Edit: Jesus Christ, people. If you buy a $150 Thinkpad made by slave labor instead of a $1,200 MacBook made by slave labor, you’re still supporting a capitalist economy based on slave labor. We all do. We have no choice. The number of smug liberals in the comments saying “well I buy a cheap used laptop” or “well I buy coffee beans and make my own coffee” are completely missing the fucking point.
Don’t tell yourself your consumption is moral. All of us make unethical choices every day because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Accept your shame and guilt and let it drive you to do better.
apple and Starbucks are capitalists. Using their products and services is not “capitalism” but “consumerism”
spending a wage you earned is the opposite of capitalism
I mean not exactly. I am not sayin the person in the photo is but excessive consumerism is what capitalism needs to stand on.
well of course not “exactly.” To get to “exactly” we would both have to write hundreds of thousands of words.
My point is that a lot of people who are proponents of capitalism aren’t actually leveraging their capital as an investment to further expand it.
For example, I just bought a house. I “leveraged” 5% of the property price from my savings (earned by a wage, by the way, not by leveraging other capital) and the bank carried the rest (which it does by leveraging capital). It’s the banks’ house for the next 30 years. I can leverage my equity in the house as that equity grows (which would be a bad idea), but even when the house is paid off, I now have an asset, not capital. Were I to sell the house - now I have capital - but I can’t do anything with, really, practically, except buy another house, again from which lawyers, banks, realtors, etc will all extract capital but I will not.
The second point is that - you need a phone and laptop to survive in modern society, just like you needed a horse in days gone. People love to gloat that people who say “those who do no work but own methods of extracting wealth from those who do should profit less” are then buying something unavoidable from those who extract capital, and point out that they should have budgeted for a slightly lower price point in order to give the wealth extractors slightly less.
And honestly, they are welcome to that opinion. It doesn’t change my opinions at all. We just disagree. They believe people (often other than themselves) are entitled to more of a share in the profit they generated than I believe they should be, either for myself or for anyone.
Anyone is welcome to disagree I just don’t understand why they want to give up their own money. Especially as such people are usually desperately against taxation, which is the same mechanism except it benefits many instead of the few.
Sure, but it’s the fact that out of any other choice to pick, she chose to still give her money to the most aggressively capitalist companies. You can say it’s consumerism, but what point is she even making then? She sat down at a Starbucks to get her overpriced coffee, on a $1200 Macbook with a sticker on it that says “SMASH CAPITALISM”, it’s blatantly hyprocritcal.
maybe she’s there with a gift card she got given and a laptop that was also a gift?
Also my work computer is a Mac, now, and was also when I worked for a print and design company years ago.
maybe she’s an artist and Macs are often considered de rigueur for image and movie editing
maybe she’s not very technical, grew up using a Mac and is sticking to what she knows, who are we to criticise someone for not being skilled at tech, when we are not skilled at javelin throwing, or glass blowing or pointilism or whatever.
There are alternatives out there. That’s all. If you want to say ‘SMASH CAPITALISM’, then don’t pick the most garbage possible way to make your point. At the end of the day, your still buying/using them, especially from the most aggressively capitalist companies such as Apple and Starbucks. You could always sell off the laptop and gift card and support your local businesses instead. There are still local computer shops out there that sell off used hardware.
Also, I mean, you don’t even need to be an expert to use Linux, it’s rather simple actually, especially with AI at our fingertips. It’s just the fact that they keep supporting the exact thing they despise, hence why it looks hypocritical. Do your part and stick to what you preach. It’s like a person that eats at a all-meat resturaunt with a t-shirt on that says “Vegan”.
how do we know it’s not used? I’m just saying we’re putting a lot into this image. Not done a massive deep dive but off the top of my head Apple isn’t really that much worse than Samsung, Sony, NVIDIA, ASUS… Maybe there’s a few percentage points in it - but by any metric: revenue, employee corps, emissions, corruption, e-waste, personal politics or private lives of key figures… are they vastly different?
Ehhhhh. I think you’re vastly over estimating how good people are at tech. Even young people. I reflect on trying to teach my grandmother how to text. Probably around 2004? She could use a VHS and DVD player, land line phone with caller ID, a microwave, set the time on the oven - but pressing keys on a phone to spell was beyond her and she got really frustrated. I also reflect on how someone I know in their early 30s was really annoyed by some old printer software they had from a printer they don’t own any more, and I said “why don’t you just uninstall it” and they didn’t know how.
The average user on lemmy can probably write a Hello world in some language, or at least create <html><head><title>Hello world</title></head><body>Hello world</body></html> … but I don’t know if the average person on the street can.
The average person on the street probably can’t install windows from scratch let alone dual boot Linux, let alone from a Mac OS.
I dont mean that to be snooty, I mean it to highlight you are taking a massive leap of faith in how good at computers most people are.
Sure you’re right. But, I’m still going to take my chances and say that she probably spent her own money lol
Buying anything in a capitalist country makes you a consumer.
And no one has the choice not to be.
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Who’s my local laptop manufacturer?
You just gotta go down to the local laptop breeder and pick out a baby
Find a local shop that refurbishes used machines and provides good warranty
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Framework laptops are like $1700
What Framework are doing is good, but pretending they’re more than a rich person thing right now is silly. AU$2,800 is not a reasonable price and is well out of the range of most people for a laptop.
I definitely wouldn’t mind buying an overpriced product just for the sake of supporting it, but it’s gonna be another decade before they ship to my country so it’s not a real choice for most, especially the price.
Let’s say you do this. Now you just need to buy a slave labor-free phone, car, TV and hundreds of other items. Not to mention you’re paying taxes to a capitalist government.
Anyone who thinks you can escape the consequences of capitalism while existing in a capitalist country is just full of it. It’s like the leftist version of sovereign citizen nonsense
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