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Comment by Frieren | Hacker News Reader

The future used to be awesome because it was though by average people, scientists, writers, etc. even advertisers were catering for consumers and their hopes and dreams.

Once the future is being designed by CEOs of corporations the value-extracting machine creates the worst of possible futures.

We need to redistribute wealth back to the working class and let us decide a better future. With the current concentration of money and power in a few hands our only future is to repeat the middle ages.

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Sometimes I fear that the vastly wealthy will only remember the social contracts that allowed them to become wealthy are two way contracts after the first few have been eaten.

They mistake the temporary shape of today's society for some unstoppable force of nature, and imagine their success to be proof of superiority. I hope they realize that neither are true before people become truly desperate.

I'm pretty sure the reason why the modern world sucks so much is that it is built on an endless maze of distraction machines.

We argue of politics, over why someone's opinion on the other side of the planet is wrong. We gawk at celebrities with terrible personalities and surgically or digitally amplified talent. We spend billions on bad movies with terrible plots that never correlate to or make us think about our own lives. We envision ourselves wealthy and beloved and poised to be greater than the greatest of all time, and we do this all while constantly being driven to work harder, output more, find new ways to make money so that we might have more for ourselves, never really considering how much we make for others and how much we are being completely and totally used until we are wrung dry and discarded by the very world we gave everything to.

We all think a small life is worthless, when it's the only thing we have.

In the past a small life was your only option.

The modern connected world drags you into a much bigger life than our monkey brains can handle.

And just ignoring shit doesn't fix the problem either.

It's a mess.

>after the first few have been eaten.

This is a bit more difficult in the modern world. If a Chinese CEO, for example, is ruining the world he's going to be very difficult for me to eat.

Also with a modern governments ability to monitor all your actions it may be very difficult to rise up without getting noticed and disappeared almost instantly. "The USSR brought to you by Flock".

> Sometimes I fear that the vastly wealthy will only remember the social contracts that allowed them to become wealthy are two way contracts after the first few have been eaten.

The only social contract the vastly wealthy will remember is that the plebs must respect their private property rights as a divine right, in return they'll give the plebs the opportunity to work...sometimes.

All of the examples in the article are products from startups or corporations, though. I fail to see how more wealth redistribution would improve product quality.

What does one have to do with the other?

I interpreted the parent as claiming that redistributing wealth would see the software industry's product offering driven by the "working class" rather than decided by the CEOs of corporations.

I don't disagree that it was better / less soul-sucking in the past, but I think that's because there was a lot less money in it, so participants in the software industry were in it because they were passionate. Unfortunately, corporatization is necessary to scale.

I'm sure you can find industries today which are largely driven by passionate people working in small outfits (but there's probably not much money in it).

>corporatization is necessary to scale.

Scale is the issue. You get one or two products that monopolize all the thought on issues with many different interpretations leading to monocultures.

If it were just one country you could break large businesses up, but when other nation states allow it, it gets messy to compete in markets.

Back in the day, the industry was run by computer enthusiasts who saw computers as an amazing tool to improve lives and enable and empower people. Today the industry is run by money enthusiasts who see computers as an amazing tool to extract money and manipulate and control people.

> With the current concentration of money and power in a few hands our only future is to repeat the middle ages.

Thiel's dream

At this point, the working class, who imagine themselves as possible-future CEOs, will try to extract the same wealth generation out of the tech when possible now that they have seen people get ungodly wealthy through tech. Humans are opportunists.

Of course, there are outliers who use tech individually to improve the human/world experience, but it isn't the norm.

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