‘Capitalism generates a lot of wealth depending on the situation’
techcrunch.com
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I'm not opposed to commerce or people making money, but so many of the startup I see are based on business plans that just seem dystopian.
Software can solve real problems, but right now capital seems to be choosing some really unsettling applications. Things like using ML to inform "behavioral nudges" for asset manager, many of the healthcare tech startups, and all of the surveillance and spying tech.
I agree that "Luddite" is a label we shouldn't be afraid of - at the very least, it should be within the Overton window of acceptable, debatable ideas. It is not an impractical and kneejerk opposition to technology; it is a principled belief that some particular technology, while it might make other people rich, hurts me and others like me, and we have the right to defend ourselves. It is certainly not a mere fear of unfamiliar technology.
One thing I'm noticing from the world around me is the extent to which political campaigning is a zero-sum game. We've poured billions of dollars into the US presidential campaigns, funding everything from microtargeted advertising to (probably) machine learning to figure out who to microtarget, and the effect is that each candidate spends tons of money on it, fighting each other. It's not clear that overall outcomes have improved (e.g., "does the elected president more accurately represent what the people actually want, because they're better informed about positions and issues"), and it certainly seems like if you could magically prevent everyone from spending piles of money, we wouldn't be any worse for it - but it's very hard to do that in any meaningful sense (there's enough ways to spend money on influence, on get-out-the-vote campaigns targeting specific neighborhoods, etc.), so it's irrational for anyone to voluntarily back down. And a huge chunk of this money, in turn, is spent on computers (and electricity and emissions) and not on human jobs.
> Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people.
I've been following Brexit since 2016 and my impression from the materials/research available is that microtargeting via social networks is in fact cheaper than the "analog" campaigning. Let alone money spent on political ads are easier to dodge and thus not even report as campaign spending. But in any case microtargeting being cheaper is the reason it's being increasingly used in politics.
Now taking the price into account, I'm not so sure energy consumption is greater for digital campaigns compared to the "analog" ones: consider rallies, talks other events that have a similar impact to microtargeting.
That is not to say digital campaigning is better in any sense of the word, it is scary because it can be far more manipulative (take Brexit as an example), just that the carbon footprint argument is not very convincing to me in this case.
If it's human-centered, it's not capitalism. If it's capitalism, it's not human-centered. You can't have a “more four-sided triangle”.
Capitalism works great. It's what's powered a lot of the world's economic growth and encourages the work force to make new discoveries.
Capitalism also leads to generosity and social progress. Look at what Bill Gates (and others like him) are doing with their gains. Can you point me to a socialist enterprise that's doing as much good?
Isn't communism in the same "depending on the situation" boat?
[1] State supported heavy industry, export sector, and large public works projects.
[2] Russia after shock treatment is economically worse off than under communism. Roll that over.
The difference to most employees is honestly pretty small, working for McDonald's versus being a janitor for the post office are functionally the same, no one really cares who the guy at the top of the chain is.
The main benefit of capitalism is the dream of being the wealthy person, if you're a janitor it's almost impossible, but the dream is there
We've never seen that as a country-level organization, but that's the theory.
Would you prefer to be a poverty-line worker with a realistic but unlikely dream of being wealthy, or a worker who can support a 4-person family comfortably and retire at age 60 but has no chance of ever making any more money?
(This is not a rhetorical question, I think there are genuinely lots of possible answers there.)
(This is proxy for limited opportunity, tough facts like "you have a family that relies on you so you cannot spend 5 years trying and failing at startups," discrimination, economic downturns, the fact that the world cannot sustain more than a few Bill Gateses, and all sorts of other things that are beyond your control even in a capitalist society. On the other hand, I think 1% is significantly above the number of actual janitors who actually strike it rich in real capitalist societies.)
Actually in most cases I think wealth concentration has a lot to do with how much democracy you have. In America the wealthy classes control our democracy and so we have a lot of inequality. In Soviet Russia the state officials had control and so there was a lot of inequality.
A lot of anarchist theory is schemes for more democracy. The whole idea of anarchism is to eliminate unnecessary hierarchy.
But if we want to compare communism in ideal theory, we have to compare it to capitalism in ideal theory, right? At that point, nobody has any actual data.
I’m genuinely curious if that’s true or not. But it doesn’t sound like you have a source. Is that just a feeling you have?
And that's if communism was functioning "normally". Didn't Romania turn into a kleptocracy? What was the level of wealth inequality there?
Now if you’re really concerned with who was authoritarian, I wouldn’t defend them.
But it sure doesn’t seem obvious to me that there was more inequality in soviet Russia than there is today in the USA.
I grew up in communism and indeed there were people who were "more equal" than others, mostly those well connected with high positioned party members (if themselves weren't such party members). That allowed them much better living conditions than the regular "worker", they ate meat every day (yes, it may sound strange to the average reader of HN but meat wasn't something that we in the 80s in Eastern Europe had access to very often), had bread (for the rest of us it was rationed), soft toilet paper, jeans (I would have killed for a pair of jeans!), pepsi (no coca-cola tho) and a million little other things that people living in Western Europe in the 80s took for granted.
But hey, most of us were "equal" in our poverty, so communism can't be that bad.
There's also the question of what the shape of the distribution looks like - for instance, would you prefer a country where 90% of the country has no savings and 10% has more money than they need, or one where 95% of the country has two months worth of savings and 5% of the country has more money than they need?
[Edit: I will agree that your post was not inflammatory.
I also note that I (on a different thread) replied to you on a programming topic, and for a change, I agreed with you and thought that you had a very interesting perspective.]