• theluddite@lemmy.ml
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    18 hours ago

    I’d say that’s mostly right, but it’s less about opportunities, and more about design. To return to the example of the factory: Let’s say that there was a communist revolution and the workers now own the factory. The machines still have them facing away from each other. If they want to face each other, they’ll have to rebuild the machine. The values of the old system are literally physically present in the machine.

    So it’s not that you can do different things with a technology based on your values, but that different values produce technology differently. This actually limits future possibilities. Those workers physically cannot face each other on that machine, even if they want to use it that way. The past’s values are frozen in that machine.