Yawn

The frediverse is more of an echo chamber then reddit ever was. It's awful sometimes.

Robert Caro disagrees. Power does not corrupt, it reveals. If you somehow became a billionaire, you'd be able to do whatever you wanted, which means we'd be able to see what you wanted to do. If you start acting evil once you get money, it means you were evil but unable to act on it until you had money.

Specifically about Amazon, Bezos made it because he wanted to cash in on the early internet with his own startup, leaving a Wall Street firm to do so. And, yes, we was a dick to his only employee, which is why the man quit after only 5 years.

Stop strawmanning it. You're arguing in bad faith when you use an example nobody is talking about.

Obviously, they mean that small business people are generally (remember that word?) still owner class capitalists, which are generally not your friend if you're a wagey.

You hit a false dichotomy. "Not your allies" does not automatically mean "class traitors". They might be neutral.

You can judge it pretty succinctly: if they are controlling a resource that others depend on in order to live (such as deriving a wage), then they are the bourgeoisie. What you’re referring to is closer to lumpenproletariat — someone who works for themselves

No. Owning a business (as in, means of production) makes you a different class — bourgeois — not a class traitor. Belonging to a different class naturally changes what benefits you.

And yeah you shouldn't automatically hate some petite bourgeois guy, they may be closer to lumpenproletariat than they are to haute bourgeois. But, as long as they own the business, they have a fundamentally different set of goals under capitalism compared to you, a worker.

It's not about hating small business owners. It's about them belonging to the owning class with those class interests. Something like raising the minimum wage can put their interests at odds with many people they share an income bracket with. It would actually be a good thing if they were a class traitor, because that would mean they were siding with us proles.

having trouble keeping up with who we’re supposed to hate

Everyone. The bots are going for maximal conflict and strife - spend more time online, find more outrageous reasons to hate more people.

Best to not spend any money on anything at all if you can possibly avoid it.

Best protest you can make is to limit your participation in the economy as much as possible. They want your money. Don't give it to them.

Who said that was the alternative? You fucking clowns...

"oh so other capitalists might still be capitalists? That must mean you want to suck Bezos' dick!"

Again. Clown. That's you.

No, all I'm saying is that small business owners are on the same side of the class divide as billionaires, so it's not surprising they resort to the cheapest sloppies solutions and are trying to replace creative people with soulless automation.

The middle class has been shrinking my entire adult life. The gap between people who start with nothing and work their way up and the people who start with a massive boost and accelerate in wealth accumulation faster than the bootstrappers ever could has grown by an astounding multiple in the past 50 years.

"Most of the world" is definitely not petite bourgeois (which is what "middle class" is supposed to mean), neither in the west nor elsewhere. There are only ~36E6 small businesses in the US, many of which share owners and some of which are just shell companies. Even if we assume that every small business was owned by a single person, it's still only around 10% of the population, in the "most entrepreneurial" country in the west.

Yeah also this thread is funny to me because it suffers from a thing I see on lemmy frequently, which is thinking that small business owners care at all what such a tiny microcosm of people like lemmy users care about. The vast majority of small business foot traffic is going off of word of mouth (in person or digital), advertising, or good reviews on aggregators like yelp or google maps, very little of their foot traffic comes from people just walking by and going "ew, AI ad, no thanks"