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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it's the opposite. This was caused by the destruction of individualism.

When people are individuals, you know the name of your butcher and which farm your wheat came from. Now it all comes from the collective and you can't participate in the process without being a drone. Working for Walmart is not the same as operating your own farm stand. You lack autonomy because decisions are made collectively by corporations and legislators, and that makes everything bland, homogeneous and fungible.

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I found the parent and your comment really insightful. I think they are right that technology has aided an individual in accomplishing things they would need others for, and one can more easily stand alone. I think you're absolutely right that the global perspective of online social media has made it difficult to build an identify that is your own. There are countless examples of others doing any interest you could to a better degree than yourself. It leads to a lot of self-doubt and isolation. I'm very happy to have the online resources we have today and would choose the muck of Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/etc over not having them any day of the week. However, I do recognize it was easier for me to take pride in my own ability and grow my own expertise in an area in "true isolation", disconnected from online humanity. Online groups to share your interests with - to me - do not feel as intimate as what some would turn to church or a community center for back in the 80s/90s.

We are alone and not special. I'm trying to explore the advantages of that. I certainly find myself in less drama in a community I can readily disconnect from.

As an anecdote: I had a friend in high school who regularly said he wanted 'to be remembered', that his greatest goal in life was to have his name be recorded in history. I thought he was somewhat arrogant, but he truly wanted to become an Alexander the Great figure.

I'm considering it my own goal to be someone forgettable. I want to find comfort/success without recognition.

> makes everything bland, homogeneous and fungible.

which is what makes it cheap and available.

If you ran your own farm stand, the goods you produce would be some 2-5x more expensive than a factory farm could've sold for.

The modern wealth is predicated on such specialization and scaling. It's why artisanal products are so expensive.

Artisanal products are so expensive because we make them so.

By default if you buy something in a store, add 5% to the value by improving it and want to sell it on eBay, they'll charge sales tax on the full sale price even though you already paid sales tax on 95% of that. To avoid the double taxation you have to file paperwork, which most people don't know how to do, and pay filing fees, which eat into your already-meager profits.

If you want to sell things over the internet yourself, or accept digital payments in person, how do you avoid paying a fraction of the sale price that may exceed your margin to some payment intermediary that may capriciously choose to cut you off at any time with no recourse?

If you want to incorporate, your annual fee is the same one paid by Apple, but e.g. $500 is a lot more to you than it is to them.

Keep adding things like that up and individual-scale operations are no longer viable without charging thick margins and thereby having only the affluent as customers, which is what happened.

Artisanal products are expensive because human work is expensive. You can either have a machine that produces a million bland identical tea cups a day for a cost of a dollar per cup or you can have an expert potter produce two dozen artisanal tea cups a day. Even if the potter works for minimum wage and materials are free it's several times more expensive.

If human labor is so expensive then why do unskilled laborers have such trouble making a living?

You're ignoring the middle ground, because that's the thing that was destroyed. The expert potter is still in business selling bespoke products to millionaires.

It's the one who might have done it for 15% more than the mass produced product who is gone, because we added on top of that so much bureaucratic overhead that the final price ends up being 100%+ more instead of 15% more and that exceeds what ordinary customers are willing to pay.

> It's the one who might have done it for 15% more than the mass produced product who is gone, because we added on top of that so much bureaucratic overhead that the final price ends up being 100%+ more instead of 15% more and that exceeds what ordinary customers are willing to pay.

Why would you buy a product for 15% more, unless there's a compelling reason to do so? The mass produced ceramics are high quality, durable, come in a variety of shapes, colors, sizes, etc. People buy hand-made ceramics for the aesthetics, and to have something that's more unique.

I think you greatly underestimate how much cheaper mass produced goods are than artisan made goods. Op's choice of ceramics is really good. Machines can produce thousands of plates in the amount of time it takes an artisan potter to make dozens. The potter's source of clay may be limited, or they may have to pay a lot more because they buy in smaller quantities. They have to pay more for transportation for the same reason. They have to pay more for distribution for the same reason.

Bureaucratic overhead may play a part in this, but overall it's a small one that gets lost in the scale of mass production.

The nonexpert potter can't produce two dozen tea cups a day, driving up unit costs even further. I tried, it takes me at least two hours to make a crappy tea cup.

You don't need to incorporate to sell artisanal products. If you want to register a fictitious name for business purposes then you can do that for free or very cheap in most states.

You probably want limited liability if you're selling edible(/quaffable) goods though. At least in the UK, it seems to be common for markets to require it of stall applicants, along with business insurance in excess of £x (looked into it a while ago on a fanciful whim).

If you base everything on pure monetary value we're absolutely rocking it! If you start talking about quality of life, sustainability, mental health, ethics, &c. it's a whole other story.

You’re talking about a different type of effect where corporations killed all the small players and that’s very true but has nothing to do with the ideological individualism, at least not directly but could as well indirectly but let’s be clear what we’re discussing and if they’re intertwined let’s make that explicit. Individualism discussed here leads people to lonelinese and communities to vanish around them..

The issue with the comment I replied to is that it takes individualism to mean something like isolation, which is a straw man when that position has no advocates.

Individualism is something more like individual autonomy, which is in no way incompatible with individuals entering into voluntary associations with other members of the community -- as long as no one is forcing them to. But that's the thing we've destroyed through regulatory overhead and vertically integrated monopolies which force people into associations with entities they'd prefer not to be associated with and deprive them of their autonomy.

I keep hearing about this ideological individualism, but I never see it explained except as a cause for bad things. Can someone give me an example?

That's not individualism, that's absence of scale.

Individuals didn't have problems achieving viable scale before collectives started imposing more fixed costs on everything than individual-scale operations could sustain.

You’re both very correct, in a sense. You’re looking at the problem from different perspectives.

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