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If it was japanese workers in japan at a japanese store you wouldnt see it as slavery. It would be just a funny bug that would needs fixing. There is probably
by wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
If it was japanese workers in japan at a japanese store you wouldnt see it as slavery. It would be just a funny bug that would needs fixing.
There is probably a racial component to your perception that doesnt need to be there.
- Eldt 2y agoYou seem to be making a wild leap in logic here?
- wegfawefgawefg 2y agoi dont think so. I live in japan and I dont see this political slave talk here ever. its a western guilt thing.
- anigbrowl 2y agoYou have completely missed the point. It is not that 'people who work in Mexican restaurants are enslaved' it's that 'restaurant workers and delivery drivers are forced to work for nothing due to a software glitch' The kind of cuisine is irrelevant.
- mcv 2y agoIt's a dehumanizing thing.
- tlhunter 2y agoWhat are you talking about?
- alwa 2y agoIf this were set in Japan as you propose, and we substituted “onigiri stall” or “izakaya” for “Mexican restaurant,” would that affect the substance of the gp’s observation? To my mind, when gp said “Mexican restaurant,” that conjured a familiar image of a particular type of informal, moderately sized, sit-in-and-delivery kind of establishment that’s probably a small business rather than managed as a corporate chain. And I wouldn’t assume that a Mexican restaurant is necessarily staffed by people of Mexican ancestry. I do feel like, in my limited exposure to Japanese culture, I hear less worry than I do from Americans about problems on this spectrum of individual economic freedom/empowerment <—> enslavement. But that’s an observation in which I’m very far from confident—I’d be curious to hear how it fits (or doesn’t) with the broader point you’re making.
- wegfawefgawefg 2y agoMaybe you are correct in that the mexican restraunt conjures up images of typical restraunt. I do think there is associative bleed. I think thoughts do not follow formal logic and words function as embeddings. My suspicion is the word "slave" in english has other encodings in it that arent strictly the general definition of slave, and that the high magnitude of those signals within the slave embedding will ellicit unreasonable responses. A bug in uber software is no more enslaving the deliverers than a distribution error made by a human on paper in the 1950s resulting in a truck driver driving a shipment of vegetables to the wrong grocery store is enslaving them to drive. The procedure does not commit the immoral act of enslaving. It is an emergent error in logic with complicit actors. Unrelated side point, lived in Texas for almost 30 years, and every mexican restraunt is owned and operated by mexicans except the rare one that is run by chinese/vietnamese (which generally are not very good). On japanese culture: Japanese frequently discusses "black companies", and poor boss worker relationships. My wife complains to me about her work every day, and so do all of her coworkers, and their friends when they get togethor. This sort of human to human mistreatment topic is an extremely common point of discussion in Japan. However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery and it pulls in emotive racial bias, and an image of conflict between groups. Software isnt a tribe to go to combat with for sovereignty. Its just code.
- skissane 2y ago> However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery I think “slavery” has much higher salience in the US than in the Western world in general. How many other nations fought a civil war over the topic?
- wegfawefgawefg 2y agoWell historically I assume there have been many nations that had slaves, but the slaves were either subjugted to the point of losing their identity, or it was not racial. The US has a self inflicted complex about it. People in Japan dont feel sorry about the Korean rapes. Descendants of slave owners the world over are free from ancestral guilt. I do think the sensetivity is unreasonable.
- bloqs 2y agoI didnt read that at all, could you be at risk of projecting here?