missingpint
Having a shitty mind numbing job is hell.
Adam Smith wrote about it (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will create servile, ignorant humans.
IMO billionaires suffer from it too. Offloading so much real doing and learning while existing in the context of abstract decision maker.
You think Bezos can do much more than validate or demean people around him? Bet he can barely rotate a tire.
On the upside for the first time in history, the oligarchs in America don’t also control armed gangs. The risk of toppling one is manageable: taxes.
Organizing abstract social metadata very particularly is way less useful and makes for way less interesting people, than real muscle memory built from doing a variety of types of work.
HR can filter at mass, keeping people from work they enjoy. Advertising has social agency warping effects. And at scale we spend our time prioritizing paid speech. Policing valid speech at scale is how authoritarian states work.
“This is how you view the problem, how you design the solution, and how you speak to people. Or you don’t get to have shelter & eat.”
Sir, yes sir.
“Profits (or some other ideological target) must go up this quarter!”
Sir, yes sir.
Not allowed to truly question what happens if AI that can schedule hair appointments isn’t developed. Computing/engineering effort we know is destined for the bin as hardware changes. Seems economical.
That’s hardly a behavioral model for a free society.
Nah sorry. We have friendly oligarchs, and looking at Google’s shifting culture and the Amazon warehouse situation that’s been going on for years... very superficially friendly.
Political power is emotional. It fades generationally as people retire, or we could term limit officials.
A big enough pile of dollars means you can generate more faster than you can spend what you need to in order to stay on top.
Ownership is the root of political theory in America. And a smaller and smaller group really own anything.
And the powers that be know that: they’ve read it in academia’s papers and philosophers notes. If the public took ownership of the manner of production (IMO themselves not factories) and stayed home for a week, politics would be shifting real fast.
We keep looking at history to learn about us. Is it any shock we keep developing top down authoritarian structures when we’re casually fetishizing their previous existence? What was becomes hard to look beyond when continually referencing the material. Wonder what humanity could look like if future people read about past people living differently.