How would Marxists define the “means of production” in 2020?

The Internet is not made of fine unicorn hair braided by pixies. It’s a huge very physical machine comprised of wires, switches, demarcation points, interchange data centers (carrier hotels), undersea and long haul overland cables, satellites, and massive cloud data centers that host shared compute and data and SaaS apps. It consumes a ton of energy and if you weighed it all would be quite massive.

PCs and mobile devices are part of that vast spaghetti monster, but only small parts.

If we could achieve cloud SaaS levels of performance and usability in pure P2P apps it would be possible to dispense with some of that, but not all of it. You would still need the wiring and interchanges and stuff. Pure P2P is also hard and doing it that efficiently requires solving some unsolved engineering problems around rapid bootstrapping, data lookup, consensus, and security.

When it comes to distribution on the internet, no, unless the network infrastructure is owned by the commons which is very hard to do even with small portions of it. There is a great Current Affairs piece from this summer (with what looks like some good further reading) which explores this more and better than I can here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/reclaiming-the-physic...

Perhaps you circumvent the internet and distribute software on USB thumb drives, if you’re the sole creator and owner of the software then yes!

Look for the book "The Singularity and Socialism: Marx, Mises, Complexity Theory, Techno-Optimism and the Way to the Age of Abundance" by C. James Townsend.

It doesn't answer the thread title, but tries to tackle your following question.

The idea is that, yes, as marginal costs go down (the Singularity being it reaching zero), wealth tends to go to wealth creators instead of capitalists.

It's a bit of fantasy but so is Marxism anyway. I was intrigued by the author's argument that Marx's ideals (not Marxism) and free markets could converge.

> How would Marxists define the “means of production” in 2020?

"The tools (instruments) and the raw material (subject) you use to create something are the means of production." [0]

> Doesn't anyone with an internet connection and a computer technically "own the means of production"?

A portion of them, similar to a physical laborer who owns his own hand tools. And, similar to that, its the whole means of production for some goods, and a tiny subset of other goods, and somewhere in between for lots.

[0] https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/m/e.htm

It's a moronic ideology, the clear answer here is you end up with a system similar to china, except stripe is owned by the govt, the computers you buy all come from the same govt org and the govt monitors and controls all forms of internet access.

If you live in America and support Marxism, please move to a country where they currently have a similar system and stop complaining. Granted, most of the people who want this likely don't have the brain power to understand basic economics...

As of now, the means of production is the advertising. It's what makes money. Unfortunately users have relegated themselves to raw materials. They need to either seize the means of production, or stop giving away their content, however trivial it is