Its what happens when both sides hurt each other for so long. All the leaders on both sides are textbook high functioning PTSD cases.
430 karma · joined June 25, 2024
So if someone wanted to build a chair from wood, they would go learn how to use a saw. But as you observed, these days there are hundred of ways to build the chair. Maybe with hammer and nails, maybe with 3D printers, maybe with genetic engineering - design a seed plant it into the ground and it grows into a chair.
But all these are just tools. The original Need - a Chair. Once that need is satisfied, you can walk away from the shed and all the ever growing number of tools inside it.
Colonies were good for society.
Kings and Feudal Lords were good for society.
It's not a static world. Things change.
Those who benefit at the expense of others, get trapped into making up elaborate stories to justify their choices. Unfortunately making up stories, doesn't reduce the number of people who are paying some price or the other. Once that pool grows large enough, we see change. So Slavery got abolished, Colonies got abolished, and most Kings and Queens have been reduced to Tourist Attraction. Its up to the Tech Monopolists, for the sake of their own survival, to pay attention to the growing rumblings.
These judgements can be skipped to make your point, which was a good one - specifics are more useful than generalizations.
These are ancient issues. And being honest won't make much of dent, without understanding the history and sociology of them. Its like Snowden saying here is the truth. Didn't change anything, cause there are deeper issues at play.
1. Financialization of the Economy - finance dominates all other sectors of the economy - people who already have cash make better returns via the stock market, real estate, insurance, lending it out etc. So Old rich people don't have to use their brains much to make cash.
2. All sectors are already monopolized by them. Even Amazon hasn't brought down Walmart which for 25 years everyone was claiming was about to happen. And you won't see Apple taking on Wall St or Google taking out AT&T or Spacex taking out Boeing or any new power ever making a pass at Exxon, Big Pharma or the MIL complex. Why new powers find it so hard?
3. Then there is the great US Dollar. IMF and World bank dont hand over "development" loans to the poors of the world in their local currency but in Dollars. Where are those people going to get dollars from? They either have to sell off their assets to the old monopolies above or forced to buy stuff from the old monopolies above. Keeps them fully dependent. It all ensures old power stays in power without having to compete on merit with new powers.
4. Then there is signalling or mass media messaging 24x7. Tell the world great stories about merit and the market and the elections, and behind the scenes rig the shit out of everything to hold on to your chair. All ambitious people do this young and old and in every country because its in their nature. But the oldies have been playing the game much longer. And their stories and tactics are much richer and deep. See Theory of the Leisure Class. Most of the younger people who are better than them, will constantly be seen PUBLICLY bowing and bending and thanking them for their existence. That doesn't happen by accident.
Thankfully old people die.
WSJ knows all that. Its job is to promote the hustle anyway. In their wisdom the next gen has to continue the tradition, even as the failures get bigger and bigger.
There is no great benefit to sitting and spending your whole life dependent financially on someone else especially if you don't have anything in common. This is the same reason men change jobs. Once globalization provides multiple paths for workers to exist corporate environments they do so. Thanks to the internet Women get to see on their feeds what options they have, in ways their mothers and grandmothers never did.
The only problem with people who hang out on HN is they don't know any sociology or why the womens movements emerged in history. All just completely delusional about success coming on the backs of exploiting free or unpaid work of others.
So currently it feels like connecting everyone (atleast on the Western Internet model) is only possible through -
1. Allowing data rape, breaches and leaks.
2. Advertising (ie Corporate marketing depts causing population scale brain damage)
3. Bundling of "free" services to enable Empire Defense Monopoly formation games of Google/Comcast/AT&T et al.
4. Elon gets govts of the world to pay him rent and becomes the next AT&T
On some days China sounds better than this ever growing sewer network.
The circus lion is bred and trained from birth not ask too many questions.
But once you give the circus lion access to the internet, sooner or later the lion is going to ask why am I jumping through hoops?
It just take one of them to find a better answer and a better purpose in life to walk off the circus, for all the others to see what options they have to totally disrupt the foundations of the circus.
The circus managers and the circus have elements of domination and exploitation that have been swept under the carpet. Its good to recognize them. Otherwise surprises and shocks are on the road ahead.
Also remember Bezos and Gates had to hand over a chunk of their wealth on divorce. That didn't happen without the nature of things changing.
Transport, Communication, Finance, Info networks have all changed drastically from the past.
And the sociologists have been pointing that out for a long time now. Check out
Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity.
Beck's Normal Chaos of Love
Works of Judith Stacey
Its a complex ever changing world out there. Coevolution requires a bit of stablity in the environments. Focus should not just be on what individuals are doing for each other but on how they shape the environment around them in ways that makes such things more possible.
Can you imagine Billionaires reporting to the average corporate robot at large corp?
All possible behavior of the Ruling and Non-Ruling Elites is covered. "Tech" Elites aren't doing anything different from what Elites of the past have done.
Thanks to globalization, ever changing regional differences in interest rates, corporate taxes, forex, labor costs, real estate prices, govt freebies/subsidies/laws etc etc, companies make decisions that have nothing to do with product produced yday or its quality.
In corporate wonderland, execs aren't trained (or given the time and resources) to use their imagination or think too deeply about how to respond to All these external forces. They are expected to avoid complex or unpredictable solutions and React as quickly as possible before the competition takes advantage of the external changes. Its automatic and highly predictable behavior how execs will respond.
The only way to slow the instant (bordering on mindless) reactions down, is to add Delay. Which buys people time on both sides of the equation to think. Now obviously its hit or miss whether any thinking happens and creative solutions are found. But its a starting point in having some sort of say in a process people on all sides have lost control over, due to global not local changes.
Making your neighborhood better is much less complex than making the world better. So look in your own neighborhood for groups, cooperatives, associations, societies that are working on specific issues. They might not capture as much Attention as large companies, but that's where you will see cool stuff happening.