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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

The worst part about inequality is that it creates communication barriers which create total deprivation of opportunities. These days, I can't communicate with anyone who might have any opportunities for me. If a person is a good match for my skills and might be a source of opportunities for me, I simply cannot email them, cannot call them, cannot connect to them on any platform. It feels like there are AI bots working behind the scenes maintaining filter bubbles air-tight.

On the other side, literally all the emails I receive, all my social network connections are spam. Like completely irrelevant, generic spam sent by a bot, but not even tailored to me; just generic template 'Dear sir'; my name is not even mentioned.

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Isn't that due to the cheapness of communication? When your options were a long-distance phone call or a letter, incoming communication could be treated as if it had some value. When a message costs an amortized fraction of a cent, incoming communication is on average valueless and gets treated accordingly.

How do you obtain a phone number or a mail address? Almost impossible. And most paper mail gets read by someone's assistant and never passed through.

The people who hoard ALL the opportunities are incapable of allocating them efficiently due to complete saturation of their bandwidth. Literally, if you are someone who are in a position to provide opportunities, you are saturated and unreachable.

These people turn down more life-changing opportunities in an hour than I get in a lifetime. And when I say 'turn down', I mean 'ignore'; because these people don't even have the time to say 'No' to an opportunity I would kill for! They don't even have the time to click on the email or perhaps even read the subject line!

But is this related to the distributional inequality discussed in the article, or something else?

I believe so, because it seems like many other people are able to launch startups. Surely it means that some kinds of communication mechanisms are working for them right? They likely have more money/connections to people with more money than I do.

If none of the communication mechanisms work for you, how can you set up a meeting with an investor to raise money, for example? These people don't like cold intros and security risks means that they are harder to meet in person than ever before. It's also harder to network your way to a warm introduction because most of the people who know investors are themselves wealthy and also don't want to talk to you for safety risks reasons.

For me, things look completely different now than they did 5 years ago; it's like I have been shadow-banned from the entire internet and society.

I can't do anything in this society. My skills are mis-allocated, my time wasted. I'm just waiting for retirement. It's horrible. And I'm extremely ambitious; worked nights and weekends for 15 years straight.

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