Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand why you would assume that the only alternative to surveillance capitalism is "surveillance socialism".

This sophism seems to be built on two errors:

* that there is nothing outside of pure capitalism and pure socialism

* that adjoining "surveillance" to capitalism means we're talking about an inevitable aspect of our society that is combined to capitalism, rather than a specific subset of the way business is done in this age.

To be honest, this lack of ability to conceive alternative social systems is concerning. The deformed Churchill quote comes as a cherry on top.

View on HN

Of course there are an infinite number of alternatives...I just quickly picked something that sounded decent that tried to make my point about my observation lately that Capitalism was getting knocked around everywhere I looked.

In the last Econtalk podcast that I listened to last night, they discussed the loneliness "epidemic" and the author ended up blaming Thatcher-based Capitalism as perhaps the main reason why people are so lonely today!

I thought that was quite the stretch but imagine my chagrin when here was another spurious back-handed attack on it.

> Capitalism [is] getting knocked around everywhere I looked.

That's what happened with every social system in the past, and, while failures certainly have happened, we've always found ways for that criticism to result in improvements to our societies.

It would be very surprising for the current shape of our society or, more generally, capitalism to be an exception to the rule, unless you subscribe to the "end of history" thesis.

No need to believe Fukiyama. The exception to the rule concept can be based on the idea that capitalism is novel in its ability to absorb and transform any protest against it. The divine right of kings, to pick just one example, was unable to pull off this trick, and perished under questioning. So far, capitalism has done remarkably well at incorporating protest and criticism that targets it, in a way that does seem quite novel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com