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This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by crea
by clanky 10mo ago
This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by creating the whole corpus of the internet, without which it could never have been bootstrapped.
The only reason we can't expect this is that we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs or that our own personal advantage can be found in making a Faustian bargain with it.
- syndacks 10mo agoIt would be a deep irony if LLMs ended up ushering in the social rupture that never arrived in the industrial era. When the pigs turn hogs and refuse to share even the scraps, they shouldn’t be surprised if the system they depend on becomes their undoing.
- clanky 10mo agoWe should all hope so. It's clear that mass surveillance, the vast psyops architecture including social media platforms, autonomous drone warfare, Starlink & Neuralink, the whole Silicon Valley project in general is intended to have everyone eventually so discombobulated and "interfered with" that they can't even tell they're experiencing exploitation that should cause discomfort and radicalization (and quickly dispatch the few stragglers who can). It's either social rupture or total oligarch victory in the class war and a 10,000-year Thielreich.
- lelanthran 10mo ago> s intended to have everyone eventually so discombobulated and "interfered with" that they can't even tell they're experiencing exploitation that should cause discomfort and radicalization (and quickly dispatch the few stragglers who can). It sounds like you have not read Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.
- clanky 10mo agoYes, the real danger we face is that the sorts of special, gifted people who "seek tax advice" from Jeffrey Epstein might some day have all their brilliant, wondrous contributions to the world stymied by oppressive systems of control. Not sure what systems those would be, since they own and are building all the ones we can see around us today, but still: collectivism ooga booga!
- ryanjshaw 10mo ago> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs What alternative do you propose?
- olmo23 10mo agoBe realistic, demand the impossible.
- mlnj 10mo ago"I demand a purple unicorn build the things I want to." Now what?
- indigo945 10mo agoClaude Code already is the purple unicorn. We're already there - the only problem is that regulatory systems are set up in a way that benefits a small minority of capitalists, rather than the majority.
- euroderf 10mo agoA reference to France in May of 1968: "Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible." See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68#Slogans_and_graffiti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68#Slogans_and_graffiti
- CalRobert 10mo agoNot forcing a scarcity of necessities like housing would be a start. Peer competition is what makes everything work. You need scarcity of necessities to force people in to the system. Recent rulings allowing the criminalisation of homelessness are pushing this further. Your existence is default-illegal unless you work to outbid your peers for housing.
- tern 10mo agoIt's always the same: workers need to unionize and form a political power bloc. Then, those most impacted—the majority—have an array of options, which are well explored in the annals of leftist and socialist political theory. This is not at all to say that more conservative or reactionary theorists are wrong about how the world works. In fact, I think they're usually more right about what's really going on abstractly. But, the working man doesn't need to know what's really going on. They need to win the war, and there's a ton of tactical advice written down—hard won lessons by those who built the modern world through the labor movement. The place to start is with the usual suspects. Verso Books, The New Centre for Social Research, histories of the labor movement, and new political commentators like Josh Citarella.
- brid 10mo agoDo the owners of capital work less?
- clanky 10mo agoThe numbers of hours that they work relative to the average wage laborer bears absolutely no relationship to whether they are the beneficiaries of an exploitative socio-economic arrangement. But they all certainly work much less than the laborers in the most precarious positions who are forced to work multiple gig economy jobs to make ends meet, yes.
- spir 10mo ago> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital This is totally false. The vast majority of consumers enjoy huge benefits from the system while owning almost no capital. For example, Walmart customers or iPhone owners. A lot of people can't tell the difference between capitalism (which has made their lives materially wealthy beyond imagination) and the root cause of today's economic troubles for ordinary people, which is affordability, which is mostly driven by the housing crisis, which is dominated by nimbyism in megacities. Fix megacity housing regulation to enable cheap/low risk building that the market wants, and you fix the affordability crisis. No need to rebuild the (greatest system in the history of humankind) from scratch.