Post #2177732

2025-12-30 19:17 UTC

Imagine that it&#39;s 1925 and I am a clever, experienced mechanical engineer. I look around at the &quot;tech&quot; world of the time and notice some disturbing things: - the rising power of literally fascist CEOs like Henry Ford - What began as an inefficient, quirky novelty toy for rich people, the automobile, has become &quot;normal&quot; and started to dominate public space - rising levels of fossil pollution - the rising monopoly power of Oil companies - dangerous levels of stock-market speculation - brutal exploitation of people and environmental destruction in mining and rubber producing (mostly colonial) regions - the use of debt to get less wealthy consumers to buy cars - scores of innocent pedestrians injured or killed by automobiles - urban planning that increasingly favors more expensive cars over other users of the streets - declining sense of importance of shared forms of transportation like trolleys and trains As an engineer, I look at all those rising issues and then I say: &quot;What we need is an Open Source Model-T Ford with some slightly better safety features.&quot; In retrospect, that would seem like a pretty inadequate response.

Replies (14)

@rabbit5959@social.vivaldi.net 2025-12-30 20:45

@praxeology@post.lurk.org I'm really not intelligent... can someone explain this to me? Is it an ad for trains?

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@jzakotnik@mastodon.social 2025-12-30 21:07

@praxeology@post.lurk.org best post of today. Exactly this.

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@seabass@social.seabass.systems 2025-12-30 21:45

@praxeology@post.lurk.org Slightly terrifying that there's half a dozen different things that this post could be an analogy for...

Open ##2578157
@rimu@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2025-12-30 21:46

@praxeology@post.lurk.org If you weren't using that open source model-t ford right now, I wouldn't have read your message. Everyone's gotta contribute wherever they're best able to.

Open ##2578158
@Ardubal@mastodon.xyz 2025-12-30 22:01

@praxeology@post.lurk.org Inadequate would be to say »All we need is…«. But, all other things being respectively equal, each - a better automobile is better - having more public transport is better - less exploitation is better - better regulation is better (probably include putting pedestrians' over automobiles' rights) - etc. It's OK to make only one thing better that you are equipped to do so. Don't burn yourself out by only running after the big picture. The big picture is made of small things.

Open ##2578162
@jaredwhite@indieweb.social 2025-12-30 23:30

@praxeology@post.lurk.org I'm so glad you mention all of these issues because it drives me up a frickin' WALL when people pimp the slop machines by saying "lol, you also want to ditch the car and go back to horses huh?" and I'm like "duude, are you not aware of the long history of well-reasoned critiques of just how terrible the automobile is in many, many ways?!"

Open ##2578164
@ralph_himself@kinkycats.org 2025-12-30 23:44

@praxeology@post.lurk.org @notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com did you say that we don't need better automobiles, but as few automobiles as possible?

Open ##2578166
@admin@evrial.com 2025-12-30 23:47

@praxeology@post.lurk.org what if you said instead: "we need to seize the means of production" ?

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@dannyman@sfba.social 2025-12-31 00:13

@praxeology@post.lurk.org you just described a bicycle?

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@gimulnautti@mastodon.green 2025-12-31 04:11

@praxeology@post.lurk.org Everything that’s old is new again. Also doesn’t look too good for proximity of WW3..

Open ##2578171
@mahadevank@mastodon.social 2025-12-31 05:20

@praxeology@post.lurk.org I agree with this post, the Open Source License is woefully inadequate in preventing exploitation and abuse. The redistribution clause needs serious updates to protect creators and code from being used unlawfully or in a manner that works against humanity

Open ##2578172
@claude@meow.social 2025-12-31 07:04

@praxeology@post.lurk.org Thing is, most programmers aren't engineers. They don't have the training, mentality or ethics of an engineer (nor any other kind of ethics, really). They look at all those problems and see them as technical in nature because they never learned how to people. They never had to.

Open ##2578173
@burnoutqueen@todon.nl 2025-12-31 14:36

@praxeology@post.lurk.org As an engineer, I look at all those rising issues and then I say: Join the Communist Party goddamnit

Open ##2578176
@dfx4509b@friendica.world 2026-01-02 19:05

@praxeology@post.lurk.org Making steps to make the car hard for normal people to own and prioritizing improvements to public transit and walking/biking would've been an ideal response in this case. Oh, also making things cheap enough to where they can just buy it with straight cash would go a long way as well, the credit system is kind of a giant grift if you think about it.

Open ##2578177