Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

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Things become more fulfilling when you see everyone else doing them, such as raising kids.

There are so many things people could be doing which are not compensated by the market and corporations. “Leaning in and earning $1 instead of 70c” is a meme that corporations use to get more humans to trade quality time with parents and kids for them. [1] Why don’t we ask about “Leaning out and spending more time with our families?” [2]

Open source

Science

Philosophy

Family

Personal development

Volunteering in community

You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all. That’s why many in NYC lamented when Amazon was not given tax breaks to come to our city. It’s almost as if we need Bezos’ company to organize ourselves an our time so we can get paid the money.

Society spends tons on fossil fuels and commuting and for what? To sit in a chair 30 miles away?

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8

2. http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286

> You've been CONDITIONED

I haven't been conditioned, thanks.

Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. We can't live at our current standards with artisan search engines, hand-crafted phones and home-made cars. But the same scale which enables modern living alienates workers from their labour. In most companies, all but a select few at the top have very little agency. They mostly get told what to do and they often don't even see the customer that benefits from the value they create. And the people with agency at the top get the vast majority of the profits.

The result is a society with a lot of inequality and poverty, and a mass of alienated consumers trying to purchase those things which are missing in their lives: narrative, stories which connect their consumption with humanity. Hand-made this, small batch that, experiences you can share with other people., the personal touches which weave a life into a broader more meaningful tapestry.

And raising children, of course. But that's somewhat bitter-sweet, knowing the world they're going out into, unless you have some assurance they're going to be among those with agency.

On the contrary, when you have only a few large companies, they form oligopolies, there is no competition, free market does not function and the consumer looses out.

I don't mean this as a personal attack, but I'm struck that your objection to having been "conditioned" is immediately followed by a paragraph affirming the content of the supposed "conditioning".

> > You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all.

Emphasis added.

> Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. ...

I want to point out in this connection that advertising (commercial propaganda) is ubiquitous in most modern societies, and IMO counts as "conditioning".

It is objectively true (is, not ought) that in the world we currently live in, large orgs enable scale which enables modern living.

It does not follow that I think that's the way things ought to be. That's how I interpret the "better" in EGreg's comment, because this conversation is about how we can live a better lives, not how to maximize efficiency. But we can only talk about oughts in the context of what can be.

What I'd like - as I've mentioned in another comment here - is some kind of organizational technology which enables the same efficiencies as large orgs, but without the alienation of labour.

What are you organizing around Mr. Chief Architect? Your company does data visualization for financial firms. Financial firms that don't have a loss condition. How many extrapolations from reality is your business? At least 2, maybe 3, more? As long as the markets your pretty pictures represent can't take a loss - you're only justifying your undeserved opulence. Every bail out absolves people like you from their failure, and denies people like me a better opportunity to out perform you.

Have the labor classes of the U.S. seen any advancement in the last few decades? Are the advances the labor classes of other (US/India) even worthwhile given the lack of political bargaining power?

You economically depress local workers, and sell them on their freedoms and in then in the next breath you're politically oppressing foreign labor classes while selling them on their economic advances. Both are true, but you take the larger margin from both.

Ah, I get it.

I was interested (from a distance) in "Holacracy" but it's hard to find information about how well it works in practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy

Also, FWIW, I'm hoping that automation frees up enough time to be able to support "consensus driven" governance, which is I suspect is theoretically optimal, but it's really expensive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making

Corporations aren’t the best way to organize things. They are good, but have been outcompeted by decentralized systems with small owner-contributors and no ownership of the platform.

LiveJournal vs Wordpress

AOL vs The Web

Britannica vs Wikipedia

I could go on and on. Science, Open Source, Creative Commons allows collaboration instead of a top-down approach, and has been wildly successful.

In the past, we needed centralized manufacturing, centralized telephone operators etc. No longerz

Google “Distributism”

Wordpress -> Facebook -> Instagram etc.; what goes around comes around.

AOL -> Web -> Google AMP etc.

Wikipedia has its editors and its petty squabbles, and worse, its ever increasing budgets (for what, exactly?) funded by guilt-based extortion from the masses, a bunch of parasites feeding on public contributions.

Once a hill has appeared from the bottom up, climbers crawl out of their holes, clamber up and try and steer from the top. And they usually succeed.

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