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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

My introduction to Rushkoff was Cyberia [1].

He's much more temperate now than he was in Cyberia. He has a great point, though. Restated, it's as follows: If we have abundance, why are we working for more, instead of sending the abundance to those who need it?

He seems to fall down in the mechanisms of distribution though in this article and hand-wave through it.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cyberia_(book...

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I very much like how you restated his point. I felt myself agreeing, nodding my head when he was following that thought, then I had the image of Rushkoff tripping and falling flat on his face once he tried to figure out how. I think it would've been a much stronger article had he ended with "I don't know how to make this happen, only that it needs to happen." As it stands, he's just suggesting a different job for these unemployed toll collectors to take up, as opposed to toll machine repair.

Except those people wouldn't be burdened by having a "job" because in Rushkoff's world "food and shelter are basic human rights."

That's where people will get tripped up; in our current economic system we don't believe such an idea is true.

Yeah, I like the premise of the article and feel that technological innovation does kill jobs (and it's not a bad thing).

That being said, I feel like I got a big build up to a solution and it's like "share and make things and distribute online" uhhhh ok? Etsy is the solution?

Provocative thinking though...

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