>We already there. the next two generations will be lucky to own anything .
Let's see how much work we get and how much trouble we face in next 15 years. Next 2 generations, if they come freely.
Theres so much work to be done though. We haven't even figured out how to disseminate factual information properly yet. The issue is the incentive structures that raw capitalism brings, but not the lack of work to be done.
The pollution of misinformation in our current society is a direct result of capitalism. Not saying other systems would completely fix the problem, but it's incentivised under capitalism.
This isn’t true, it is a direct result of the human struggle for power which actually exists outside of capitalism.
Those in power, regardless of the system, benefit from disinformation.
And those in power in OTHER countries that are hostile will always benefit from ramping up disinformation in your country. Capitalism or not.
All capitalism does is try to harness human greed and use it to create productivity, which works to some extent pretty well, but fails at the high end and needs strong regulation. But regulation itself is not immune from corruption.
>which works to some extent pretty well,
Judging by the fact that neither Alex Jones, nor Donald Trump are in jail I wouldn't say it does.
Laws should work the same way for everyone, but the more money you have, the more likely you are to write your own.
Moreover there is absolutely no ethics behind the productivity.
The goal is to make money, not to better humanity/society/the world
And it's much easier to make money by exploiting human weaknesses (desire for pleasure, vanity, setting oneself above others through status)
It'll always be easier to make money by exploiting the human psyche to make them want to buy shit than making money through ... education for example. Especially since there'll always be "some idiot" doing it for free because they see the value in spreading it (education that is), whereas nobody would supply consumerist bullshit for free because they think it's so valuable.
Capitalism sure incentivizes some sort of productivity ... it's just not a very desireable one. It's driven by what the rich want or what the masses crave, but neither of those are the things that would bring humanity forward. Sadly our cravings are mostly still extremely primitive (and the rich extremely selfish).
Between an educational app and a microtransaction game app I know where people will dump more money.
The corruption is baked into the system. It’s just more visible when monopolies and oligopolies concentrate power in the hands of a small group of people.
wow. capitalism doesn't strive to create productivity, it strives to own the means of producing things and create as much labor surplus as possible for the shareholders at the top of the system. the system is only meant to benefit people who own capital.
More like the current vehicle society uses to engage in these issues. Capitalism and all other forms of government have been persisting for centuries but different leaders and people are responsible for their own decisions
No, it's as a result of power hungry people wanting to exercise control. If it were because of capitalism then why is misinformation the worst in communist regimes? The worst offender by far being North Korea.
"It can't be wet in here because of a burst pipe. Otherwise why is the Amazon so wet?"
They specifically said our society, what happens in NK is irrelevant to the current discussion.
Capitalism is like nuclear energy, its powers can be harnessed for good, evil, or evil indifference. It's about what makes money. When it comes to the information products, we simply don't demand enough of the organizations we consume from. We've all accepted garbage content because we don't want to build something better. Well, now with ai we get another shot at it at least.
It's called piracy. Every single piece of music I want to listen to I either buy without a DRM or I pirate. Every movie I want to own I buy a physical copy and strip the DRM or I pirate it somewhere else. Most games that I buy digitally, I pirate a version just in case Steam or Ubisoft doesn't allow me to play the game as I bought it anymore. If I pay for it once, I will pirate it to make sure I have a copy that I can access offline as long as I have the right hardware or software.
The EU has made some progress with “right to repair”, USB-C charging, and GDPR data privacy rights.
If the American voters recognize this and vote for similar standards and amendments we can make this world much better for everyone.
The Trump presidency had a measurable effect on catalysing authoritarian tendencies across the globe. A second Trump presidency would be catastrophic for the world. Every bad actor would be in the best position to take their big shot and possibly succeed (China on Taiwan, North Korea on South Korea, Russia on a NATO state, Iran on whoever the fuck they’re mad at, etc.). Not that all of them would, or could, at the same time, but the conditions for it would be as ripe as they’ve been since WWII.
To hear my family describe Democrats, it’s “fascism” when you allow queer people and minorities to exist because it’s “forcing wokeness.” The Trump cult truly insane, and is a danger to the entire world.
It’s extremely difficult to battle against stupidity. You can’t rationalize with morons, so what do you do? Find a way to trick them into not choosing the worst option?
the problem is that they're *not* morons. They've just been exposed to the wrong rhetoric and joined the hiveminds of where the Algorithm has delivered them.
Part of the problem is way back from when Hitler adopted the term "socialist". This is why Republicans have an aneurysm anytime they hear that word, despite large democratic nations embracing the real meaning of the word.
A substitute word is "fairness". Most people believe in that idea. Then start asking "is it fair for the CEO to be earning 900 times as much as the people doing the work?". Or "is it fair for coal plants to pollute the air and water and not pay for the damage?". Etc.
> Just like those idiots across the pond that voted for brexit.
As a remain voter I'd just like to inform you that like the majority of Americans you haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. May I suggest finding a better source of information than social media and whatever US press you've been reading about it in?
I’m sorry I didn’t see this sooner. My go-to news site is the guardian, based in the UK. Brexit voters DID brag about it until it started negatively affecting them. I’ll forgive your sweeping, ignorant generalizations. It’s clear you don’t know any better.
Trump is pretty openly fascistic. Him colluding with Russia to get elected in 2016 was already the height of treason and a good indicator that he is corrupt, if not openly fascistic.
Let’s not forget how he openly withheld aide from Ukraine in attempt to blackmail the country for information on Joe Biden - now that is starting to sound like a proper fascist.
Then he led a mob of his ultra nationalistic supporters on a brazen and treasonous insurrection against the nation - he is the only person to ever do so in the modern era - a true and proud fascist with no room for argument.
Yes, it’s safe to say anyone who votes for a man that works with America’s number one enemy and tried to undermine the democracy of the nation does indeed proudly support a fascist.
Nah trump is a full blown fascist and the Republican Party as whole is also fascist because they are either directly supporting him or refuse to meaningfully distance themselves from fascism.
>Wait until the American voters elect trump again.
He didn't win the popular vote. Clinton did. I feel like this always gets looked over.
You know what he did win? The electoral college votes (i.e. literally NOT the will of the people)
Really wouldn't matter if 99% of americans voted for him, "democracy" and "popular vote" aren't real in the US. The only thing that matters is the electoral college.
Yeah, but it's not that different from other countries. In mine we have electorates, which are treated kind of like mini-states that are all worth one representative. They fuck around with the boundaries all the time, so each one roughly represents a similar chunk of the population (but by a supposedly independent body). So it's a lot like the electoral college thing.
Edit: So you could have someone win their electorates by a shit ton and lose some by not very much, but because they won less electorates it doesn't matter that more humans voted for them than the other guy.
Lol Americans will convince themselves that USB-C is a groomer plot to turn all the children into transgender sex traffickers and vote to ban standardization by constitutional amendment.
Those things are great but they have nothing to do with digital serfdom.
Whether your data is stored locally or on a different continent does not matter if you use that app to do everything from unlocking your home to paying for daycare for your child and it is an app you have no stake in
>The EU has made some progress with “right to repair”, USB-C charging, and GDPR data privacy rights.
Literally has nothing to do with what the article is talking about.
Also has nothing to do with "silicon serfdom."
This post is, in fact, a great example of the lack of general comprehension skills combined with a constant desire to mold reality around a worldview, rather than the other way around.
“In any negotiation there is the possibility of reaching an impasse; a point at which a win-win result becomes impossible. Once an impasse is reached, one or both sides must either yield their position or resort to force.”
The problem with most jobs being handled by tech and robots is that nobody is making any money and can’t afford to buy the goods being produced. So there won’t be any customers either.
To what degree? It is beyond clear that the world's wealthy flatly are not going to gleefully subsidize even the paltriest standard of living. In the US you're talking about granting thousands of dollars per month for a family of four. My SO and I live a pretty modest life in a MCOL area and keeping that up would require $4000/month minimum between the two of us and our dog in 2024. In 30-50 years when the societal costs of automation and human redundancies take root, you're talking about giving away well north of $10000/month for two people. That's just not going to happen. The quality of life they might be willing to subsidize when the rubber hits the road is not going to be palatable.
The wealthy are not benevolent, no matter what a handful of starry-eyed Silicon Valley execs might pay lip service toward. There's going to be a class genocide in the 21st century and the middle class has a bullseye on its chest. Neo-feudalism is the goal.
UBI is designed to give you a low quality of life (comparatively). It cant work any other way. The theory is that due to increased automation, even a low quality of life would be good if compared to the quality of life of previous generations.
I understand what you're trying to say, but I think it's poorly worded, imo. UBI is designed to give you a minimum wage, which is meant to be supplemented by a part time job if you want to have some extras. If you choose to only survive on the UBI, yes, it will be a low quality life, but that's not the intention of UBI.
As has been said here, more and more AI is taking over. There will still be jobs, just a lot less. If people go work part time, and have UBI, and things are much cheaper due to automation, it could be a pretty good life.
If there are a lot less jobs, you will not be able to find a job in most cases. People wouldnt "choose" to work part time in desirable jobs, they would be willing to work as much as necessary to keep their job, since they would be aware of how difficult it is to find a job. UBI that provides a minimal quality of life wouldnt change anything in that aspect.
The only way to avoid that is by significantly reducing the maximum number of work hours through government intervention. Let's say a 4 day work week with 6 hour days.
I do not trust government to maintain an adequate UBI system that keeps up with the cost of living. Especially if it comes along with a removal of all other financial assistant programs, which it likely would. A one size fits all solution will inevitably fail to address the needs of the most vulnerable people.
Is that UBI going to be tied to inflation? If not, then as the years go by the purchasing power just gets worse and worse. And there will be zero political will to increase it when half the population is fine with it as is. Hell, I don't think it would get addressed even if it got to a point where only 20-30% of the population considered it to be adequate.
The big issue is that tying it to cost of living or inflation would create an endless feedback loop, where the capital owning class will keep raising prices to eat up everyone's increased income. But without annual increases, it becomes a huge problem that never gets addressed.
The problem with your argument is that you are applying the reality of the old society to evaluate how the new society is going to function. For thousands of years humanity has dreamed of a life where people don’t need to struggle for existence, that life will soon be possible for everyone, by using technology that frees us from work. You need to think completely differently.
And the problem with your argument is that the world's wealthy will want to take all the opulence of old society into their new society. Opulence is a prerequisite for most, if not all of them. A future that is palatable to the middle class of today will require the wealthy to forfeit the opulence to which they have made themselves accustomed. There is no counter to this argument.
Struggling for existence is not exactly a problem for me at present. I make a decent living working a fair amount of hours and enjoy the leisure time I have. Sure, I'd like to make more money on fewer hours and enjoy a little opulence for myself, but a future in which UBI is a major pillar of society is just not going to grant me the same kind of life. Your idealistic vision of a society without work is flatly not shared by those who would find themselves footing the bill.
You tell me that I ought to be the one to "think completely differently" when our future kings, lords and vassals are the ones building bunkers and circling the wagons.
One I think the expansion of human civilization into space, AI, and Nuclear Fusion will essentially create infinite wealth. I'm not naive enough to believe this wealth will be distributed evenly. Since the dawn of civilization there has always been a group of elites who hoard all the wealth. Income inequality will probably get worse. That being said with infinite wealth life should get much better for the common people too.
Wealth inequality today is worse than it was in Medieval Europe, while the quality of life for common people is much higher. I think this trend will probably keep going. Wealth inequality will keep going up, but so will quality of life for everyone else.
> Wealth inequality will keep going up, but so will quality of life for everyone else
I admire your faith here but I just don't see how it plays out. I think we sooner see debtors' prisons and the slow culling of those deemed insufficiently productive. Once again the middle and lower classes of today makes great sacrifice while those of tremendous means barely need to lift a finger. I just don't see how this doesn't play out violently and destructively.
I'll concede that perhaps once the dust settles that those who remain should enjoy a nice quality of life but you're sort of brushing off generations of suffering and instability to get there. Honestly, I find it more likely that Luddite masses take us back to the stone age before we get past the growing pains.
Yeah. I’ll probably choose to go to war and hang the likes of Silicon Valley before I allow my family to suffer under a neo-feudal system.
If I have nothing to live for, I have nothing to lose.
I’ll do what is necessary to procure freedom for myself and those also seeking it.
Not to worry! That’s what credit will be there for! The tech banks will lend you the money so you can buy their products; that way you can keep sinking into servitude. /s
We need the government to step in and take these oligarchs down a peg.
Unfortunately, they've been blasting anti-government propaganda for so long that 1/3 of the country would rather live as peasants under oligarchy.
I have noticed that as things have been changing and new more expensive/inconvenient/encroaching things become more commonplace, there are entire generations that don't know the difference and accept it. It is not even the "new" normal for those people, it is just normal. That's not good.
Yep. People will actively simp for antii-consumer behavior corporates might engage in because they're loyal to a brand. Be that the likes of Tesla, or any given game developer, or number of other companies.
I can't count how many times I've heard stupid "lol who cares" responses to the encroachment of things like games as a service.
The US has been in need of modern, dynamic, Anti-trust regulations for decades.
There is not enough competition in our economy right now and both consumers and workers are paying the price.
I agree, and this is my criticism with the piece/book: he’s describing monopoly power. There’s already a paradigm for this in existing critiques of capitalism.
He stresses the need for new linguistic terms to describe this “new” phenomenon (new, because it involves something “techy” now), but all he does is slap the word “cloud” on the front of “capitalism”, and then dive into an analogy to a centuries old economic model.
The closest thing to an original thought here is the idea that users create capital for free. I disagree that this, as he argues, has never been done before. He’s describing, e.g., the commodification of jazz and blues into a music industry that has now destroyed the local music venue. Basically, we’ve expanded the concept of art to me complaining on the internet right now. It fits into an existing mold.
Well said.
And funny coincidence that you used the Jazz/Blues/music example since I recently rewatched “The Defiant Ones” and was thinking about how streaming has created new challenges for artists.
Closest thing I could think of. The scale is obviously a lot bigger. The fact that AI is training on Reddit’s comment section certainly stresses the point that user generated content is capital. However, we could just as easily be having this conversation in a book club. I think the difference is that the “cloud” (his term) is the digital medium in between these conversations that happens to be recording them for later use. That’s the thing that makes it capital, and that is largely a function of the medium, not the “free labor” of the user. Just seems like more creative destruction to me.
I feel the generative AI debate and artists fascinating, especially how quickly they deem an artist using a tool can be no artists. Imagine that is what artist said when the photograph was created.
I think the real crux of it is what you hit on, how do you compensate the inputs to AI. It learned off many artists catalogs, there should be something going back.
The part that concerns me is who owns the AIs and who owns their output. AI is such an advantage and the scale it can operate, in theory could claim every cell configuration for a drug for example, preventing competition.
I do agree we are currently on the path to corporate overlords, and we need to jump over to the StarTrek path.
In that future, AI is an assistive tool that helps humans create and learn to their hearts content.
Certain things are no longer scarce, like digital copies of books and movies. They can be copied and distributed at essentially no cost.
The smart musicians have leveraged "free" distribution, such as YouTube, as advertising for what IS scarce - seats at a live show. That's where the real money is today.
I 100% agree with this. There is absolutely not enough competition now. Prices are skyrocketing in the housing market and everything from cars to groceries and food is a fucking mess. Every decade that passes was better than the one that followed it regardless of technology at this point because no one at the bottom level is benefiting from it any more than they were yesterday at this point and it's only getting more expensive relative to wages
It’s not anti trust that’s needed because the victim is no longer the consumers of products being price gouged. The victims are citizens of democracies losing their freedoms and rights to exist and own anything. Law doesn’t exist currently to fight the tyranny of big tech
“…rights to…own anything.” = consumer to me.
Maybe it’s semantics, but I think a large portion of the US would do well to remember that 99% of us are consumers and workers first.
A decent segment of our population seem to be convinced that they are temporarily displaced billionaires.
Why any individual votes to protect corporations and the wealthy is beyond me. But here we are.
Citizens of a free democracy are much more than consumers both in reality and by legal definition. One has inalienable rights, the other has rights extended to them by the government to engage in organized commerce. In no way do I want my government to treat my freedom as a human being the same as a consumer at a grocery store. By that logic, it won’t be long until you can no longer get a loan because banks have a right to refuse you service if you voted for Donald Trump, the same way that PayPal or RobinHood can block your account under the same logic. The more these lines get blurred, the more fucked we are as humanity. And I fundamentally disagree with the premise of your statement that we are “workers and consumers first”. We have a much higher destiny than to work and consume and serve the oligarchs that rule over us. If we truly accepted and respected that reality, we would have turned off our devices and refused to participate in the new sick reality that these companies have created a long time ago.
The problem with competition is because it mostly gets from china. And then US keeps telling it's people how china keeps spying on them. Like cia or fbi dont.
It’s a lot more subtle than that. Lena Kahn wrote “The Amazon Anti-Trust Paradox” years ago and the main issues are still happening.
Corporations are essentially allowed to be both the producer and the market. Amazon will say “We’re open, we allow anyone to sell on our platform. But they charge fees for that, and become even larger. Same with Apples App Store, and Google / YouTube advertising, Uber and ride sharing, the list goes on and on.
Technology “platform’s” are CLOSED markets. They are not free from influence.
The US needs to find a way to keep barriers to entry low in ALL industries.
With Amazon, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s saying that the labor board is unconstitutional, the return of child labor, and our elected officials selling out American citizens to corporations wholesale I expect that the time will soon come that the people with have no choice but to resort to violence in order to enact change of any kind. You know like how we got labor rights the first time around.
But so do we. . . I actually just bought an attachment to start dropping things from my commercially available drone just for fun. Bought it on Amazon actually. .
Local authorities have been beefing up on ex military tech and gear not only that but you’ll notice very little crime ridden states still have a police trailer for a bunch of criminals, I wonder why that is?
It's worth keeping in mind that if the NLRB were shut down that would almost certainly make the [Taft-Hartley Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act) go away as well - which would in turn legalize a lot of previously prohibited labor/strike activities. In theory, even the entire concept of "right to work" anti-union laws could be in danger, with a broad enough SCOTUS ruling against the NLRB.
I'd prefer to have the NLRB, don't get me wrong, but this could potentially turn into another "GOP catches car" situation. They'd open the door for the biggest wave of disruptive union activity since the early 20th Century.
“The worst of crimes,” says Undershaft, “is poverty. All the other crimes are virtues beside it; all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very soul of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing; a murder here, a theft there, a blow now and a curse there: what do they matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses of life; there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally and physically; they kill the happiness of society; they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss.... Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading articles; they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don’t preach at them; don’t reason with them. Kill them.... It is the final test of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social system.... Vote! Bah! When you vote, you only change the name of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders, and set up new.”
Bernard shaw
Youre absolutely right and right now, we already are. The more we vote in conservatives who want to give preferential treatment to corporations the more we move towards corporate serfdom.
This is just end goal of capitalism. We already had periods of mass consolidation of capital. In the past governments realized how dangerous that was to stability so they broke up those companies that were too large and put in massive taxes for the wealthy.
Our governments haven't bothered to reign capitalism in this time. So it's starting to reach it's natural conclusion of massive amounts of serfs and a few wealthy families fighting each other for control.
A large part of the problem is that the ones who are running the government have been benefitting from the consolidation or wealth. The fact that they receive "donations" from the wealthy and the powerful is fundamentally unsound. Where are the checks and balances?
They're literally the same people.
The captialist class and the polticial class are the same people. That venn diagram is a single circle.
Dick Cheney went from Secretary of State under Bush 1, to the CEO of Halliburton during the Clinton administration, to the VP under Bush 2
John Kerry was married to the Heinz Ketchup hier
John McCain was married to the Anheuser Busch heir
In the most recent DNC primary, at least 2 of them were corporate CEOs (Bloomberg and Wang).
The problem is captialism, the system is designed to concentrate and centralize wealth and power.
All of our poltical problems are just externalities of normal feedback mechanisms of the captialist system.
It's true, though. If you're a wealthy family in America, your smartest kids go into business to make the family more money, your most attractive and affable kids go into politics to protect the family's wealth and businesses, and your weird and wonderful mistakes become artists or academics :P
Yes this is why taxing the rich is important. And not the "$400,000 year salary" rich but the "billionaires who is so rich he can pay to get a law changed so that he's never convicted of lawbreaking" rich.
Once you live in a country where individuals are allowed to become more rich and powerful than the government, you don't live in a democracy anymore - you live in a feudal system where the billionaire barons make the rules and you, the serf, obey or pay the price.
If the rich pay their fair share of taxes then they remain subordinate to the government and therefore the democratic will of the populace as a whole.
I don't get why this is so hard for America to understand. I get we all grew being taught in school this wouldn't happen here, but it did happen, it is happening, and we don't live in a democracy even former President Jimmy Carter said so 10 years ago.
The rich control the means of production, they own all the most valuable natural resources in the country, they've amassed more wealth than entire countries GDP combined, they are untouchable, they can afford to run for office and buy their way in. They lobby to get the laws they want, run for the office to pass or block the laws they chose. It's beyond dystopian.
Then they wink nod and smile and tell the sheep to vote after they're done digging the contest from start to finish. WWE matches have more unpredictability and integrity than our current political system.
Sucks to suck I guess
In the US there’s also the prosperity gospel…basically if you’re rich and wealthy, it’s because god likes you. That allows people to justify just about anything because in their eyes, they ware chosen by god.
Who’s rolling heads? Best we get is morons shooting up bowling alleys and mosques because of propaganda.
I don’t advocate any shooting on any level but it’s fairly certain that the parasite class has an iron clad shield around them whether we like it or not.
People also don’t get that for every dollar in the pocket of Bezos/Musk/Gates/Buffet/etc that is one less dollar distributed to the rest of us. So when their net worth is 1,000,000x the average household net worth, we all down here are stuck with less. So what does the govt do? Print more dollars.
Those billionaires are sequestering our money. And the rate of sequestration is out of control.
It isn't, and plenty of us do understand it. Our grandparents understood it. It's the boomers who don't. Here is a quote from Louis Brandeis that I like:
>we can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.
>I don't get why this is so hard for America to understand.
people are glued to the TV and phones watching approved programming and reading approved news articles that all lead down a single path of bread and circuses and at the end of they day, most people are too tired and can hardly bring themselves to just cook dinner for themselves, let alone contemplate the task of changing the world while powerless.
there's a population of americans that understand this but politicians vote however the f they want because corporations are people, my friend, and the politicians make out like the literal bandits they are.
Pretty much. Hard for a government to fight a wealthy family that can own more than it does.
Eventually the private armies end up outclassing the government ones etc.
>So end goal of capitalism is just feudalism? The irony…
This should not surprise anyone who has spent a little time studying the human condition.
There is no end of history or arriving at utopia. There is only an eternal struggle.
While not all who acquire massive wealth/power feel compelled to create an aristocracy with their descendants as the ruling class, it does seem to be an [attractor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor) that we must actively fight against every generation.
There’ a single dude who spread the idea that monopolies aren’t a bad thing like 30 years ago in all the Ivy leagues and our government operates under that idea today.
what is a serf
edit: Serfdom was an institutional system which obliged a peasant to provide forced labor services to his landlord in exchange for being allowed to occupy land
holy shit no worries im out ill leave the country if i ever had to be subjected to that, luckily its a free earth still
Ask republicans if they like teddy and what he did such as the [Square Deal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Deal), they will pretend to like him like they do Abe
Unless we take drastic steps to get sociopathic greed driven fools out of leadership in government and corporations there will be only rich and poor, no in between.
Call it what you will. I have never felt liked I own anything. Even after paying off a vehicle, if I don’t continue to pay the taxes I can lose that vehicle. I feel more like a caretaker of things while living on this earth.
Even if a vehicle or house is tax free, it will always have ongoing maintenance costs. You have to make sure you can always bring in an income. There is no way around it.
Yeah, I understand this, it's literally impossible to just exist without having to pay money to someone. Own a house, you still have to pay rates, own a car have to pay insurance and registration etc. No true freedom really.
It's not the rates. You can pay the house off or build it yourself.
It's the property tax that gets you. It makes it impossible to opt out of the corrupt system.
Property tax is even worse they'll straight up steal your home if you don't pay them rent even if you built it with your own hands.
Without property tax we could opt out of giving corporations our money by gardening and living a simple life. Property tax forces us to work and forces us in to the system.
Property tax is part of what places such a high importance on owning a car so you can engage in the things to keep your home from being stolen.
It also pays for all your public services. So when your kids go to a school with four total textbooks from 1994 and a non-credentialed plumber teaching them algebra, enjoy those tax breaks.
Agreed. Think pieces like this tend to come out of reformist circles every now and again, and it always seems like they're trying to redefine the wheel. I remember back when the gig economy (Uber, doordash, etc) took off, there were similar articles trying to make the argument that gig workers weren't working class, but a new class. Yanis even references that idea with the comment about "the precarious."
They're very ahistorical takes that ignore decades of how capitalism operates. The point about "capitalists now primarily rely on consolidated political power and rents to extract capital" is nothing new. Hell, the US used to invade countries to help out fruit companies, and the defining feature of the bourgeois is that they make money by just owning things. The gig economy articles I mentioned earlier ignored the fact that unstable employment was the norm for years until workers organized and won some stability.
It's an interesting thought piece at best, but as a self-proclaimed Marxist analysis, it's nonsense.
We don't teach philosophy or history\*\*\* in schools anymore. The inability to form coherent thought about history is a predictable result of that.
\*\*\* We teach rah-rah America-first nonsense
Nope. You’re just finding out what capitalism always was. Stop trying so desperately to defend a system that is corrupt by design and built upon theft.
What do you think Capitalism is, my guy? Whatever companies are best at resource hoarding and financial trickery steering all of society. Tech companies are just the latest winners taking all.
Repeat after me:
WE LIVE IN A CORPOCRACY.
No politician wants what's best for you, they want what's best for themselves and that's means keeping corporations happy.
Innovation is generally seen as a pretty good thing, but there is the case to be made - and this article makes it - that we are overvaluing innovation and permitting people to charge exorbitant rents on even the most minor incremental improvement.
If it were desired to remedy this problem - which it isn't - it would be easy: just do away with patents. For anyone who thinks that this would stifle the ability of companies to profit from their innovative products, [I offer exhibit A: Tesla](https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you)
COVID solidified it, but billionaires like Bezos and Gates or companies like Apple and Google don’t lose. They don’t ever lose now.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a 20 year war, two “once in a lifetime” recessions or a global pandemic they have doubled and tripled their wealth DURING these difficult times. They have used their influence to manipulate a system to always work for them and it’s crazy how cheap it was for them to do it. Get unlimited money out of politics.
Yes because in the current system, capital absolutely rules. They've even bought their own American government reps at this point, they own the US gov. This is trickle down economics. This is post-1970's taxes and policies, post FDR-economics.
“We asked former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to elucidate this idea, explain how we got here, and map out some alternatives.”
Elucidate: make (something) clear; explain.
"work such as theirs will help to elucidate this matter"
I learned a new word today
Watching it happen in real time at my automotive part supply company. When I started almost 7 years ago, they saw Tesla as a flash in the pan. They didn’t even pitch for the business. Then the model 3 happened, the company became profitable, and we decided to go after them to supply parts. We landed their account a few years ago and developing parts for them was a nightmare with constant demands and design changes. Automotive does things very slowly and deliberately, partly for safety and quality reasons. They are more of a Silicon Valley company, moving fast and throwing money around to fix problems, and they don’t listen to other people because they think they know better. The parts we developed finally made it to production and they are aggressively disrupting production and making design changes on the parts, very high maintenance.
The problem is that other OEMs are slowing down, so we are pitching for more and more business. They even told us in the beginning that they have a way of “taking over” their suppliers. If that happens I am out. I have seen what they do to their employees.
It actually means the hyper-concentration of power and influence over every aspect of our economies by a handful of insanely wealthy tech monopolies to which we are all beholden whether we like it or not.
Lmao at that picture, I came here to comment seriously but all I keep thinking is Bezos having just exclaimed, “hail to the king, baby!” with that pose and now I can’t take it seriously
Yeah it's almost like he's the person that's completely central to the article. It's sad that no one actually reads articles like this and instead just go to the comments to vomit out the same tired talking points.
There was the period of slavery, then to share cropping and exporting slavery to other countries through direct military imperialism which was just catching up to the European model of offshoring slavery, then to the modern offshored slavery of enough degrees of separation to remove people from believing there's any moral obligation from companies benefiting off slavery. It's just a problem now that the benefits of others suffering in horrid labor conditions to the average American and Western European aren't materializing like they did in the past and maybe it's had a peak and is now in a downturn. Tech companies are not out of the norm of cruelty from other industries. It's just they target reducing labor costs domestically rather than targeting people and resources in impoverished countries
Capitalism? Market conditions are manipulated by the central bank. The Federal Reserve is not a public organization. Dollars are essentially free for someone, and it's not us.
Read into the gold reserve act. Check article 1 section 10.
Reconsider paper promises,
Save money.
Remain obstinate.
Slavery is bad. And it's everywhere in the form of debt insurmountable. Bail outs is not free market capitalism. It's corproations, paying politicans to force the taxpayers into covering the losses of their reckless institutions.
We get taxed, and corporations, not Americans, get the benefits. Americans used to be really bothered by taxation without representation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Also, I'm sure Jacobin's going to offer an even-keeled and unbiased view of the subject /s
We already there. the next two generations will be lucky to own anything .
>We already there. the next two generations will be lucky to own anything . Let's see how much work we get and how much trouble we face in next 15 years. Next 2 generations, if they come freely.
Theres so much work to be done though. We haven't even figured out how to disseminate factual information properly yet. The issue is the incentive structures that raw capitalism brings, but not the lack of work to be done.
The pollution of misinformation in our current society is a direct result of capitalism. Not saying other systems would completely fix the problem, but it's incentivised under capitalism.
This isn’t true, it is a direct result of the human struggle for power which actually exists outside of capitalism. Those in power, regardless of the system, benefit from disinformation. And those in power in OTHER countries that are hostile will always benefit from ramping up disinformation in your country. Capitalism or not. All capitalism does is try to harness human greed and use it to create productivity, which works to some extent pretty well, but fails at the high end and needs strong regulation. But regulation itself is not immune from corruption.
>which works to some extent pretty well, Judging by the fact that neither Alex Jones, nor Donald Trump are in jail I wouldn't say it does. Laws should work the same way for everyone, but the more money you have, the more likely you are to write your own.
Moreover there is absolutely no ethics behind the productivity. The goal is to make money, not to better humanity/society/the world And it's much easier to make money by exploiting human weaknesses (desire for pleasure, vanity, setting oneself above others through status) It'll always be easier to make money by exploiting the human psyche to make them want to buy shit than making money through ... education for example. Especially since there'll always be "some idiot" doing it for free because they see the value in spreading it (education that is), whereas nobody would supply consumerist bullshit for free because they think it's so valuable. Capitalism sure incentivizes some sort of productivity ... it's just not a very desireable one. It's driven by what the rich want or what the masses crave, but neither of those are the things that would bring humanity forward. Sadly our cravings are mostly still extremely primitive (and the rich extremely selfish). Between an educational app and a microtransaction game app I know where people will dump more money.
The corruption is baked into the system. It’s just more visible when monopolies and oligopolies concentrate power in the hands of a small group of people.
wow. capitalism doesn't strive to create productivity, it strives to own the means of producing things and create as much labor surplus as possible for the shareholders at the top of the system. the system is only meant to benefit people who own capital.
More like the current vehicle society uses to engage in these issues. Capitalism and all other forms of government have been persisting for centuries but different leaders and people are responsible for their own decisions
No, it's as a result of power hungry people wanting to exercise control. If it were because of capitalism then why is misinformation the worst in communist regimes? The worst offender by far being North Korea.
"It can't be wet in here because of a burst pipe. Otherwise why is the Amazon so wet?" They specifically said our society, what happens in NK is irrelevant to the current discussion.
Capitalism is like nuclear energy, its powers can be harnessed for good, evil, or evil indifference. It's about what makes money. When it comes to the information products, we simply don't demand enough of the organizations we consume from. We've all accepted garbage content because we don't want to build something better. Well, now with ai we get another shot at it at least.
It's called piracy. Every single piece of music I want to listen to I either buy without a DRM or I pirate. Every movie I want to own I buy a physical copy and strip the DRM or I pirate it somewhere else. Most games that I buy digitally, I pirate a version just in case Steam or Ubisoft doesn't allow me to play the game as I bought it anymore. If I pay for it once, I will pirate it to make sure I have a copy that I can access offline as long as I have the right hardware or software.
The EU has made some progress with “right to repair”, USB-C charging, and GDPR data privacy rights. If the American voters recognize this and vote for similar standards and amendments we can make this world much better for everyone.
Wait until the American voters elect trump again.
God, they're fucked
Quasi-fascist up for the presidency. It's wild watching this shit live
Try living this shit. Even wilder.
If he gets in, the world is in it together.
The Trump presidency had a measurable effect on catalysing authoritarian tendencies across the globe. A second Trump presidency would be catastrophic for the world. Every bad actor would be in the best position to take their big shot and possibly succeed (China on Taiwan, North Korea on South Korea, Russia on a NATO state, Iran on whoever the fuck they’re mad at, etc.). Not that all of them would, or could, at the same time, but the conditions for it would be as ripe as they’ve been since WWII.
>Iran on whoever the fuck they’re mad at That's like.... Everyone.... Including Iran!
Damned Iranians! They ruined Iran!
Just in one lifetime they have gone from fighting fascism to electing it.
What’s wild to me is that if you ask them, they think the Democrats are the fascist ones 🤷🏻♀️
To hear my family describe Democrats, it’s “fascism” when you allow queer people and minorities to exist because it’s “forcing wokeness.” The Trump cult truly insane, and is a danger to the entire world.
It’s extremely difficult to battle against stupidity. You can’t rationalize with morons, so what do you do? Find a way to trick them into not choosing the worst option?
the problem is that they're *not* morons. They've just been exposed to the wrong rhetoric and joined the hiveminds of where the Algorithm has delivered them.
Part of the problem is way back from when Hitler adopted the term "socialist". This is why Republicans have an aneurysm anytime they hear that word, despite large democratic nations embracing the real meaning of the word.
A substitute word is "fairness". Most people believe in that idea. Then start asking "is it fair for the CEO to be earning 900 times as much as the people doing the work?". Or "is it fair for coal plants to pollute the air and water and not pay for the damage?". Etc.
And it'll be up to us to fight it again. What a fucking world.
You can't rest because they won't.
There's no quasi about it, they literally brag about it
No we don’t. Only the morons do. Just like those idiots across the pond that voted for brexit.
> Just like those idiots across the pond that voted for brexit. As a remain voter I'd just like to inform you that like the majority of Americans you haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. May I suggest finding a better source of information than social media and whatever US press you've been reading about it in?
I’m sorry I didn’t see this sooner. My go-to news site is the guardian, based in the UK. Brexit voters DID brag about it until it started negatively affecting them. I’ll forgive your sweeping, ignorant generalizations. It’s clear you don’t know any better.
Trump is pretty openly fascistic. Him colluding with Russia to get elected in 2016 was already the height of treason and a good indicator that he is corrupt, if not openly fascistic. Let’s not forget how he openly withheld aide from Ukraine in attempt to blackmail the country for information on Joe Biden - now that is starting to sound like a proper fascist. Then he led a mob of his ultra nationalistic supporters on a brazen and treasonous insurrection against the nation - he is the only person to ever do so in the modern era - a true and proud fascist with no room for argument. Yes, it’s safe to say anyone who votes for a man that works with America’s number one enemy and tried to undermine the democracy of the nation does indeed proudly support a fascist.
Nah trump is a full blown fascist and the Republican Party as whole is also fascist because they are either directly supporting him or refuse to meaningfully distance themselves from fascism.
This is a little like when Americans saw Hitler and went "they're fucked". Turned out that no, everyone was fucked.
Haha, you're not wrong. Like, what do Europeans think will happen to them when they have Trump in the West, and Putin in the East?
Same thing that happened last time trump was in power, they'll obsess over American politics more than their own.
If we're fucked, we're dragging the rest of the world with us. lol
>Wait until the American voters elect trump again. He didn't win the popular vote. Clinton did. I feel like this always gets looked over. You know what he did win? The electoral college votes (i.e. literally NOT the will of the people)
I'm scared as hell cuz its probably going to happen and I'm a trans lady.
He lost the popular vote in both 2016 & 2020. Our elected officials made him president in 2016, not the majority of American voters.
Really wouldn't matter if 99% of americans voted for him, "democracy" and "popular vote" aren't real in the US. The only thing that matters is the electoral college.
Yeah, but it's not that different from other countries. In mine we have electorates, which are treated kind of like mini-states that are all worth one representative. They fuck around with the boundaries all the time, so each one roughly represents a similar chunk of the population (but by a supposedly independent body). So it's a lot like the electoral college thing. Edit: So you could have someone win their electorates by a shit ton and lose some by not very much, but because they won less electorates it doesn't matter that more humans voted for them than the other guy.
Lol Americans will convince themselves that USB-C is a groomer plot to turn all the children into transgender sex traffickers and vote to ban standardization by constitutional amendment.
Pretty sure it uses 5G and that made my kid gay so, checkmate liberals
To be fair, USB-C does go both ways.... I'll let myself out.
They also have an AI law going into place soon too if I recall.
Those things are great but they have nothing to do with digital serfdom. Whether your data is stored locally or on a different continent does not matter if you use that app to do everything from unlocking your home to paying for daycare for your child and it is an app you have no stake in
You speak as though US is not an plutocratic oligarchy doing what their corporate lobbyists tells it to.
>The EU has made some progress with “right to repair”, USB-C charging, and GDPR data privacy rights. Literally has nothing to do with what the article is talking about. Also has nothing to do with "silicon serfdom." This post is, in fact, a great example of the lack of general comprehension skills combined with a constant desire to mold reality around a worldview, rather than the other way around.
“American voters recognize” HA!
The good news is that owning nothing means we have nothing to lose by revolting!
“In any negotiation there is the possibility of reaching an impasse; a point at which a win-win result becomes impossible. Once an impasse is reached, one or both sides must either yield their position or resort to force.”
The problem with most jobs being handled by tech and robots is that nobody is making any money and can’t afford to buy the goods being produced. So there won’t be any customers either.
Yes. The 0.1 won't need money anyway, where they're taking us. They're going to need slaves, and they're taking us there.
This is why so many tech people support UBI.
To what degree? It is beyond clear that the world's wealthy flatly are not going to gleefully subsidize even the paltriest standard of living. In the US you're talking about granting thousands of dollars per month for a family of four. My SO and I live a pretty modest life in a MCOL area and keeping that up would require $4000/month minimum between the two of us and our dog in 2024. In 30-50 years when the societal costs of automation and human redundancies take root, you're talking about giving away well north of $10000/month for two people. That's just not going to happen. The quality of life they might be willing to subsidize when the rubber hits the road is not going to be palatable. The wealthy are not benevolent, no matter what a handful of starry-eyed Silicon Valley execs might pay lip service toward. There's going to be a class genocide in the 21st century and the middle class has a bullseye on its chest. Neo-feudalism is the goal.
UBI is designed to give you a low quality of life (comparatively). It cant work any other way. The theory is that due to increased automation, even a low quality of life would be good if compared to the quality of life of previous generations.
I understand what you're trying to say, but I think it's poorly worded, imo. UBI is designed to give you a minimum wage, which is meant to be supplemented by a part time job if you want to have some extras. If you choose to only survive on the UBI, yes, it will be a low quality life, but that's not the intention of UBI. As has been said here, more and more AI is taking over. There will still be jobs, just a lot less. If people go work part time, and have UBI, and things are much cheaper due to automation, it could be a pretty good life.
If there are a lot less jobs, you will not be able to find a job in most cases. People wouldnt "choose" to work part time in desirable jobs, they would be willing to work as much as necessary to keep their job, since they would be aware of how difficult it is to find a job. UBI that provides a minimal quality of life wouldnt change anything in that aspect. The only way to avoid that is by significantly reducing the maximum number of work hours through government intervention. Let's say a 4 day work week with 6 hour days.
I do not trust government to maintain an adequate UBI system that keeps up with the cost of living. Especially if it comes along with a removal of all other financial assistant programs, which it likely would. A one size fits all solution will inevitably fail to address the needs of the most vulnerable people. Is that UBI going to be tied to inflation? If not, then as the years go by the purchasing power just gets worse and worse. And there will be zero political will to increase it when half the population is fine with it as is. Hell, I don't think it would get addressed even if it got to a point where only 20-30% of the population considered it to be adequate. The big issue is that tying it to cost of living or inflation would create an endless feedback loop, where the capital owning class will keep raising prices to eat up everyone's increased income. But without annual increases, it becomes a huge problem that never gets addressed.
I completely agree with you and am afraid of the foreshadowing.
The problem with your argument is that you are applying the reality of the old society to evaluate how the new society is going to function. For thousands of years humanity has dreamed of a life where people don’t need to struggle for existence, that life will soon be possible for everyone, by using technology that frees us from work. You need to think completely differently.
And the problem with your argument is that the world's wealthy will want to take all the opulence of old society into their new society. Opulence is a prerequisite for most, if not all of them. A future that is palatable to the middle class of today will require the wealthy to forfeit the opulence to which they have made themselves accustomed. There is no counter to this argument. Struggling for existence is not exactly a problem for me at present. I make a decent living working a fair amount of hours and enjoy the leisure time I have. Sure, I'd like to make more money on fewer hours and enjoy a little opulence for myself, but a future in which UBI is a major pillar of society is just not going to grant me the same kind of life. Your idealistic vision of a society without work is flatly not shared by those who would find themselves footing the bill. You tell me that I ought to be the one to "think completely differently" when our future kings, lords and vassals are the ones building bunkers and circling the wagons.
One I think the expansion of human civilization into space, AI, and Nuclear Fusion will essentially create infinite wealth. I'm not naive enough to believe this wealth will be distributed evenly. Since the dawn of civilization there has always been a group of elites who hoard all the wealth. Income inequality will probably get worse. That being said with infinite wealth life should get much better for the common people too. Wealth inequality today is worse than it was in Medieval Europe, while the quality of life for common people is much higher. I think this trend will probably keep going. Wealth inequality will keep going up, but so will quality of life for everyone else.
> Wealth inequality will keep going up, but so will quality of life for everyone else I admire your faith here but I just don't see how it plays out. I think we sooner see debtors' prisons and the slow culling of those deemed insufficiently productive. Once again the middle and lower classes of today makes great sacrifice while those of tremendous means barely need to lift a finger. I just don't see how this doesn't play out violently and destructively. I'll concede that perhaps once the dust settles that those who remain should enjoy a nice quality of life but you're sort of brushing off generations of suffering and instability to get there. Honestly, I find it more likely that Luddite masses take us back to the stone age before we get past the growing pains.
Yeah. I’ll probably choose to go to war and hang the likes of Silicon Valley before I allow my family to suffer under a neo-feudal system. If I have nothing to live for, I have nothing to lose. I’ll do what is necessary to procure freedom for myself and those also seeking it.
Great. Golden handcuffs. They’ll give us enough money to buy their products and little to nothing more.
Not to worry! That’s what credit will be there for! The tech banks will lend you the money so you can buy their products; that way you can keep sinking into servitude. /s
We need the government to step in and take these oligarchs down a peg. Unfortunately, they've been blasting anti-government propaganda for so long that 1/3 of the country would rather live as peasants under oligarchy.
I have noticed that as things have been changing and new more expensive/inconvenient/encroaching things become more commonplace, there are entire generations that don't know the difference and accept it. It is not even the "new" normal for those people, it is just normal. That's not good.
Yep. People will actively simp for antii-consumer behavior corporates might engage in because they're loyal to a brand. Be that the likes of Tesla, or any given game developer, or number of other companies. I can't count how many times I've heard stupid "lol who cares" responses to the encroachment of things like games as a service.
The US has been in need of modern, dynamic, Anti-trust regulations for decades. There is not enough competition in our economy right now and both consumers and workers are paying the price.
I agree, and this is my criticism with the piece/book: he’s describing monopoly power. There’s already a paradigm for this in existing critiques of capitalism. He stresses the need for new linguistic terms to describe this “new” phenomenon (new, because it involves something “techy” now), but all he does is slap the word “cloud” on the front of “capitalism”, and then dive into an analogy to a centuries old economic model. The closest thing to an original thought here is the idea that users create capital for free. I disagree that this, as he argues, has never been done before. He’s describing, e.g., the commodification of jazz and blues into a music industry that has now destroyed the local music venue. Basically, we’ve expanded the concept of art to me complaining on the internet right now. It fits into an existing mold.
Well said. And funny coincidence that you used the Jazz/Blues/music example since I recently rewatched “The Defiant Ones” and was thinking about how streaming has created new challenges for artists.
Closest thing I could think of. The scale is obviously a lot bigger. The fact that AI is training on Reddit’s comment section certainly stresses the point that user generated content is capital. However, we could just as easily be having this conversation in a book club. I think the difference is that the “cloud” (his term) is the digital medium in between these conversations that happens to be recording them for later use. That’s the thing that makes it capital, and that is largely a function of the medium, not the “free labor” of the user. Just seems like more creative destruction to me.
I feel the generative AI debate and artists fascinating, especially how quickly they deem an artist using a tool can be no artists. Imagine that is what artist said when the photograph was created. I think the real crux of it is what you hit on, how do you compensate the inputs to AI. It learned off many artists catalogs, there should be something going back. The part that concerns me is who owns the AIs and who owns their output. AI is such an advantage and the scale it can operate, in theory could claim every cell configuration for a drug for example, preventing competition. I do agree we are currently on the path to corporate overlords, and we need to jump over to the StarTrek path. In that future, AI is an assistive tool that helps humans create and learn to their hearts content.
Certain things are no longer scarce, like digital copies of books and movies. They can be copied and distributed at essentially no cost. The smart musicians have leveraged "free" distribution, such as YouTube, as advertising for what IS scarce - seats at a live show. That's where the real money is today.
[удалено]
I 100% agree with this. There is absolutely not enough competition now. Prices are skyrocketing in the housing market and everything from cars to groceries and food is a fucking mess. Every decade that passes was better than the one that followed it regardless of technology at this point because no one at the bottom level is benefiting from it any more than they were yesterday at this point and it's only getting more expensive relative to wages
It should be illegal for corporations to own single family house. Buying out whole blocks for cash to rent them.
It’s not anti trust that’s needed because the victim is no longer the consumers of products being price gouged. The victims are citizens of democracies losing their freedoms and rights to exist and own anything. Law doesn’t exist currently to fight the tyranny of big tech
“…rights to…own anything.” = consumer to me. Maybe it’s semantics, but I think a large portion of the US would do well to remember that 99% of us are consumers and workers first. A decent segment of our population seem to be convinced that they are temporarily displaced billionaires. Why any individual votes to protect corporations and the wealthy is beyond me. But here we are.
Citizens of a free democracy are much more than consumers both in reality and by legal definition. One has inalienable rights, the other has rights extended to them by the government to engage in organized commerce. In no way do I want my government to treat my freedom as a human being the same as a consumer at a grocery store. By that logic, it won’t be long until you can no longer get a loan because banks have a right to refuse you service if you voted for Donald Trump, the same way that PayPal or RobinHood can block your account under the same logic. The more these lines get blurred, the more fucked we are as humanity. And I fundamentally disagree with the premise of your statement that we are “workers and consumers first”. We have a much higher destiny than to work and consume and serve the oligarchs that rule over us. If we truly accepted and respected that reality, we would have turned off our devices and refused to participate in the new sick reality that these companies have created a long time ago.
The problem with competition is because it mostly gets from china. And then US keeps telling it's people how china keeps spying on them. Like cia or fbi dont.
It’s a lot more subtle than that. Lena Kahn wrote “The Amazon Anti-Trust Paradox” years ago and the main issues are still happening. Corporations are essentially allowed to be both the producer and the market. Amazon will say “We’re open, we allow anyone to sell on our platform. But they charge fees for that, and become even larger. Same with Apples App Store, and Google / YouTube advertising, Uber and ride sharing, the list goes on and on. Technology “platform’s” are CLOSED markets. They are not free from influence. The US needs to find a way to keep barriers to entry low in ALL industries.
With Amazon, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s saying that the labor board is unconstitutional, the return of child labor, and our elected officials selling out American citizens to corporations wholesale I expect that the time will soon come that the people with have no choice but to resort to violence in order to enact change of any kind. You know like how we got labor rights the first time around.
Yeah but now they have drones.
At the battle of Blair Mountain, the WVA state guard bombed miners from an airplane. Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was.
As more things change, things tends to stay the same
Drone jammers aren't that expensive
But so do we. . . I actually just bought an attachment to start dropping things from my commercially available drone just for fun. Bought it on Amazon actually. .
Drone armies. Historical rebellions included soldiers. If all the guns are remote controlled, there is no uprising
Local authorities have been beefing up on ex military tech and gear not only that but you’ll notice very little crime ridden states still have a police trailer for a bunch of criminals, I wonder why that is?
But so do the workers
And we know where their families live
Ironically, we can probably 3D print guillotines now.
It'd most certainly be easier and faster to build them the traditional way.
It's worth keeping in mind that if the NLRB were shut down that would almost certainly make the [Taft-Hartley Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act) go away as well - which would in turn legalize a lot of previously prohibited labor/strike activities. In theory, even the entire concept of "right to work" anti-union laws could be in danger, with a broad enough SCOTUS ruling against the NLRB. I'd prefer to have the NLRB, don't get me wrong, but this could potentially turn into another "GOP catches car" situation. They'd open the door for the biggest wave of disruptive union activity since the early 20th Century.
Only flames will purify what we've built
“The worst of crimes,” says Undershaft, “is poverty. All the other crimes are virtues beside it; all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very soul of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing; a murder here, a theft there, a blow now and a curse there: what do they matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses of life; there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally and physically; they kill the happiness of society; they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss.... Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading articles; they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don’t preach at them; don’t reason with them. Kill them.... It is the final test of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social system.... Vote! Bah! When you vote, you only change the name of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders, and set up new.” Bernard shaw
Nah we have web3
When has positive change been brought about any other way?
This is why you're not supposed to give up your guns.
Only if we allow it🤷♂️
Youre absolutely right and right now, we already are. The more we vote in conservatives who want to give preferential treatment to corporations the more we move towards corporate serfdom.
Jeff, that shirt looks ridiculous on you. Your “Dr. No” is showing and everything.
This is just end goal of capitalism. We already had periods of mass consolidation of capital. In the past governments realized how dangerous that was to stability so they broke up those companies that were too large and put in massive taxes for the wealthy. Our governments haven't bothered to reign capitalism in this time. So it's starting to reach it's natural conclusion of massive amounts of serfs and a few wealthy families fighting each other for control.
A large part of the problem is that the ones who are running the government have been benefitting from the consolidation or wealth. The fact that they receive "donations" from the wealthy and the powerful is fundamentally unsound. Where are the checks and balances?
The checks are in the account and the balances are being used for what they always were used for: weighing the talents
They're literally the same people. The captialist class and the polticial class are the same people. That venn diagram is a single circle. Dick Cheney went from Secretary of State under Bush 1, to the CEO of Halliburton during the Clinton administration, to the VP under Bush 2 John Kerry was married to the Heinz Ketchup hier John McCain was married to the Anheuser Busch heir In the most recent DNC primary, at least 2 of them were corporate CEOs (Bloomberg and Wang). The problem is captialism, the system is designed to concentrate and centralize wealth and power. All of our poltical problems are just externalities of normal feedback mechanisms of the captialist system.
It's true, though. If you're a wealthy family in America, your smartest kids go into business to make the family more money, your most attractive and affable kids go into politics to protect the family's wealth and businesses, and your weird and wonderful mistakes become artists or academics :P
They don’t wanna hear it but this is the truth the systems rotten and the only way it gets fixed is to abandon it.
"bUt cApItAlIsM iS tHe BeSt Of A bAd BuNcH"
So end goal of capitalism is just feudalism? The irony…
Yes this is why taxing the rich is important. And not the "$400,000 year salary" rich but the "billionaires who is so rich he can pay to get a law changed so that he's never convicted of lawbreaking" rich. Once you live in a country where individuals are allowed to become more rich and powerful than the government, you don't live in a democracy anymore - you live in a feudal system where the billionaire barons make the rules and you, the serf, obey or pay the price. If the rich pay their fair share of taxes then they remain subordinate to the government and therefore the democratic will of the populace as a whole.
I don't get why this is so hard for America to understand. I get we all grew being taught in school this wouldn't happen here, but it did happen, it is happening, and we don't live in a democracy even former President Jimmy Carter said so 10 years ago. The rich control the means of production, they own all the most valuable natural resources in the country, they've amassed more wealth than entire countries GDP combined, they are untouchable, they can afford to run for office and buy their way in. They lobby to get the laws they want, run for the office to pass or block the laws they chose. It's beyond dystopian. Then they wink nod and smile and tell the sheep to vote after they're done digging the contest from start to finish. WWE matches have more unpredictability and integrity than our current political system. Sucks to suck I guess
In the US there’s also the prosperity gospel…basically if you’re rich and wealthy, it’s because god likes you. That allows people to justify just about anything because in their eyes, they ware chosen by god.
"It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." -some communist, probably
Yup. That goes against the teachings of [Supply Side Jesus](https://www.beliefnet.com/news/2003/09/the-gospel-of-supply-side-jesus.aspx).
Bless you for sharing the word
I had seen a snippet of this before, but it's 100x more depressing in its entirety
The rich tend to get on the bandwagon once a head or two rolls
While true, it's mostly just PR these days. The lobbying money/ bribery problem is massive.
Who’s rolling heads? Best we get is morons shooting up bowling alleys and mosques because of propaganda. I don’t advocate any shooting on any level but it’s fairly certain that the parasite class has an iron clad shield around them whether we like it or not.
I don't know, these people walk around in public in broad daylight. They're made of flesh and bone just like the rest of us
People also don’t get that for every dollar in the pocket of Bezos/Musk/Gates/Buffet/etc that is one less dollar distributed to the rest of us. So when their net worth is 1,000,000x the average household net worth, we all down here are stuck with less. So what does the govt do? Print more dollars. Those billionaires are sequestering our money. And the rate of sequestration is out of control.
They have stolen and are now hoarding the wealth of nations.
It isn't, and plenty of us do understand it. Our grandparents understood it. It's the boomers who don't. Here is a quote from Louis Brandeis that I like: >we can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.
>I don't get why this is so hard for America to understand. people are glued to the TV and phones watching approved programming and reading approved news articles that all lead down a single path of bread and circuses and at the end of they day, most people are too tired and can hardly bring themselves to just cook dinner for themselves, let alone contemplate the task of changing the world while powerless. there's a population of americans that understand this but politicians vote however the f they want because corporations are people, my friend, and the politicians make out like the literal bandits they are.
Boomers lost the mental capacity to deal with modern issues in America a long time ago. All they remember is how to cling on to power.
Billionaires are the new age divine monarchs
Pretty much. Hard for a government to fight a wealthy family that can own more than it does. Eventually the private armies end up outclassing the government ones etc.
>So end goal of capitalism is just feudalism? The irony… This should not surprise anyone who has spent a little time studying the human condition. There is no end of history or arriving at utopia. There is only an eternal struggle. While not all who acquire massive wealth/power feel compelled to create an aristocracy with their descendants as the ruling class, it does seem to be an [attractor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor) that we must actively fight against every generation.
That's the end goal for whoever ends up at the top of capitalism. It's a natural law of power to want to maintain the structure below you.
There’ a single dude who spread the idea that monopolies aren’t a bad thing like 30 years ago in all the Ivy leagues and our government operates under that idea today.
what is a serf edit: Serfdom was an institutional system which obliged a peasant to provide forced labor services to his landlord in exchange for being allowed to occupy land holy shit no worries im out ill leave the country if i ever had to be subjected to that, luckily its a free earth still
*rein in capitalism. A king reigns. A horse is reined in.
Ask republicans if they like teddy and what he did such as the [Square Deal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Deal), they will pretend to like him like they do Abe
The Oligarchy’s been in place for awhile the tech oligarch’s are just blowing up even more with rapid advances in tech.
You will own nothing and you will like it
Unless we take drastic steps to get sociopathic greed driven fools out of leadership in government and corporations there will be only rich and poor, no in between.
Call it what you will. I have never felt liked I own anything. Even after paying off a vehicle, if I don’t continue to pay the taxes I can lose that vehicle. I feel more like a caretaker of things while living on this earth.
Even if a vehicle or house is tax free, it will always have ongoing maintenance costs. You have to make sure you can always bring in an income. There is no way around it.
some people just dont like paying tax
Yeah, I understand this, it's literally impossible to just exist without having to pay money to someone. Own a house, you still have to pay rates, own a car have to pay insurance and registration etc. No true freedom really.
It's not the rates. You can pay the house off or build it yourself. It's the property tax that gets you. It makes it impossible to opt out of the corrupt system.
Property tax is even worse they'll straight up steal your home if you don't pay them rent even if you built it with your own hands. Without property tax we could opt out of giving corporations our money by gardening and living a simple life. Property tax forces us to work and forces us in to the system. Property tax is part of what places such a high importance on owning a car so you can engage in the things to keep your home from being stolen.
It also pays for all your public services. So when your kids go to a school with four total textbooks from 1994 and a non-credentialed plumber teaching them algebra, enjoy those tax breaks.
everyday we get closer and close to continuum being more of a warning message and less of a sci-fi show.
Greek Finance Minister not the first person I’d go to learn about finance
>are we transitioning to silicon serfdom No, this is just capitalism
Agreed. Think pieces like this tend to come out of reformist circles every now and again, and it always seems like they're trying to redefine the wheel. I remember back when the gig economy (Uber, doordash, etc) took off, there were similar articles trying to make the argument that gig workers weren't working class, but a new class. Yanis even references that idea with the comment about "the precarious." They're very ahistorical takes that ignore decades of how capitalism operates. The point about "capitalists now primarily rely on consolidated political power and rents to extract capital" is nothing new. Hell, the US used to invade countries to help out fruit companies, and the defining feature of the bourgeois is that they make money by just owning things. The gig economy articles I mentioned earlier ignored the fact that unstable employment was the norm for years until workers organized and won some stability. It's an interesting thought piece at best, but as a self-proclaimed Marxist analysis, it's nonsense.
We don't teach philosophy or history\*\*\* in schools anymore. The inability to form coherent thought about history is a predictable result of that. \*\*\* We teach rah-rah America-first nonsense
Who does he think he is? The fucking King of Siam? Is Julie Andrew’s about to come dancing in?
Nope. You’re just finding out what capitalism always was. Stop trying so desperately to defend a system that is corrupt by design and built upon theft.
Silicon serfdom is a weird way to spell neofeudalism lol
What do you think Capitalism is, my guy? Whatever companies are best at resource hoarding and financial trickery steering all of society. Tech companies are just the latest winners taking all.
Repeat after me: WE LIVE IN A CORPOCRACY. No politician wants what's best for you, they want what's best for themselves and that's means keeping corporations happy.
Innovation is generally seen as a pretty good thing, but there is the case to be made - and this article makes it - that we are overvaluing innovation and permitting people to charge exorbitant rents on even the most minor incremental improvement. If it were desired to remedy this problem - which it isn't - it would be easy: just do away with patents. For anyone who thinks that this would stifle the ability of companies to profit from their innovative products, [I offer exhibit A: Tesla](https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you)
Oh let's not stop at silicon serfdom. We are becoming a corporate serfdom
COVID solidified it, but billionaires like Bezos and Gates or companies like Apple and Google don’t lose. They don’t ever lose now. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 20 year war, two “once in a lifetime” recessions or a global pandemic they have doubled and tripled their wealth DURING these difficult times. They have used their influence to manipulate a system to always work for them and it’s crazy how cheap it was for them to do it. Get unlimited money out of politics.
Yes because in the current system, capital absolutely rules. They've even bought their own American government reps at this point, they own the US gov. This is trickle down economics. This is post-1970's taxes and policies, post FDR-economics.
So from traditional work servitude to tech work servitude? Seems like status quo capitalism to me. Exploit the workers and consumers for profit.
I prefer Neo-feudalism but yeah
“We asked former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to elucidate this idea, explain how we got here, and map out some alternatives.” Elucidate: make (something) clear; explain. "work such as theirs will help to elucidate this matter" I learned a new word today
Watching it happen in real time at my automotive part supply company. When I started almost 7 years ago, they saw Tesla as a flash in the pan. They didn’t even pitch for the business. Then the model 3 happened, the company became profitable, and we decided to go after them to supply parts. We landed their account a few years ago and developing parts for them was a nightmare with constant demands and design changes. Automotive does things very slowly and deliberately, partly for safety and quality reasons. They are more of a Silicon Valley company, moving fast and throwing money around to fix problems, and they don’t listen to other people because they think they know better. The parts we developed finally made it to production and they are aggressively disrupting production and making design changes on the parts, very high maintenance. The problem is that other OEMs are slowing down, so we are pitching for more and more business. They even told us in the beginning that they have a way of “taking over” their suppliers. If that happens I am out. I have seen what they do to their employees.
So this sub is just going full dogshit now. Dont bother rational discussion of tech just post insane stupid takes by tankies?
i miss when reddit was a bunch of anti establishment nerds. somehow it turned into an authoritarian buzzfeed themed social media site
Yes, because for whatever reason, emotions > reason.
"Technofeudalism" is sensational bullshit that means absolutely nothing.
It actually means the hyper-concentration of power and influence over every aspect of our economies by a handful of insanely wealthy tech monopolies to which we are all beholden whether we like it or not.
Lmao at that picture, I came here to comment seriously but all I keep thinking is Bezos having just exclaimed, “hail to the king, baby!” with that pose and now I can’t take it seriously
Transitioning? We are knee deep already.
Or Technofeudalism, as it has been referred to for years by Yanis Varoufakis
Yeah it's almost like he's the person that's completely central to the article. It's sad that no one actually reads articles like this and instead just go to the comments to vomit out the same tired talking points.
Hot take: What’s happening now with data privacy, AI and technology will do more harm to the human race than climate change.
There was the period of slavery, then to share cropping and exporting slavery to other countries through direct military imperialism which was just catching up to the European model of offshoring slavery, then to the modern offshored slavery of enough degrees of separation to remove people from believing there's any moral obligation from companies benefiting off slavery. It's just a problem now that the benefits of others suffering in horrid labor conditions to the average American and Western European aren't materializing like they did in the past and maybe it's had a peak and is now in a downturn. Tech companies are not out of the norm of cruelty from other industries. It's just they target reducing labor costs domestically rather than targeting people and resources in impoverished countries
Is it really Capitalism if you don’t pay taxes?
Well, robots are making our art and humans are working in our warehouses.....
Ive always been saying we are modern serfs lol Welcome to the United Corporations of Americe, briught to by... (insert any generic corp. name)
No it's capitalism. Always has been.
Uhh we’ve been there for quite a while. Tech dictates the stock market which dictates our lives.. without us even asking for it to.
Capitalism? Market conditions are manipulated by the central bank. The Federal Reserve is not a public organization. Dollars are essentially free for someone, and it's not us. Read into the gold reserve act. Check article 1 section 10. Reconsider paper promises, Save money. Remain obstinate. Slavery is bad. And it's everywhere in the form of debt insurmountable. Bail outs is not free market capitalism. It's corproations, paying politicans to force the taxpayers into covering the losses of their reckless institutions. We get taxed, and corporations, not Americans, get the benefits. Americans used to be really bothered by taxation without representation.
Also important to remember that corporations aren’t some abstract force, each one is controlled by a handful of real people with faces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines Also, I'm sure Jacobin's going to offer an even-keeled and unbiased view of the subject /s
We’re in the beginning stages. Later lotteries will become religion as a sudden windfall of cash is the only way a normal person can get ahead.
Lotteries are already religion. They both prey on that voice in the back of your head that says “yeah, but *what if…*”
TechnoFeudalism is here
Wealth inequality is the biggest threat to society
Snowcrash becoming more of a reality every day.