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Comment by CompelTechnic | Hacker News Reader

It is very strange that the thrust of the piece is defined as:

Waking up early is good for capitalism, but not good for your own interests

As opposed to:

Waking up early is good for your career interests given that you work in a capitalist system, but not good for your other interests

Anthropomorphizing capitalism and portraying its grand stance as a monolith that demands more time and sweat be thrown into it (for the good of Capitalism!) sure is a nice literary touch. But its a very subversive way of appealing to people's self pity. I can feel the implicit assumptions of language embodied within this article chewing on my mind and damaging the definitions I need to be able to rely on.

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I don't know if those two statements you used are isomorphisms. I haven't read the book that the title is making reference to, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, but I'd guess that they are not trying to anthropomorphize capitalism, but more using the term as synecdoche in referring to the interests of the collection of decision makers who benefit the most from capitalism -- at the cost of all the externalities of living in a capitalist society, in this case the amount of sleep the average member of the proletariat gets, but also environmental costs, the interests of the weak and the oppressed, and any other harm that doesn't lend itself to be easily measured in terms of financial gain or loss.

> Waking up early is good for your career interests given that you work in a capitalist system, but not good for your other interests

Isn't that the gist of the article? Whether you serve capitalism or whether capitalism serves you?

It's like industrial farming. Do the cows exist to serve the farm or does the farm exist to serve the cows?

Maybe both? Who knows.

Depends on how you define it - while they may not have the best lifestyle it did result in them outnumbering humanity and being fed. While the intent is for humans clearly symbiosis can work on selfishness. Bees are just after the nectar of flowers but the plants get to mate with distant others while being completely sessile. The spice of peppers was "meant" to deter those who would eat it and destroy its seeds but humans are freaks who destroy it with digestion and like it but deliberately farm it enmasse so it works out for the plant. It has no agency clearly but it is served nonetheless.

Your cow example is a good one.

I would argue that there is no farm. The independent behavior of independent agents does create the emergent phenomenon of capitalism. However, this phenomenon does not express will or intent. Saying that Capitalism wants you to you wake up earlier is not equivalent to saying that the farmer wants the cow produce more milk.

When people say things like this, they are lumping together their undesired extrensic motivations and others' expectations of them into a big mental ball of "things I have to do, don't want to, and capitalism makes me do," and calling it Capitalism.

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