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Comment by belfalas | Hacker News Reader

You jest, but most likely someone at Amazon will read this and think to themselves: "you know...the for-profit private prison industry is ripe for disruption. This could be a good lead."

Also, what you describe has been done before in history. In the 19th century in the US there were "Pullman Towns" - everything from A to Z owned by the Pullman company.

"Get baptized in a Pullman church, go to a Pullman school, work for Pullman all your life, and get buried in a Pullman graveyard." was an activist slogan at the time. (I learned this from history class at university, paraphrasing from memory).

More on Pullman Towns here: https://www.pullman-museum.org/theTown/

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For the curious: besides the Pullman towns, there were many other “company towns” [1] in the United States, owned by various companies [2].

Some of the most exploitive ones were owned by mining firms, as immortalized in the famous protest song “Sixteen Tons”, with its refrain “I owe my soul to the company store”. [3]

(This song may be familiar to South Park viewers.) [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_towns_in_the_U...

[3] http://www.protestsonglyrics.net/Labor_Union_Songs/Sixteen-T...

[4] https://youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc

Thank you for pointing that out - yes, Pullman is one of the most famous examples but the issue was rampant during the Industrial Revolution.

In a sense we are now re-living that past, call it the "Digital Industrial Revolution."

I had those “Pullman Towns” in mind. This type of system opens up obvious opportunities for exploitation, but so do our existing prison systems. If we ever did replace prisons, I think it would involve something like this.

Since Amazon Prison is so close to life already, we might all benefit from thinking about how to solve its issues. As the legal system necessitates lawyers, a digital prison might need digital advocates programmed by the prisoner‘s representatives. Could we design a digital jail that could both monitor the prisoner and share privileges?

As software introduces more restrictions on our lives, we could benefit from something like an AI “Freedom Box” that represented us while interfacing with proprietary services. People have already made AI lawyers to suggest options. Maybe these could merge with security software to allow us to navigate whatever future prisons we build.

How about willfully admitting yourself into the Amazon prison, to build up prison credits. By so doing, you could commit small crimes with impunity, using your already earned credits to skip punishment. Hmm. The rich already commit large crimes, and skip punishment, using MONEY.

$5000 in AWS credits if you spend a month in Amazon Prime Prison™

Go to Amazon Prime Prison Free for 30 days!

Forgot about that GPU cluster you spun up last month and built up an astronomical AWS bill? Don’t worry, you won’t have to sell a kidney, stay at Amazon Workhouse Services until you've cleared your debt!

Part of the Blockchaingang..

Cold: the air and water flowing.

Hard: the land we call our home.

Push to keep the corpo growing,

Feel the weight of what we owe.

This: the song of sons and daughters,

Hide the heart of who we are.

Making code to build our future,

Strong, united, working till we fall.

Maybe instead of wasting energy to mine crypto, one could waste human potential instead.

> Maybe these could merge with security software to allow us to navigate whatever future prisons we build.

In my mind our goal should be to imagine a future in which the need for prisons becomes obviated.

You jest, but most likely someone at Amazon will read this and think to themselves: "you know...the for-profit private prison industry is ripe for disruption. This could be a good lead."

"Good business is where you find it." - Dick Jones, Omni Consumer Products

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