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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Lots of bad stuff. But Capitalism, our one-and-only True God, is making sure that it's all for the Greater Profit - so we shouldn't worry about it. Or even think about it - to do so would both inefficient, and non-revenue-generating.

Meanwhile, back at the coalface - could the "Protect children from screens!" crusaders spare a thought or few for the non-0.01% parents, whose kids need healthy alternative to screen time? The great & unwashed 99.99% can't just order their 24/7 nannies to keep the kids busy without screens, or their security staff to drive the tykes to the park and supervise their play there.

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There was a brief period where it was fairly attainable to have a family supported by a single parent which meant one parent had the time, energy and head space to do those kinds of things for the children and also attend to other family affairs.

And this brief period happened right after the government was heavily involved in managing the economy, bypassing normal market conventions, and building huge amounts of infrastructure to support the war effort.

I was thinking of the far, far longer time when it was okay - in most places - to let your kids freely roam the neighborhood to play. Or to walk to & home from school by themselves. Or to send 'em half a mile to a grocery store, because "I'd like to make some cookies, dear, but we're low on flour...". (No comment on how often I bought such stories from my mom:)

1950s?

Snark aside, your point is valid.

If a parent has time to take their child to the local park regularly (i.e., at the same phase of a periodic cycle, e.g. from 13:00 to 14:00 on Wednesdays), that can act as a Schelling point for other parents in the area.

In places that are not large cities and do not have stroads, it can be safe for children to play outside in groups, largely unsupervised. However, I don't think this will be common again (per capita) for at least another 50 years: even just cars are getting more dangerous for children.

Agreed. A lot of convos about kids playing outside point to human dangers -- predators, bullying, kidnapping -- as the "reason" many parents don't let their kids play outside unsupervised, but imo the actual deciding factor is usually traffic.

It seems like a neighborhood design problem to me, at least in the newish suburbs I'm most familiar with. By optimizing for easy-to-drive neighborhoods with large driveways, more of the available space is dedicated specifically to car traffic, leaving less for open or common space. Fenced yards are fun to play in IF you already have playmates -- but without a common place to meet new kids, that can be much more challenging.

Consider how my family was able to handle it, growing up on a council estate (kind of like a ghetto, in America) in the 80s. Sure there was probably more T.V. than was healthy, but there was as much quality time as possible.

Nowadays we say negligent parenting (yes, I believe putting your kid in front of a screen all day is negligent) is acceptable, and move on. Stop blaming circumstance. I know there are alternatives, because here I am.

Blaming random things on "capitalism" is neither helpful nor interesting. No, this isn't the fault of capitalism. Any social system would suffer from young people too invested in an online world.

The class division doesn't even make senses, previously "anti-capitalist" we're protesting about poorer children having less access to information technology, now that capitalism has largely fixed this and nearly everyone has access to a phone, the "anti-capitalist" complain that only the rich can afford not to give their kids phones. This is literal nonsense. Capitalism isn't preventing kids from spending time outside, it even sells them what they need to do so.

> Blaming random things on...

I'm thinking that the literal $billions which have been (and are being) spent to create, operate, and endlessly optimize the child-addicting portions of today's internet are not random. And that capitalism is very much behind that.

Capitalism is just as much behind producing bikes for children. Really sinister.

In a capitalist world, capitalism is behind everything. This isn't insightful.

In the magical, post-capitalist utopia where everyone is fed and clothed and housed without having to lift a finger, and nobody is compensated for anything they do, what things would people still choose to do? People make bikes on an amateur basis, but would people addict children on an amateur basis?

If you wish to defend capitalism, you should ask questions like "would people still farm, and supply others with food, in a free society without capitalism?". Y'know, the big, fundamental questions about the basic viability of a non-capitalist system. Trying to downplay capitalism's known downsides is the worst kind of apologism.

>In the magical, post-capitalist utopia

Every question about that is irrelevant and monumentally disinteresting. People define their utopia as whatever society doesn't have the problems they imagine, arguing against that is like arguing about how magic works in a fantasy novel with the author of said world. All discussion is completely fictional and if you discover anything which doesn't fit it is immediately rectified in the other persons head.

In fact the question you propose are stupid and boring. Who cares about the utopia? It is as boring as a question can possibly be, which is also why talking to "anti-capitalists" is so annoying, you are arguing against their fantasy world. Whatever objection you can have is disregarded. In Utopia problems don't exist, so whatever objection you have against the utopia is invalid by definition. "Anti-capitalists" are the most boring people in the world.

>People make bikes on an amateur basis, but would people addict children on an amateur basis?

In utopia bad things do not happen. So of course all children live protected in infinite joy. That is why you need to support my extremely radical and extremely specific political position, else you support everything bad in the world which is currently caused by anything, since everything is capitalism.

> People define their utopia as whatever society doesn't have the problems they imagine,

I defined it as (a) guaranteeing food, clothing and housing; and (b) where people are not compensated for their actions. This is an abstract model of a functional society that might exist without capitalism, and it's not subject to my whims.

If you believe such a society is impossible, or prohibitively difficult to get to, that's one thing. If you have reasons that such a society would be a bad place to live, then that's a different thing: it means we shouldn't be striving for it, and that's a really valuable insight! Both of these are ways you can productively argue with anti-capitalists, and I wouldn't say either kind of criticism is stupid or boring.

Such criticisms might be obvious to you, but they're clearly not obvious to good-faith anti-capitalists (of which there are many, though you might not meet them much on internet forums). If you can only share your insight, maybe you can turn those good-faith anti-capitalists away from their path of pointless, desperate futility.

> In utopia bad things do not happen.

I think you're thinking of eutopia (lit: good place). I said utopia (lit: no place). "Magical utopia" was a deprecating caveat, referencing the uselessness of this description as an instruction manual: if that part is confusing you, feel free to ignore it.

Compare the magical utopia presented in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where food, shelter and immortality are available unconditionally to all citizens of the Bitchun society, and everyone else is dead. That society is not a mere happy fantasy land: it has problems, and those problems are consequences of how society is organised. The Clarketech that supports the society might be impossible, but saying "that society's impossible, so thinking about it is irrelevant" is just a refusal to engage with the premise.

Frankly, if you don't want to have an opinion, then don't have an opinion. If you don't want to explain your opinion, don't explain it. But don't state your opinion, and then act like explaining yourself is beneath you.

Again, I hate talking to people like you, simply because it is impossible. Who cares about your utopia? I certainly do not, it is a silly idea. Arguing about your stupid fantasy world.

>Compare the magical utopia presented in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,

NO. I absolutely will not argue with some magic fantasy land. This is disingenuous, who cares what some hack writer has written. It is fiction and not constrained to the laws of reality.

>Frankly, if you don't want to have an opinion, then don't have an opinion.

Markets are an inescapable fact of life. In any society losers will exist and winners. Raging against that is futile and shows a fundamental disinterest in making anything better. There, you have my opinion. No I don't care that you think that some hack writer has written something where this isn't true, I really absolutely do not care that you can imagine a world where this isn't true. No I do not care that in some fantasy world scarcity does not exist, frankly I don't care about any of your arguments since you continue to argue about your silly fantasy worlds.

> Markets are an inescapable fact of life.

It would help if you explained why you think that. Adam Smith disagrees with you: in The Wealth of Nations, he wrote that markets were something that had to be carefully tended, lest they devolve – via monopoly – into non-markets. A basic, back-of-the-envelope simulation involving ideal rational selfish actors with fixed, differing capabilities and finite resources will show the same result.

> No I don't care that you think that some hack writer has written something where this isn't true,

The Bitchun utopia does actually have a reputation economy (Whuffie), and winners, and losers. Perhaps your criticism would be more meaningful if you actually engaged with any of the ideas you dismiss out of hand.

> frankly I don't care about any of your arguments since you continue to argue about your silly fantasy worlds.

Gedankenexperimente, in the tradition of Hans Christian Ørsted. Albert Einstein's fantasy worlds were much sillier: riding on a beam of light!

My verdict is: ad hominem!!!1 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/21

Again I don't care about your fantasies worlds.

No, they aren't thought experiments, they are rationalizations you need to justify your politics. You can't talk about the qualities or problems of free market, since every possible problem would be solved if your utopia was real. It is an anti-Gedankenexperiment in the sense that you don't use it to critically examine a concepy, you use it to uncritically accept a concept.

>Perhaps your criticism would be more meaningful if you actually engaged with any of the ideas you dismiss out of hand.

What is wrong with you to think I had read that garbage? I read one thing by Corey and was immensely unimpressed, I really couldn't care less whether whoopsy didly has a bingo bingo economic system or not.

> > I defined it as (a) guaranteeing food, clothing and housing; and (b) where people are not compensated for their actions.

> every possible problem would be solved if your utopia was real.

So, if food, shelter and clothing were covered, you think people would volunteer to study, train, and work as medical doctors – treating the sick and the dying at not-insignificant physical and psychological risk to themselves – for no compensation? I mean… I can actually buy that: there are probably enough people like that in the world, and if they wouldn't get money but didn't need to work for money, this might be what they chose to do.

But you think we'd be entirely rid of sexism, pub brawls, and pieces of Lego left on the carpet? That'd require the complete non-existence of certain classes of behaviour. I find it hard to believe that partially-satisfying everyone's basic needs would have such a universal effect on any kind of behaviour.

And you think we'd be entirely rid of climate change, plague, cancer, and falling down stairs? Really?

No I don't think any of that. For the millionth time I don't care about your fantasy world.

I believe I told you this often enough.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario of young people getting pushed a skinner machine without any real pushback. But in this case, it’s possible because advertising companies can pay top bucks to the brightest minds to make their platforms as much addictive as possible, and criticism is deflected by a combination of appeal to personal responsibility, and the ideology that political collective action is bad and profit seeking is good.

I guess we can find an alternative scenario, yet is hard to argue that it isn’t capitalist ideology what brought us here this time.

Since this phenomenon is taking place at basically every part of the globe either capitalism is so all consuming that escape is not possible or it is a universal human phenomenon.

Again, the same people blaming capitalism for too much phone use have in the past blamed capitalism for disadvantaging the poor by gatekeeping access to technology. The whole critique is incoherent and unhelpful. Instead of trying to find actual solutions the blame is put on a vague concept. So vague that is can cause anything, too much phones, too little phones and anything else you can imagine. It is just a very lazy thought process.

The truth is that markets will always exist and that humans will always seek pleasure in unheayways, phones are just one instance, but so are drugs, online gambling, prostitution, etc. If you blame capitalism you can't solve anything, because the change required to change anything would be so great as to guarantee it will never happen.

>Since this phenomenon is taking place at basically every part of the globe either capitalism is so all consuming that escape is not possible or it is a universal human phenomenon.

Well capitalism is a global phenomenon... so?

>Again, the same people blaming capitalism for too much phone use have in the past blamed capitalism for disadvantaging the poor by gatekeeping access to technology. The whole critique is incoherent and unhelpful. Instead of trying to find actual solutions the blame is put on a vague concept. So vague that is can cause anything, too much phones, too little phones and anything else you can imagine. It is just a very lazy thought process.

You seem to be mixing up critiques. Complaining capitalism about the resource allocation strategy (capital owners get things first) is orthogonal to complaining about capitalism building skinner boxes in the pursuit of profit. The concept is vague if you actually don't try to put effort in understanding the critiques, as reveals thinking the critique is "too much phones".

>The truth is that markets will always exist and that humans will always seek pleasure in unheayways, phones are just one instance, but so are drugs, online gambling, prostitution, etc. If you blame capitalism you can't solve anything, because the change required to change anything would be so great as to guarantee it will never happen.

Markets may always exist, I believe they will, but that's still an hypothesis. What definitely hasn't always existed and I bet it won't exist forever, is the ideology of worshiping the markets. The idea that markets are efficient has not always existed, and surely the absurd idea I have read here about markets being "a form of AI" has not always existed. If you believe that markets == capitalism, yes, you cannot solve anything, but I think that applies to defenders of capitalism, not the critics.

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