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Comment by endofcapital | Hacker News Reader

Our tooling has improved rapidly in the past few years, and we're now at a point where a handful of all powerful executives can aggregate vast swaths of human activity into a single number that they then get to sit there and start fiddling with to see what happens.

What we're currently legally doing isn't even within the scope of capitalism, it's more like free form social experimentation. And the ones with their fingers on the dials doing the experiments have never taken a history class or a sociology class or a civics class.

The laws aren't just out of date, our terminology can't even keep up. It's not a free market, it's not capitalism, it's something else entirely new and different.

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How is this different from other times in history?

What makes you think today's executives haven't taken enough humanities courses?

I think I need more context or background to understand what you are trying to get at.

Ancient Romans? They never had such labor saving devices and thus relied heavily on slavery for most manual labor. I imagine if they had the combustion engine things would have turned out very differently.

> What makes you think today's executives haven't taken enough humanities courses?

Not OP but i would have to guess something along the lines of a revolution of the non-ascended. IE: when you have a country where the 0.1% live a life of luxury and extravagance while the rest are left to fight over the scraps.

It was arrogance combined with a metaphysical shift away from rulers as the divine that lead to their downfall. The difference now is nobody even pretends to believe our elites are divine in any sense of the word.

As the MASSIVE aquaducts in France and Italy clearly illustrate, as well as things like the Thermae, the Romans were keenly aware that there are things that can't be done with any amount of slave labour, and did in fact use labor saving devices.

Hell, they had the same problem we have: "automation" (massive infrastructure projects) putting people out of jobs. The solution was also similar: first, massive infrastructure projects soaking up more than all available labor for decades, followed by making the problem worse, then austerity and mass-corruption on all levels, then (let's say "todo" in our current case) revolution, followed by large scale Rome-initiated expansion wars. On the plus side: those wars resulted in the longest period of prosperity in history.

> How is this different from other times in history?

The push for human fungibility on the same level as monetary fungibility is a much more recent trend, perhaps only setting aside slave societies.

Not sure I understand the scope of your statement in terms of time scale and the groups impacted.

If you mean "people having less agency in the workplace than 50 years ago in European/ex-European colonial countries" - sure, I buy it as a recent trend.

If you mean people in power treating other humans like farm animals or worse - this is not new at all and has been going on in various, far more brutal ways for as long as we have recorded history.

While I think you’re right about specifics, that is in fact just capitalism. The acceleration you note, and the absurdity of it, is entirely expected by those studying the effects for the last 200 or so years. I think Frederic Jameson put it best:

“All that is solid melts into air”

That quote did not originate with Jameson, but with the Communist Manifesto:

"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...

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