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Comment by jhoechtl | Hacker News Reader

> the innovators (lords) capture the majority of the gains, and the 99% (serfs) get an awesome phone, a $4,000 TV, great original scripted television, and Mandalorian action figures delivered within 24 hours.

It's striking that the Bread and Games of the Roman Empire works out so well even today after that many more people are are comparatively well educated and should know better.

What makes be particularly sad is that 15 years ago I was confident that social media and smart phones will bring the printing press to the least advantaged, resulting in a more homogeneous society. The contrary has come true.

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> It's striking that the Bread and Games of the Roman Empire works out so well even today after that many more people are are comparatively well educated and should know better.

What would you expect people to do? Most people want a peaceful life with their friends and family, passing their time pleasantly until they die. Sure, it would be nice to be a billionaire, but most people don't want that enough to do much about it (and rightly so, in my opinion, since the utility of money decreases rapidly the more you have).

Your comment implies a critique of what people want, but I can't make out a suggestion of what they should want instead. Yes, it would be great if more people were richer, yes, we should make that happen, but no, being a billionaire isn't really worth pursuing when you can be very happy with much less and without sacrificing two decades in the process for a shot at a lottery ticket.

> What would you expect people to do? Most people want a peaceful life with their friends and family, passing their time pleasantly until they die.

No they don't. Most people want success and to follow their passions when they're young, get knocked around a few times by life, get older and decide to chill out and focus on building their families instead.

They learn to be happy with what life has given them, which is generally a good thing, but it does not mean it's the only thing they've ever wanted.

The truth is somewhere in between. Despite rationalizing some lofty goals our choices reflect a bias towards comfortable, passive leisure. Success is complicated when food, lodging and procreation are already achieved. It's a lot of work for a mere peace of mind that some arbitrary milestones are achieved and these may not be a passion either.

Perhaps there is a mass passification about, and yet many individuals still manage to do great things growing up in these environments.

I think part of the blame lies with people themselves. Few are motivated to partake in civics, read studies, be literate in math and logical analysis. I understand that many aren’t given the opportunity, but I see that even those who are, few desire to take advantage of their freedom and would rather leave the operation and advancement of society to others.

If you want to see an example of what you are yearning for, I'd suggest reading about the history of coffeehouses in England.

I think it's less a matter of motivation than of means, which is itself not merely a matter of access to resources, but also of risk tolerance.

Simply educating one's self requires no risk, just time. But no one wants to read the minutes of a city council meeting, or delve into the numbers behind issues. For example, it's telling to me that only a handful of US states offer parental leave, when I ask my family members in child rearing ages if they voted are not, they say no.

I know there were candidates who supported laws that would have benefited my family members, such as sick leave, parental leave, etc. I informed my family members who these candidates were. I even asked them what kind of life would they want for their daughters. But nevertheless, on voting day, none could muster the will to visit a polling booth or request an absentee ballot via mail. Yet it's not as if they are wealthy enough to forgo having jobs.

Therefore, I must surmise it's simply laziness.

Time is money, so betting on action with no immediate benefit (reading a book, voting for the "correct" candidate from the wrong party) versus action with immediate benefits (the dopamine rush from playing a video game, or skipping voting to go to work/enjoy your day off) is risky, at least as far as Scumbag Brain is concerned.

In that vein, I don't believe laziness exists; just misaligned incentives. Intellectual, even emotional appeals tend not to work when people are insecure. You have to alleviate the insecurity somehow.

> What makes be particularly sad is that 15 years ago I was confident that social media and smart phones will bring the printing press to the least advantaged, resulting in a more homogeneous society. The contrary has come true.

we ended up with social media influencers that either bends to the highest bidder at the top, or will do anything for a bit of money or fame at the bottom.

On top of social media platforms having to also bend to the will of their advertisers and cut payments to content creators (ie: YouTube) to stay afloat.

“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.” (Herbert Marcuse, 1961).

(By the proper definition of "(social) classes", arguably it indicates both. Then again, Marcuse did not seem to have much appreciation for those widely shared "needs and satisfactions", or for the so-called "establishment" that has evolved (and is indeed constantly evolving) to meet them.)

Marcuse is using "classes" more in the traditional sense, social relations predicated (roughly) on ownership and control of society's gross productive capacity. But the point still rings true - in terms of media, for instance, there is a huge amount of overlap between what the "upper classes" and "lower classes" enjoy. Marcuse would have been very critical of the lifestyle and art produced by the culture industry today (see, for instance, his discussion on the sadness of seeing Freud in the drug store and Bach on the radio in the kitchen).

Well I think the balance of power is at least changing on the media site. It's getting more and more difficult for traditional newspapers and media outlets to stay afloat, and (as much as it may be unpopular to some), social media, YouTube, blogs etc are probably going to replace it altogether at some point or another.

Whether that's a good or bad thing is another question entirely.

But social media and modern tech has certainly also created a bread and circuses style situation for a large percentage of the population too, and it's probably done quite a bit to dissuade people from actually voting or taking part in the political process as well (thanks to the availablity of 'feel good' outrages and tribal spats on Twitter and the likes)

> social media and smart phones will bring the printing press to the least advantaged, resulting in a more homogeneous society. The contrary has come true.

These things take time. It took centuries for the actual printing press to lead to a more harmonious society (viz. The Enlightenment), whereas its early effects were just as disruptive as those of modern-day social media. Crazy conspiracy theories galore.

There’s no higher calling than bread and circuses. As long as the people are well fed and are entertained, what else do they really need?

The illusion that it means something.

That goes on the "entertained" part.

Average life span is falling for the first time in a century. It would be one thing if people were apathetic due to a comfortable life. The current situation is more akin to a frog in a pot of slowly heating water.

Blaming this on bread and circuses alone is as tone deaf as the article with regards to the problems with poverty in this nation. To be fair, there is a real limiting of opportunity as education is increasingly used as a caste delimiter. However the real issue still is financial insecurity:

* Consider that 1 in 5 people people today struggle with paying the rent and face rental insecurity (https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rental-insecurity-...). * Before you claim that they should be buying instead of renting, also consider that you have to have a good credit rating to buy (which automatically cuts off 1/2 of the population; average credit rating is 700: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/10/average-fico-score-hits-an-a...) and you have to be able to put down at least 10% which varies widely in the US (https://www.zillow.com/home-values/) but would probably require at least 20,000 in savings. If you have money in savings you probably don't have rental insecurity. In fact median net worth is $200 according to the last US survey here (https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf), and mean net worth is _negative_. In short, the majority of people in this country can't afford to buy and they will not be in a position to buy anytime soon, if they are still worried about not getting evicted. * Almost 14% of households in the US have food insecurity (https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...). That's nearly 1 in 7. So much for the "bread" part of the theory. You think any of those people can afford to invest in the stock market, create new businesses, or take on any risk that could threaten starvation of their families? Do you think they can afford to send kids to college without taking loans? * And a voice on the internet, a printing press to the least advantaged? 89% of people have a computer at home, but that means at least 10% don't. That 89% number is so high because the stats include smartphones (https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...). Unless they go to the library to use the computer, they are not in the "public" internet discourse. And you better bet that all these categories are intersectional.

99% of serfs. Gah. There is still real poverty in this nation, people afraid of starving, people afraid of having nowhere to live, worried about underemployment, a laughable opportunity at higher education, no real way to climb up the social ladder, and it is not yet getting better. The imbalance is only being talked about because it is becoming increasingly difficult for the upper 80% who don't have these issues to perceive themselves as part of the 1%.

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