It leads to these total room-temperature takes that the system is the only reason we have the internet or Hacker News. It is exhausting watching people parrot the same old clichés because they are too lazy to actually crack a history book.
The truth is that foundational tech was almost never market-driven. The architecture of the computer, the internet, and the Web were all products of the public commons. They were created by people motivated by discovery and utility rather than exit liquidity. Capital did not invent these things. It just showed up late, threw a fence around them, and started charging rent on human ingenuity it had nothing to do with.
Same goes for the Luddites. They were not anti-machine, they were just anti-starvation. They did not hate the loom. They hated that the loom was being used as a legal weapon to gut their labor rights while the owners hoarded 100 percent of the gains.
Using a computer to call this out is not hypocrisy. It is using a tool that was stolen from the human commons to argue for its return. If you think we owe our progress to the current ownership model, you are not paying attention. You have just been programmed by the marketing.
