Never lose the opportunity to fuck corporations, also it's not your duty to preserve others experience, it's not like that corporations don't give a phuck about having enough bandwidth or don't oversell and then we have to be scared of downloading something
There is no such thing as "communally-minded" under private ownership. What we have is "rugged individualism" and free competition, ie "might makes right." I don't like it, but I can't escape it.
It's ironic that you mention "tragedy of the commons." Literally, what we don't have is a commons. What we have is enclosure. So it's truly not a "tragedy of the commons" but a tragedy of private ownership or, specifically, a tragedy of the commons' absence.
Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.
Everyone is a specific person, i.e. a "private" entity, and ownership represents the exclusivity of possession and use that is inherent in all economically rival goods. In order for anything to be owned and used by anyone, it must be owned and used by someone specific at the exclusion of others. In other words, "private ownership" is the only kind of ownership that actually exists.
"The public" is an abstraction that resolves to lots of separate "private" people in aggregate -- it's not a specific entity capable of acting as an owner of anything. When people talk about "publkic ownership", what they're really describing is one specific organization acting as the de facto owner, but nominally acting on behalf of "the public" by being bound up in fiduciary responsibilities to others. That sounds nice in theory, but the incentive structures applicable to those institutons are often not aligned with the interests of "the public" (presuming that any singular interest can even be attributed to it), and the mechanisms of fiduciary accountability often do not work properly. What "public ownership" usually amounts to is private ownership by political institutions, which have their own interests and agendas.
> Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.
The corporation is an organizational model employed by people. It has no consciousness or will of its own, so attributing any of the above qualities, positive or negative, to it, is meaningless. Corporations cannot be ruthless or cynical, or be communally-minded or have any sort of "spirit". They are just processes.
The people who are using the corporation as an organizational structure, on the other hand, can be any of those things. If you have a society full of greedy avaricious people, then commercial corporations will likely behave in ways that reflect greed and avarice. But then so again will every other expression of that society -- including political institutions and interpersonal interactions -- because it's not the abstract organizational model that possesses those qualities, it's the people.
The reality here is that doing destructive things out of some antipathy toward the abstract "corporation" has concrete negative consequences for its employees, its customers, and its investors (who aren't cartoon characters wearing top hats and monocles, but include ordinary people trying to fund their retirements).
> If you have a society full of greedy avaricious people, then commercial corporations will likely behave in ways that reflect greed and avarice.
I think it's possible to have corporations whose emergent values don't reflect their constituent values. In fact, I think it's inevitable; an LLC is not a cortical homunculus.
There's no tragedy of the commons here. A paid service provided by a private corporation is not "the commons". The commons refers to something like a municipal park owned by the public and run by the local government, and a tragedy of the commons is jerks going to the public bathroom there and leaving it a mess, stealing the toilet paper, etc.
"The public" is an abstraction, and the local government is just another specific organization. Everything is people, all the way down, and it is profoundly anti-social to rationalize away hostile, destructive behavior simply because you have an emotional prejudice against people who engage in commercial business.
The reality is that the behavior you are trying to justify doesn't impact the equally abstract "corporation", it impacts the actual people whose activities that concept represents -- employees, customers, investors, etc.
I am of the idea that the main issue are those at the top, but volounteers are also contributing to hide or make issues less pushy, what is the level of pain you're going to be able to support in order to let the community feel better, while execs pocket money?
