Does Amazon offer a significantly worse deal to its warehouse staff than Walmart? My impression is that it doesn't, so I don't think this is a problem with tech companies specifically.
Really, I'm just upset about my own disillusionment. As a little kid I thought Silicon Valley was going to usher in a new era of technology and plenty. Something like Star Trek's utopian ideal of a society where scarcity is a thing of the past.
What I see instead is the same old corporate bullshit of maximum exploitation for maximum profit.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/walmart-warehouse-workers...
Even someone poor has a magic device in his pocket that can show almost any video ever, can talk to anyone, and give directions.
People today have never been better off. A poor person today lives better than a king of old.
Except that people always compare to each other. And that's never going to change.
That is an illusion to help people with their conscience. It does sound nice, but ...
The poor maybe eat better and maybe have better shelter, and certainly access to cleaner water, but they have significantly less control over their destiny. Also, kings didn't have to work and they were (usually) extremely wealthy, had servants, and could do whatever they wanted to. Kings had people to help them raise their children. Kings also didn't die from an easily treatable but ultimately unaffordable medical condition. Kings usually didn't get evicted for not paying rent on time. Kings didn't get arrested for trivial things and have to spend time in jail because they couldn't afford a lawyer. I could go on and on.
Worse, they died from medical conditions which could be survived with no treatment, because treatments with negative utility based on lore with no scientific basis were applied which the common folk would not have access to.
They certainly did die from what we would today call easily treatable conditions. Antibiotics? Vaccines? Appendicitis?
>Kings also didn't die from an easily treatable but ultimately unaffordable medical condition.
Kings died too, man!
This is dangerous bullshit. A poor person who spends their life working long hours on menial work where they have no agency is not better off than medieval nobility just because they have cheap entertainment available.
A lot of "poor people" stress about providing enough food for their families or losing their homes. Not something that nobility ever had to worry about.
A lot of people today live better than medieval kings; you and I probably do. But our society does a shitty job of distributing the bounties of technological miracles, except in superficial ways.