I imagine that some graphical environments will always support X11. I'd suggest you switch to one of those. If someone forked Plasma, it'd have far fewer eyes on it than something like i3. I assume XFCE will continue to support X11 for a while too since it's only just working on Wayland support. Maybe some of the less common DEs like MATE are worth looking into?
Security and difference of design philosophy. I run OpenBSD on one of my machines and I enjoy it. It has better software availability than I expected and it feels like a neater, more minimal system than Linuxes. Definitely falls into the "hobbyist computing" category rather than something I'd recommend for a practical use case, but it's fun.
I think it's just clickbait/being hyperbolic. I imagine the videos themselves are just normal tutorials or intros to the topic.
People play games for different reasons. A lot of people play games to relax, and challenge themselves doing serious stuff. It's literally fine for things like cheats to exist (and there's no such thing as cheating for singleplayer games anyway). If someone wants to make their singleplayer game easier, or to skip a particularly hard section, or whatever, it doesn't affect anyone else in any way, so let them.
No worries, happy to help :) Yes it's a common misconception like I said. Hopefully if you reread the commodity fetishism section of Capital with that in mind (it's just one subheading under the first chapter, though of course it's relevant to the whole book) you'll see some of the points I took from that section in what Marx says.
My understanding is that Marx’s analysis is that when individual commodities are fetishized he meant that people believe that commodities as commodities are capable of meeting the believer’s personal human needs, when in reality it is actually the human relationships that are meeting the needs through the application of labor on nature to produce that which is needed.
This is a common misunderstanding, but not correct. The commodity fetish is not something that occurs in people's minds. We could all be consciously aware of the commodity fetish but it would still happen; it doesn't describe a false belief, but it describes the actual appearance of commodities under capitalism. It falls into the category of a "real abstraction", that is, an abstraction that actually happens in real life, rather than one that is psychological. Another example of a real abstraction is abstract and concrete labour. Concrete labour is the actual labour performed, such as sewing, farming, driving, etc. Concrete labour must become abstract labour in order to exchange commodities; if I exchange cookies I baked for a T-shirt you tailored, we somehow have to make baking and tailoring commensurable, even though they are qualitatively different labour. How many cookies is a T-shirt worth? That would seem a nonsensical question at first glance, because those are two completely different things. But the value-form provides a universal quantifier of commodities, that is, socially necessary labour time, which must be a measure of abstract labour, because e.g. 1 hour of highly skilled labour is worth more than 1 hour of unskilled labour (here, "skilled" is not meant disparagingly towards unskilled labour; skilled labour is more labour because it requires education, e.g. a doctor's labour is not just 1 hour of doctoring but also 10 years of medical school split up across the doctor's whole career). Making concrete labour into abstract labour is a real abstraction, i.e. it really happens every time you exchange commodities. You can be aware of it, you can be critical of it, you can hate that it happens, but it will still happen; it is part of the exchange process. Similarly, the commodity fetish is part of the commodity form. If it were psychological, it would be divorcable from the commodity form; the exchangers of commodities could simply decide in their heads to "combat" the commodity fetish and not be beholden to it.
Marx clarifies in the section of Capital I'm talking about (the subsection of chapter 1) that the causation is not "people see objects as homogeneous labour → they exchange them", but the other way round: "people exchange products of labour → they equate different kinds of labour as human labour".
Like, what even is an example of a “mystical property” that would apply in the context of industrial modernity?
Taking directly from chapter 1 of Capital again, the commodity reflects the social characteristics of people's labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves. This is a peculiar trait of commodities—in pre-capitalist societies, relations between people appeared as relations between people, but in capitalist societies, relations between people appear as relations between things. Examples Marx gives of this:
- Equality of different kinds of labour takes on the form of equal objectivity of products of labour as values
- Measure of labour-time takes on the form of magnitude of value of products of labour
- Relationships between producers take on the form of social relations between the products of labour
Isn’t this mystical thinking?
Again, we're not talking about any kind of thinking. The commodity fetish occurs without awareness, i.e. it is not a process that occurs in the mind.
“Money means you can get more stuff” is ascribing a power to commodity (in this case money) that is actually a power inherent in the relationship between humans.
I mean, no, "money means you can get more stuff" is true in the context of capitalist society. I have a job not because I love doing shitty manual labour for the capitalists I work for, but because I need a roof over my head and I need to eat. I'm alienated from the means of subsistence as a proletarian so I need to sell my labour-power to obtain means of subsistence. This is objectively correct; that's how capitalism works. Being anti-capitalist or a Marx scholar or attaining any kind of consciousness is not going to change these facts.
And content is not a commodity (or it is only in the colloquial sense, not in the Marxist or economic sense). Commodities have an exchange-value. Generally, online content is not exchanged, but distributed for free (since it can be copied nearly-infinitely nearly-freely; e.g. you reading my comment doesn't prevent anyone else from reading it).
Genuine question, have you read any of Capital? Not trying to be an ass, but Marx explains in the first chapter, and the book I linked is a good supplementary text too. You don't have to read all of Capital; like I said, the commodity fetish gets explained in the first chapter. (Though I highly recommend taking the time to read all of Capital; it's a great text and provides the basis of a scientific critique of capitalism and class society.)
"Fetish", in "commodity fetish" refers to the commodity appearing to have mystical properties, when in actuality it's an inanimate object. But it appears animate; it appears to be capable of magical things; and it also makes social relations between people appear as relations between things, e.g. the relation of domination between capitalist and worker appears as an exchange of commodities, a wage in exchange for labour-power. The wording of "fetish" comes from an old racist conception where Europeans said that Africans had a "fetish" of particular religious objects, i.e. they ascribed magical properties to these objects that they didn't have. Whilst that old conception is racist and wrong, I think the concept of the commodity fetish still holds true.
The commodity fetish isn't particularly related to what OP is talking about. Clout-chasing is just clout-chasing. The desire to make money is because, well, we live in a capitalist society, and more money means you can get more stuff. The commodity fetish describes properties of commodities, not behaviour of people. It describes the way commodities actually appear; there's no mental process or actions you can take to undo the commodity fetish, because it is a description of the actual way commodities function under capitalism.
I'm baffled by how many people are saying they experience this. This has never been a problem for me. I thought conventional wisdom was that food tastes better when it's your own cooking, and I've definitely found that to be true for me personally. Not that I'm an amazing cook but I think the cooking process helps me appreciate what has gone into the food and makes it appear better.
No, that is not what the commodity fetish is. This is literally first chapter of Capital. The commodity fetish refers to the appearance of relations between people as relations between things, and the way that things (commodities) appear to have person-like qualities. This is not something that happens in the mind but a real abstraction that actually occurs under the capitalist mode of production.
Not what that means
These look SO GOOD! I've been making salt and pepper tofu lately and I think I'm getting into battered tofu. Will have to try this at some point. Thanks for the recipe!
Yeah. It looks like a lot of the BSDs might be the way to go if for whatever reason you want/need to stay on X11. I've been trying out OpenBSD on one of my machines, and following for quite a lot longer, and progress on Wayland support seems to be relatively slow over there.