Welcome to 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy and Life Has Never Been Better | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy and Life Has Never Been Better

forbes.com

11 pointsfreediver18 comments

They smoked a fat joint when writing this, didn't they?

> First communication became digitized and free to everyone.

Arguably nothing is free, and nothing will ever be free, as long as private organizations want to make a profit. This article is hiding the downsides between the lines. Yes, social media is "free" but you pay in data, attention and effort of creating content. I wonder what the parallels to "free" energy and "free" transportation would be. In this future dystopia, you probably don't even own yourself, or your time.

I know this is a few years old, but the current WEF isn't backing away from their dystopian nightmare recommendations. They're already promoting the metaverse for ALL education, effectively creating the typical sci-fi dystopia. The lack of self-awareness is astounding (unless I'm cynical and then conspiracy theories look plausible, how can they not with these ideas).

> Arguably nothing is free, and nothing will ever be free, as long as private organizations want to make a profit.

For things to be free, I think a slave workforce will be necessary. But even then there is a cost to feeding and housing the slaves.

In the article "we solved" this with AI and robots.

> They smoked a fat joint when writing this, didn't they?

I think this is more indicative of a lifetime of total, stone-cold sobriety and bean counting.

>My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

Cool, enjoy the toddler toys covered in chocolate milk puke and pink eye. This is fundamentally moronic.

LOL yeah, lack of personal living space is not realistic in the slightest. I think it's meant to just inspire people to question things, though.

(so long as I think, speak, and do precisely what my owners tell me to)

See, this reads like an absolute dystopia to me, like a late-stage capitalist endgame. With the WEF being a bunch of hypercapitalists, it ain't too surprising that they'd pitch it as utopia instead.

I'm not convinced that WEF is a bunch of capitalists of any kind, but they definitely are working hard to both create and sell a world where nobody other than their membership has any capital.

they distribute ideology but I strongly doubt they possess it. the "which -ist?" question works to their favor (and has for a long time).

That would be the capitalist endgame, yep. Or feudalist, if you prefer, but at the end of the day it's pigmeat v. pork; either way, you've got a tiny elite who owns (as close as possible to) everything and rents it back out to everyone else (who pays with their labor, be it directly as serfs or indirectly via their wages).

This sounds like late stage techno-communism. I'm pretty sure owning things is at the core of capitalism.

Some people still own things, just not you.

Just like communism in practice. We can look at Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, USSR, etc, where the top elite certainly own things, just not the general public.

It's almost as if using a term meaning "a classless, stateless, and moneyless society" to describe societies which are precisely none of those things (in theory, let alone in practice) ain't a sign of intelligence or rationality - be it among those calling themselves "communist" or the ones taking their claim at face value.

A society wherein "the top elite certainly own things, just not the general public" is the capitalist endgame; the goal is to maximize profit/wealth, and being one of the lucky few who owns everything and rents it all back out to the masses is a damn good way of going about that.

> My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city.

> They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities.

The silver lining of this otherwise tone deaf dystopian nonsense.

This is from the 2016 World Economic Forum.

Seems topical considering they just finished their annual conference.

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