If had a nickel for every time I had a person with a passing interest in Marxism mansplain the world to me. This is a starting point, materialism is not exclusively how socialists and anarchists criticize or understand capitalism.

You seem to think this is contradictory, which should spur you to question something more fundamental instead of assuming others are just dumber than you. “Coordination” would require a conspiratorial level of organizing between groups that, while maintaining common interests, distorts the reality of this system to the point of incomprehensibility. If your way of thinking finds it impossible to analyze the interaction between people – individual actors – and the system they are positioned in – as in their class interests – then you will find this system incomprehensible. This is so because, guess what, there are individual actors who are not powerlessly making decisions in accordance with their positionality.

In order to do that, you must start understanding these things as relational. There are class interests motivating these policies, those class interests are not the sole mover of these actions. To suggest as much would do what you are trying to do right now, which is universalise human action. I wonder if you’ve thought about power dynamics in indigenous nations under settler-colonialism, and what it would mean to only interpret their navigation of this system with the frameworks that originate from Europe with the goal of understanding European ways of organizing. How do you understand conflicting interests within shared classes even under the same material conditions?

Getting fuckin tired of people on here presuming they’re all-knowing; many of these interactions happen to occur in discussions on Europe, go figure. Won’t be responding to anything else from you unless it is actually serious.

Strange, I didn’t realize there was any non-liberal, anti-capitalist states within the EU.

I think you’ve misunderstood the point, what I’m saying is that these sorts of policies are an inevitable consequence of liberalism because it requires an oppressive level of population control to function. The internet is a threat to that control, and therefore liberal states have responded predictably and consistently by moving to create as many vectors of restriction and punishment as they can. The UK is not part of the EU, Canada (which has been pushing for this for half a decade now) isn’t, Australia isn’t, but they are all capitalist and imperialist liberal states.

I don’t know how contrived the mechanisms have to be before people just accept that these ideological forces do not need specific mechanisms to exist. Tech firms did not produce liberalism and capitalism, as they did not exist when these ways of organizing emerged. Everything you described here are consequences of this system and the means by which it reproduces itself, they are not the system itself. Yeah, they organize, they do so because they have a common interest which is capital, and the imperatives of profit and infinite growth historically manifest consistently in formal and informal mechanisms of control like this.

Class warfare doesn’t apply here any better than it does to the informal consequences of neoliberal individualism which is both intentionally reinforced in media and culturally through its subscription by middle-class property owners. It may look coordinated, but that term distorts how these systems of power function and reproduce by creating the narrative that there is a select group of people responsible for this outcome, even while individual actions are taken to realise it.

It’s not “coordinated” any more than every action in service of capital is. These policies and values coincide because all of these liberal states share common imperatives. The internet is a problem for liberals; it is impossible to fully control without diminishing its use for industry, anti-capitalism has flourished online even with the overwhelming corporate promotion of fascism and liberalism, and the international nature of the medium has made imperialism more visible to the metropole than ever.

They correctly identify that the internet is a threat to their security, and they are moving to secure it and punish as many people as they can to discourage its use for disruptive purposes.

I think you’re underestimating how much of a problem liberal states are in their use of soft power. I don’t doubt that most Linux users and devs would resist, I’m saying that it would definitely be a threat for liberal states to dedicate resources to influencing norms and access. They don’t need to “win” as in complete and utter domination of every aspect of development for Linux to have a massive and negative effect. Think about how much more labour the US state has at is disposal than the entirety of the Linux community; how much more resources it has that could be dedicated to the privileging of projects that do comply.

Yes, how to resist is certainly important to consider, but there’s no way to design that resistance if you ignore the tools at their disposal. Look at how big Zorin got from just a timely marketing campaign or the fact that corporate- and enterprise-oriented revenue models are already deeply influential on the landscape even without state promotion.

Oh, no it wouldnt be like “we’re mandating this through legislation,” because that is typically really hard to defend. They’re more likely to simply provide subsidies or some sort of financial benefit to larger, more compliant entities.

This is a very importrant thing to keep in mind. Liberalism is exceptional at appropriation and assimilation, and there is already a tremendous amount of corporate influence on the trajectory of Linux development. Since the open source nature of Linux is fairly robust, this would mean that control would look a lot like accessibility and feature competition (think how Android has effectively muscled out alternative ‘open source’ mobile OS’s and functions as one of the most expansive data collection systems in the world). It likely would not be as immediate as this suggests, for exactly the same reason Linux is so preferable to proprietary operating systems, but examples like Zorin’s successful marketing campaign and paid services do point to a trajectory of corporatization separate from what exists in Redhat and Ubuntu.

As liberal states seek more power over information and computing, they will direct regulations into favourable conditions for capitalization, as they always do, and will reward corporations that comply. The big threat is the amount of resources that private capital wields with state support and how this may pressure independent developers to comply as well.