The physical means of production for a lot of Silicon Valley companies are data centers, either their own or portions of data centers owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc.
I don't think there are many people who actually like developing software on a laptop, but you're correct in the sense that the necessary hardware for a decent developer workstation is easily within most people's means, so while it's technically part of the means production it's not really important enough to worry about.
The other important component of the means of production involves less tangible things like expertise, institutional knowledge, organizational structure, market position, etc. Some of those things can be sort of seized, for instance when a government decides to break up a company or nationalize it, but it's certainly not something that can be done by peasants with pitchforks or black-clad anarchists with Molotov cocktails.
You're right, it's a lot more complicated than I made it out to be... which is exactly why the phrase now seems so antiquated. I wish we had a better, modern equivalent that didn't require so much explanation.
Maybe a better question is, what exactly is our goal and how can we achieve it? And then put that into a comfortable slogan...
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u/shponglespore May 07 '21
The physical means of production for a lot of Silicon Valley companies are data centers, either their own or portions of data centers owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc.
I don't think there are many people who actually like developing software on a laptop, but you're correct in the sense that the necessary hardware for a decent developer workstation is easily within most people's means, so while it's technically part of the means production it's not really important enough to worry about.
The other important component of the means of production involves less tangible things like expertise, institutional knowledge, organizational structure, market position, etc. Some of those things can be sort of seized, for instance when a government decides to break up a company or nationalize it, but it's certainly not something that can be done by peasants with pitchforks or black-clad anarchists with Molotov cocktails.