On profit incentive

The idea for the Socialist Developers Association came to me not long after the site for my favorite tattoo shop went live.

I spent a few hours cloning the design of their Squarespace site, which they'd been paying entirely too much for, and which I was thrilled to help them escape from. I built it with Gatsby, and deployed it via Netlify.

It's been several months since I deployed the site, and I've yet to spend a cent hosting it.

To me, this seemed like a refutation of the oft-repeated critique of socialism - "without a profit incentive, people won't work." I'd asked for nothing in return for my labor - I did their website strictly out of generosity to people I thought were rad, and a earnest love for the development process.

Sometimes I I like to imagine what my socialist utopia would look like, and what my day to day life as a developer would be like. After the tattoo shop site went live, I realized - this is a small taste of what it would be like. I'd spend my time doing development work on behalf of a client, with no concern for profit or my own financial well-being.

I imagined being able to walk into that tattoo shop and say "hey y'all, wanna give me a [insert badass tattoo idea here]", and they'd say "hell yeah!". They'd get to their handiwork, and perhaps they'd say to me "hey, would you mind making a small change to the shop site?", to which I'd reply "yeah, absolutely, as soon as I get back to my desk". Then, they'd finish up, we'd admire their work, and then I'd be on my way, with no monetary exchange to be seen.

Sound unrealistic? Well, guess what - the artists at the shop had the same sort of dream. They didn't want to have to charge for tattoos, but hey, they had to make money somehow? How else would they pay for the ink, for the machines, for the books of flash?

Likewise, I don't want to charge for my work. I'd love to just code away all day, following my passion and generally being helpful to people in my community. But I gotta pay server costs somehow, right?

And that takes us to the hosting. Netlify has a generous free plan that provides more than enough bandwidth to run that site hundreds of times over. So, the only cost that falls to me when running the site for the tattoo shop is the cost of my own labor. And with Javascript frameworks such as Gatsby, the total labor involved to create a simple static site is basically negligible, something I was able to get done in a handful of hours on a weekend.

So, there's me, working without profit incentive, in spite of every neolib who told me that human nature is to be lazy and selfish. And from this, a thought came to my mind.

Let's scale this up.

Enter, the Socialist Developers Association.