It’s how Bethesda got Fallout.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
on 20 Jul 2024 14:49
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Damn I needed some good news bad, that is fantastic!
That’s the neat thing about workers’ rights. Workers have more interest in making good products than investors, especially in artistic fields. Investors will gladly sabotage a product’s quality for the sake of personal gain and move on to the next company with goodwill to exploit, but for workers a job well done is inherently rewarding.
Unionization directly leads to better games with more artistic merit.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
on 21 Jul 2024 00:43
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next up: microsoft announces development of Bethesda’s next game will be largely outsourced
Gamers prolitariat did unite and push back against exploitation.
Ad4mWayn3@lemmy.world
on 22 Jul 2024 12:29
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Forgive my ignorance, but what is a union supposed to mean/represent in this context? What benefit may the employees get from unionizing? Has this actually ever worked before?
coffee_with_cream@sh.itjust.works
on 22 Jul 2024 20:50
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Worked for cops, teachers, and iron workers
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
on 22 Jul 2024 23:27
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It’s why we have a 40h work week and safe factories.
threaded - newest
Good for them
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.
Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers.
The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica.
(Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)
Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
The original article contains 165 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 11%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Better be careful they don’t clip through any windows.
Finally some good news out of Bethesda
Seeing the rebirth of unions in tech companies might be one of my favorite things about this timeline.
Not nearly prevalent enough or fast enough, let’s gooooo!
A few years ago a tech friend literally couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
Check again, maybe it was me.
I’m at a tech company. It’s nowhere near prevalent, nor do I think many employees actually want it. I’d love for it to happen, though, and IMO the first place it should happen is the video games industry.
Agreed. I think we’re in the, “fuck around and find out,” era of tech company unionization, and I’m fortunate enough to work for a company whose legal team is smart enough to know that a reasonably happy, fulfilled, and compensated workforce is significantly less likely to even start discussing unionization, and so I don’t think that my company will see it anytime soon, if ever (which I also think is fine, for the record). But to your point, with the way that the vast majority of the video game industry treats their employees, I hope that every single one of those large game companies ends up joining a union, because the employees deserve better.
✊
Hell yeah good for them.
Congrats! Now you guys can use collective bargaining to ensure you’re paid for every single bug you code. This is huge!
Seriously though, unions are good for the industry, I’m happy to see this is continuing at ever more software companies.
Unions work in ancap just as well as IRL, thus I support unions.
Regulation doesn’t work IRL and doesn’t exist in ancap.
Why do people here hate ancap again?
Unions don’t work without a central state.
If there isn’t an organization larger than a corporation making it keep to a line, a corporation will end up as a monopoly. If a line of work for certain skills is completely monopolized by one company, a union can’t ever get bigger than them to enforce anything. Its a stalemate that the company can end by training scabs and a union can’t end at all. That’s assuming the company doesn’t just start murdering Union heads which is probably the first thing they’d start to do without an organization larger than a company to call on.
Of course, maybe we could unionize everyone into a people’s union, for the purposes of having a bigger entity than a corporation that can defend the people. Pay some Union dues to them to get some police-equivalent people to make companies toe the line. But corruption exists and while the USA isn’t really for the people today, that is pretty much how the USA started.
Unions as we know them rely on regulations like anti-monopoly laws to exist.
Although for the record I don’t hate anarcho capitalism, I just think it’s more of an ideal. A more realistic but comparable system would include a government to protect union rights and prevent oligarchical behaviors while still being mostly hands off on an industry with a Union, letting the union enforce safety and related guidelines.
Ancap does not allow murder, but ancap also doesn’t protect patents and trademarks, so from stage one a monopoly can’t form. In some perspective it can.
This is what just a bit under half of ancaps think.
Almost all other ancaps want panarchy, which is more or less the same, but involves a central entity to prevent outright mass violence, while all other functionality is under exterritorial jurisdictions under it.
There’s a negligible minority of complete idealists.
That is minarchism. Still fails as a society model at every metric we judge a good society model with, but you aren’t an anarchist. You just like the folklore because it sounds cool.
Dude is just a different flavor of typical Neo-Lib conservatism. Just tries to pretend to be something else while voting straight R in every election
I once spoke to someone who comes across as libertarian at my workplace and asked them why their resistance to oppression and authoritarianism by the state doesn’t extend to the economy, in that private owners run fiefdoms and both oppress and dictate the actions of their laborers.
The answer was that “I guess I just think there’ll always be some oppression”
This is the kind of critical thinking we’re usually dealing with. These people will lick boots as long as they’re not democratically elected and instead just inherited or purchased. They are OK with dictators and kings as long as there’s no DIRECT violence, no matter the actual harm and violence done to the working class.
Mine work should be a valid career path for children not wanting to go to secondary school
Ancaps are like monotheists to anarchism’s atheism. You’ve given up MOST oppression and hierarchy but for some reason you still worship the inequalities of capitalism.
Abolish all hierarchy, end all oppression.
We actually don’t, we worship voluntarism, taboo on aggressive violence and personal borders, the rest is up to free interpretation from these axioms.
Also it’s not monotheism, rather a system like Taoism in the wild.
But I’ll return to this:
There’s an issue with no evolutionary mechanisms in a society.
A person who doesn’t know how to survive and doesn’t get help from others dies. A person who knows or gets that help doesn’t. On this level there are no problems as we assume that people help each other, if we are talking about “usual” anarchism.
Now, people form communes. Communes require organization. We don’t want them to have hierarchy, but the situation where everybody respects the rights of others won’t hold by itself. If you expel those who make trouble, then a sufficiently intelligent sociopath may persuade the majority to expel those they don’t like. Other than it being the problem in itself, this will eventually make sociopaths more likely to be the leaders of communes, and form hierarchy. If you don’t expel those who make trouble, you’ll need hierarchy right away to re-educate or jail or punish and otherwise discourage them somehow. These are all with the assumption of common property.
But if we have private property and voluntarism, so every person is a faction in itself, as if they, pun intended, had sovereignty, - we have an evolutionary mechanism which reduces the advantage sociopaths have. It doesn’t negate it, but you may collect power, expressed in property, as an alternative to power expressed in social ties, and the existence of the latter you can’t abolish. So we prolong the life of communities.
And there’s another consideration - property can be collected both by honest and dishonest means, the former meaning someone’s opinion is more valuable on practical subjects. Power as social ties is usually of the “dishonest” kind. Even without private property, frankly, someone of more use for the commune has more weight, but private property allows to account for that more easily. When your understanding who is more useful for the commune and who is less useful for the commune is skewed, it’ll have smaller chances of survival.
And then how do you share resources with a commune part of which you don’t want to be? What will make them behave in the spirit of brotherhood and equality and such? Same if you are a smaller commune. Will they declare you antisocial or something, capture all those resources for themselves and leave you to die?
(With ancap to share resources and various devices of existence property is preserved, and other borders erected, and systems on basis of voluntary agreements are offered to prevent violence.)
weird how this flavour of “anarchism” is pretty identical to conservative politics
I’ve specifically put parentheses to leave the hypothetical situation where I’d like to see answers as the last paragraph without them.
I’ve literally explained how with property you get a mechanism for communal cooperation without hierarchy.
You don’t seem to differentiate private property and personal property and also I learned long ago not to bother debating with ancaps because the rational ones tend to un-cap themselves on their own eventually
The difference would exist in a world where you have a mediator making it. How would you differentiate them without such?
Say, I have a longbow, a tunic, leather pants and shoes and arrows on me and a piece of cloth I sleep on. Is that piece of cloth personal or private property? Say, for me they are all the same, but somebody near me needs that cloth. I say no, because I need it too. They say I’ll be fine with half of it. I say no without disputing whether half of it is enough for my needs. Who’s right?
EDIT: Ah, also I’ve already, as you say, “un-capped” myself like 10 years ago, being tired of the emotional component of ancap, and was trying to be realistic and open to new ideas and such. I don’t regret it, I’ve learned a few more things, it was cool and all.
But in the end realized that what I have is simply an evolution of ancap. Even when I’ve been reading Trotskyist articles and imagining ways to build that. Thus I’m calling myself ancap.
The only things comprising ancap are moral constraints, all the rest is good until it doesn’t violate them. Say, ancaps are fine with ancom communes existing and interacting between each other in pretty ancom ways. The only situation where ancom won’t be a valid ancap is when ancoms prevent someone from leaving their heaven if that someone wishes so or try to conquer the neighboring Ancapistan for agricultural land.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what private property is. Also I’m not sure if you understand exactly where capitalism begins and ends compared to other concepts like money, trade, and markets.
The gap there is again the concept of private property and how economic production capability is owned and operated.
It’s shocking to me how much trouble people have imagining non-capitalist systems, propaganda has successfully conflated the idea of capitalism with economy, and with freedom. You’re more a victim of that than anything else, so no hard feelings.
Anarcho-capitalism is a contradictory ideology and there’s no way to reconcile those two things together. Capitalism must be rejected in any egalitarian society.
That’s damn certain, I’ve only seen any discussion on the possible separation of such 1) in Russian language, 2) it’s specific to your ideology, so requires clarification of terms.
Same with this. People mean all kinds of things saying “capitalism”. It requires clarifying which exact meaning you are using.
Well, no hard feelings, but when I try to extract specific statements from this sentence, I get none. A bit similar to the Imperial ambassador’s words from “Foundation” book.
Anarcho-capitalism does not necessarily involve capitalism (depends on the definition of that). It’s a name that stuck.
Yikes dawg how does one communicate with someone whose ideological landscape is full of missing definitions and contradictory definitions? There’s a lot to untangle here and I’m not willing or able to do that for you. I can only suggest reading more anarchist sources. I typically share this one as a decent conceptual intro theanarchistlibrary.org/…/peter-gelderloos-anarch… although I don’t agree with everything it says.
I’m finding it difficult to be talking to an “anarcho-capitalist” who doesn’t seem to agree or identify with either anarchism or capitalism nor have confidence in their understanding of the terms.
Maybe don’t be so quick to label yourself, let your mind explore without the baggage of assuming what you are a priori.
That’s not what I’ve said. I’ve said that your definitions are subjective to your own ideology. Thus they require clarification when used.
I’ve read Kropotkin. For everything good, against everything bad, no specifics, no mechanisms, and how animals don’t hurt each other for power (in fact they do).
I’ve even explained to you how ancap is just a common name and what the ideology called that actually is. That your brain skips anything you don’t expect from this conversation is your own flaw, sorry.
That’s amazing.
Here are a few anarchist and anarchist-adjacent sources to go into specifics about institutions that an anarchist society might have:
The Possibility of Cooperation by Michael Taylor - A critique of Hobbes's argument for the state with modern game theory
https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/plural-money-a-new-currency-design/ - A currency design that encourages mutual aid. Mentions how collective ownership can be achieved without a state.
Ancaps support employment contracts. This is contradictory: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
@technology
Thank you, this is exactly what I dream of getting when engaging in arguments over anarchism in the Web.
Capitalism is inherently based on dishonesty. It routinely treats people as things in the employer-employee relationship. When the factual and legal situation don't match, that is morally a fraud.
Postcapitalism would consists of various intersecting and overlapping voluntary democratic associations managing their own collectivized means of production. Within these groups, there would still be a notion of possession of the shared asset.
@technology
No. A contract can only be signed by two equal sides. If you mean emotionally and in planning - well, do you treat your employer as people or as that thing, system, which allows you to get money in exchange for work?
Does this mean that such an association is the basic entity? Because any system where a human is not the basic entity is unacceptable for me.
Specifics? When I leave that voluntary association, what of possessions stops being managed by it? If I enter it with some “means of production” and leave it after some time, with what I leave?
How does possession of those means overlap between associations?
Does the described mean that a person can’t have property, but an association can?
Capitalism puts de facto persons into a thing's legal role. Consenting to a contract doesn't alienate personhood. As labor-sellers, workers are treated as persons. The issue arises with the workers as labor performers. The employees are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but get 0% of property and liabilities for the results of production. Instead, the employer has 100% sole legal responsibility.
Individuals are the basic entity. Groups' rules vary
@technology
That’s true, but cooperatives can legally exist where workers share those.
It’s rather that dynamic of power makes bad behavior advantageous, but what would change this in “simple” anarchism?
Ancaps imagine aiming for maximal granularity and variability, so that the same kind of abusive behavior wouldn’t fit all cases and rules’ combinations (same as with epidemics) and there’d be market mechanisms functioning due to scale (things generally look better when there are, say, 100 microsofts instead of 1). They assume that those variability and granularity won’t be reduced through open violence (conquering of subduing jurisdictions with differing rules on something) and enforcement of monopolies (trademarks, patents, licenses and such), because of everybody being armed to the teeth and usually there’s still assumed some centralized state which will keep the situation from coming to open violence.
In case of “simple” anarchism I see contempt for ancap concepts of solving this, but what are the alternatives?
No anwer is too stupid for me, even new genetically altered humans (I’ve literally encountered an opinion that an anarchist society may require this to make humanity more empathetic, LOL).
This doesn’t seem to be different from ancap+panarchy when described so abstractly.
Cooperatives existing doesn't solve the problem as it doesn't address the violation of inalienable rights in all non-coop firms. Consent doesn't transfer responsibility. The solution is to abolish the employment contract and secure universal self-employment as in a worker coop.
Markets have a place, but non-market mechanisms and mutual aid should flourish within groups. Ancaps see the logic of exit, but ignore the dual logic of commitment and voice e.g. democracy and social property
@technology
I agree.
Ancaps delegate this to free will.
Including
Only how do you form a group with its resources without property of individuals as its components?
So you agree that the employer-employee contract must be abolished due to it violating workers' inalienable right to workplace democracy?
The way collective property works is that each group member that possesses collective property self-assess and declares the price they would be willing to turn over the possession to another group member. Then, they pay a percentage fee on this self-assessed price to the group. Groups democratically decide what to do with the collective funds @technology
No, just that you can’t offload responsibility via contract. I agree though that contract under clear pressure is negligible.
So a group can make the fee zero and thus have a usual ancap community?
The employment contract is such a contract. It involves a legal transfer of legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of production from the employees to the solely the employer. However, there is no corresponding de facto transfer of de facto responsibility. The contract is unfulfillable.
Groups set exit fees for transferring out community value. They can lower the exit fees for mutually-recognized groups, and exclude "groups" with no public goods funding
@technology
Funny that I have never looked at it from this particular point.
Can one person be a group?
1 individual can be a part of many groups. Being a part of zero groups would make people pay steep exit fees for every economic transaction with you and you wouldn't be able to access any group collective property, group currencies or receive mutual aid that these groups provide. There would be strong economic incentives to participate in these groups. Since all firms would be mandated to be worker coops, these groups would be a new way to provide startup capital to new firms
@technology
OK, the economical parts have more constraints than ancap, but the whole idea is similar and understandable.
What about violence? If a person commits murder or theft, how do the rest deal with it?
If there’s an argument over something, how does it get resolved?
Same question as “how do law enforcement and courts work in ancap”, only not for ancap.
Abolishing the employment contract isn't more constraints than ancap. It is part of legitimate contracts' non-fraudulent nature.
Groups enable the large-scale cooperation needed for an ordered stateless society.
Groups could have judicial systems. Judicial agreements could exist between groups. Thieves would pay damages to the victim. For serious crimes, there could be expulsion from group(s) and blocklists
For arguments, groups could subsidize agreement across social distance
@technology
I meant in general - two sides in ancap may voluntarily decide whatever concerns them both via any mechanism they come up with, but if that violates the rights of others, the others of course are not obligated by it in any way, or if it transfers responsibility in this case, others are not obligated to follow that transfer.
Here we have something less relative and more static.
OK. This is as bad or as good an answer as for ancap, because it’s the same answer.
In general what you describe is technically a subset of ancap+panarchy, which is what I meant by more constraints.
The ancap vision lacks necessities for stable stateless societies besides the dual logics of exit and commitment. By having some rights be non-transferable, it prevents them from accumulating and concentrating maintaining decentralization and preventing collusion to form a state. There is no middle ground, in the ancap vision, between full economic planning of the firm and completely uncoordinated atomized individuals in the market. The groups I describe provide that.
@technology
Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. You need hierarchies to protect private property, otherwise the whole thing just collapses on itself because there’s no significant force to prevent theft - and not just by communities, be it states or cities, not following the principles of that selfish flavor of liberalism.
Even if everyone lived in an “ancap” dystopia, that doesn’t make everybody magically immune to greed, and some would happily bend the rules and loot, kill or steal, even if they agree on the social contract.
I really don’t think these idiots deserve the label “anarchism”. I like to go with “neo-feodalism” because this is what their dystopias can only resolve to ultimately as soon as wealth is concentrated enough (which is inevitable without corrective action currently undertaken by the state in normal societies).
I’m not saying this for you as much as I’m saying it for the lemmings that might not be too familiar with their nonsense.
For one illustration of the dangers of their stupid ideology, see vox.com/…/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libert…
Because many ancaps don’t agree with you about unions. Are you sure you’re not a market anarchist?
Not everyone here is an anarchist.
It was a rhetorical question ; unions function through negotiating together most of all.
If regulation didn’t work, corpos wouldn’t fight so hard to dismantle them every step of the way. If they didn’t work, we wouldn’t see things get markedly worse every time they’re removed.
And ancap just sounds like all the worst bits of libertarianism taken to their illogical extreme and would produce one of the worst possible societies imaginable so why do any people here not hate ancap?
OK, they work, just both ways. Corps work to make them work more for them and less for everyone else. Since they have more power, they slowly succeed.
Ancap is one of the words for libertarianism.
I think a society valuing freedom and non-aggression above the rest in not that.
History is a great teacher. Without a powerful state to curb the influence of the owners of capital like when the US dismantled the standard rail in the early 20th century, what is going to prevent the natural concentration of wealth in the hands of an all-powerful lord, since accumulation is the endgame of capitalism?
What you describe can only ever become a nightmarish dystopia that would bring about a new era of feodalism. And nobody except a few sheltered idiots are falling for that shit.
And what you seem to describe in your other comments is actually minarchism and not anarchism, which handwaves the complexity of anarchism away for a flavor of “extreme economic conservatism but I don’t want to pay taxes”, which is incredibly shallow and selfish, on top of being actively against your personal interest.
Worth highlighting that, at least in my opinion, regulation by a state isn’t the only way to rein in corporate society-destroying impulses. If all “corporations” were worker owned and operated by the laborers you’d have lots of people “in charge” who like havingclean water and air in their community.
This is a critique of capitalism first and foremost, not of the “anarchist” part (again, admittedly debatable).
Absolutely agreed on that… Got a fair number of companies I’d like to see taken over by the people working them or the communities they serve
Mostly because it has more to do with feodalism than anarchism proper.
next up: microsoft closes bethesda game studio, reassigns all assets to other departments.
… still glad to see it though. i’d love to see tech giants brought low by all the workers just withdrawing their labor.
This is what’s next for Bethesda, but it’s smart of them to only unionize after Bethesda has started on their next “independent” project. It all depends on how ES6 does. If it isn’t a smash hit with decent reception, Bethesda will be absorbed into Microsoft I guarantee it
If it depends on how ES6 is received they still have another 6 or 7 years
Though with a union, they have an organization set up where they could tell ms to go fuck themselves and start a new studio, especially with non-competes losing their teeth recently.
Considering the assholery that Obsidian went through with New Vegas, I fully expect the higher ups to do everything in their power to fuck up TES6 if it means the end of the union, one way or another.
best thing bethesda has done this decade
Well it’s not the company that did it, it’s the workers
This will help standardize contracts across the business and ensure things like credits, benefits, etc are done in a systemic way
As a decades-long Bethesda fan, I think this might improve product quality from what we saw in Starfield. It’s clear that somebody needs to be able to talk back to King Todd.
Maybe if they’re not so alienated from their work, we’ll see more of other people’s creative vision.
Starfield is Todd Howard making his Homer Simpson car. It’s a pile of shit no one wanted.
What are you talking about, he revolutionized the walking simulator. Now you can jump real high too. And instead of traveling places you just loading screen everywhere.
You can jump further too, but only if you rebind the jump button :D
I do think that’s more Emil Pagliarulo’s car than Todd
This is the first thought I had. Capitalist apologists would probably say the exact opposite, that owners need to be able to abuse workers to get more and better work out of them, but that’s basically never true. Owners owe so much to their workers’ creativity - even in fields where you wouldn’t expect - and they are deeply unaware of it.
to be fair, a forest fire might improve product quality from what we saw in starfield
Fire is a natural and necessary part of many ecosystemsm. It keeps parasitic insect populations down, stuff like ticks and chiggers, and some plant species rely on fire to prepare the soil for seeds and even is required for some plants to release their seeds. In dry ecosystems like the western USA it also consumes old dead plant material, reducing the fuel available for future fires and reducing fire severity overall. Many foresters and fire fighters advocate for increasing prescribed burns, essentially forest fires that we light on purpose in cooler and wetter times of the year to consume the fuel without risking a catastrophic fire that is difficult to control. I just think that’s neat.
Everyone should know this. The fire he said “This is fine” about was a metaphorical one, after all. But then, Unionization has been important to have in the economic ecosystem as well, so it might just be that greatly-needed wildfire in a forest with too much corporate rot.
This will be great for the workers, but I don’t think it will necessarily fix the issues in Bethesda’s organization when it comes to game development (and it won’t make them worse either).
Given what we know from Starfield, Bethesda is really lacking when it comes to planning: they aren’t doing a good job at establishing a compact vision for the final product which also results in having issues to establish an agile workflow to get from start to finish. In the best cases, this results in ludonarrative disonance where the story isn’t really supported by the mechanics of the game (example: Fallout 4’s story incentivizes the player to hurry up and look for their son, but they assign a lot of resources into making sandbox mechanics such as those related to base building); in the worst cases, this results in teams returning the ball to each other all the time because they aren’t properly coordinated to build things in the way other teams of the studio needs them, which loses a lot of time and becomes even more glaringly obvious the larger the project is.
The silver lining is: this problem isn’t so noticeable when the designers have the template of Oblivion in their minds and they’re making Skyrim, but it was going to be completely exposed when making the jump to a new IP (and thus a new universe), with a new engine, with some large design jumps such as ceding ground to dynamically created areas; so ES6 doesn’t have to be as much of a low point as it has been Starfield, as long as they’re conservative in their design choices. I’d vastly prefer the leadership of Bethesda to be completely reorganized, which would allow them to innovate by taking well measured risks, but I don’t have much hope for that scenario.
Either way it’s a good thing, a major company unionizing could lead to the whole industry unionizing
On that, I agree.
And I doubt the studio will see the end of this decade under Microshit‘s umbrella. Nonetheless I applaud the employees. Their success might be short lived but it‘s a success all the same.
5.5 years? No way they’ll shut down this quickly. The next Elder Scrolls alone will carry them into 2030. (As much as I would enjoy you being right though…)
If starfield is anything to go by, the new elder scrolls might be a step back from modded skyrim.
You assume TES6 isnt going to be pure trash like FO76 and starfield but… um… I dont share that same outlook. If anything TES6 will be the final nail in the coffin when the masses get their hands on it and see the buggy outdated mess they get.
I didn’t say that.
I expect it to be about as awful as Starfield. However, unlike Starfield (which didn’t sell horrendously by any source I can find, just not great) it has incredible brand recognition behind it. I have no doubts it will sell based on that alone as long as it looks like Skyrim 2 at first glance.
Edit: right after posting I figured out how to formulate what else I wanted to say but couldn’t find the correct words for: “Sadly profitability and quality don’t always correlate.”
neither of those games are pure trash. unless all you ever play is 10/10 masterpieces and nothing worse than that
Might be just enough for another remaster of Sykrim.
Or Microsoft will just close the studio and outsource the IP. It’s how Bethesda got Fallout.
Damn I needed some good news bad, that is fantastic!
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Can’t slow down something that’s not moving.
That said, I’d rather play a union made TES6 than another non-union Starfield.
Okay…but what about making a good game.
Eh. One good game or a sustainable industry?
The big studios are lost anyway, the best they can do now is be a starting place for worker reforms
Why not both.
I mean I wouldn’t mind a decent Elder Scrolls game…
Better compensation and working conditions typical result in improved productivity and higher quality goods.
That’s the neat thing about workers’ rights. Workers have more interest in making good products than investors, especially in artistic fields. Investors will gladly sabotage a product’s quality for the sake of personal gain and move on to the next company with goodwill to exploit, but for workers a job well done is inherently rewarding.
Unionization directly leads to better games with more artistic merit.
next up: microsoft announces development of Bethesda’s next game will be largely outsourced
A glimmer of hope in dystopyan world. Starlight Glimmer of hope.
Gamersprolitariat did unite and push back against exploitation.Forgive my ignorance, but what is a union supposed to mean/represent in this context? What benefit may the employees get from unionizing? Has this actually ever worked before?
Worked for cops, teachers, and iron workers
It’s why we have a 40h work week and safe factories.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi…