<<braddelong.substack.com/p/brad-de…>>

A Non-Platonic Twitter Dialogue: In a Better World than This, This Is What Twitter Would Have Been Used for: Bhandari, DeLong, Riley, et al.; Martin Wolf; Mike Konczal; Very Briefly Noted; & ¶s

But Jack Dorsey decided he wanted to get rich by becoming yet another manipulative-grift advertising platform, and now Elon Musk has set the whole thing on fire:

---

Rakesh Bhandari: You can’t have the cake baked under extant production relations as if those were natural & ahistorical & then have the cake divided up any way you want afterwards as if that were an autonomous political question….

Brad DeLong: Yes, the changing technology-driven forces-of-production hardware of society greatly constrain and shape the relations-of-production and superstructural econo-politico-socio-cultural software of society that puts the forces-of-production to work and does the distribution and utilization of our common and collective wealth.

Yes, feudal-era forces- and relations-of-production teach people that society is static, hierarchical, with who you are chosen for you by the role ascribed to you; that production is small-scale, handicraft, and individually autonomous; and that those who work owe rent to those who protect them and tithes to those who guide them to salvation. Hence the feudal mode-of-production requires that we write feudal-society software to run on top of it.

Commercial-imperial gunpowder-empire forces- and relations-of-production, by contrast, teach people…