Hacker News Reader

Comment by Timwi | Hacker News Reader

I think I understand this perspective somewhat. It's coming from a mindset where it's easier for the author to imagine the end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism. They don't really want to keep Tintin from the common folk, but they want to keep it from the hands of greedy capitalists, and they assume that those will always be with us.

View on HN

I look out my window and see the fires and the smoke and the homes lost forever. I look at Google News and half the stories are about cryptocurrency. The end of human civilization is much, much easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.

When capitalism falls, we can reevaluate those laws.

Both are equally impermanent ideas

>When capitalism falls, we can reevaluate those laws.

If it falls, "we" won't get to reevaluate them, because neither of us will be allowed to express any opinion at all, let alone anything resembling political influence.

I think you are confusing capitalism and democracy.

But my point stands: being against a law because it wouldn't make sense without capitalism is a silly reason to oppose something when we live under capitalism for the foreseeable future

>I think you are confusing capitalism and democracy.

You might think that. But the kind of people who show up to tear down a system from the inside aren't very democratically oriented, even if that's the rhetoric they espouse to rile up the crowds they need to tear it all down.

> it's easier for the author to imagine the end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism

Well, yeah, it absolutely is easier to imagine civilization collapsing than to imagine it a world in which human being do not expect to benefit from their efforts. Noting, of course, that "capitalism" as you mean it doesn't really even exist in the first place, as it's just an analytical model used to describe patterns of behavior that emerge from the motivations people already have.

Duck Duck Go: end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism

limit to last year

I get: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-civilizatio...

(The end of the world as we know it? Theorist warns humanity is .)

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-still-easier-to-imagine...

(It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of ...)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/apocaly...

(A History of the End of the World - The Atlantic)

https://medium.com/write-a-catalyst/imaging-a-world-after-ca...

(Imaging a World After Capitalism - Medium)

https://orwellsociety.com/can-we-truly-rebel/

(Can We Truly Rebel? - The Orwell Society)

Yes I think that's known.

Astral Codex is about AI, so maybe we'll get the end of the world, and the end of capitalism, and huge quantities of AI slop Tintin!

You're looking at aggregate patterns of human behavior, which originate in the pre-existing inclinations and motivations of those humans, and then trying to attribute them to some externalized, reified abstraction.

"Capitalism" construed as some entity unto itself simply does not exist. There is no "end of capitalism" that isn't itself an element of a general collapse of social organization and economic exchange.

So feudalism was a general collapse of social organization and economic exchange? Your analysis of capitalism is blinded by your obvious ideological bias

No, that's another abstraction. "Feudalism" is a descriptive term for a particular pattern of reciprocal obligations that was common in Western societies (though not dominant in the particular society that our own evolved from) in the past. The emergent patterns shifted, but the underlying reality -- that it all is just patterns of behavior engaged in by human beings with the same fundamental motivations and intentions -- remains. There was never an separate entity called "feudalism" just as there is no entity called "capitalism" acting as a causal agent.

And the problem here is that the things you're arguing against aren't particular to that emergent pattern -- they're the lower-order motivations that inform the underlying behavior itself.

There is no "analysis of capitalism". Your either analyzing real-life human beings or you're analyzing imaginary phantoms in your own mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com