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Comment by EddieEngineers | Hacker News Reader

Before people see this and immediately dive into the comments about the WEF, make sure to read the actual essay by Ida Auken. It was never meant to be some dystopian plan but a thought experiment on a gig economy that grew more famous than it should have.

Edit: One thing I've noticed on HN is the dislike of 'Own nothing and be happy' while celebrating gig-economy companies that are essentially empowering this. Startups renting clothing or furniture in SF, at scale, combined with UBI (or benefits common in the part of Europe she's from) is what this article was thinking about.

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No planner ever means for their plan to be dystopian. On the contrary, the planner likely has nothing but the best intentions. But intentions don't make their plan non-dystopian.

This is something I always highlight. Grab your standard dystopian sci-fi, check the back history and realize that someone thought that something very much like it was a Grand Idea. Implementation details got in the way, sure, but damn, this system is so fine that hardly anyone could object, and you know what to do with people who object to Utopia.

While I agree with the spirit of your comment, in practice it wouldn't really be fair to blame Marx for Stalin and Mao.

The communist manifesto is a very reductionist view of economics that lends itself to false oppressor class/oppressed class narratives. Large scale death (not just Stalin and Mao but Pol Pot and many others) follows fairly easily from that narrative as the oppressed class can do no wrong.

Now if I could only remember what road it was that my mama said was paved with good intentions...

Dystopias for some are often utopias for others. I mean Mad Max Fury road looks bad for most, but for Immortan Joe that system was sweet as pie.

Ah yes, with the title "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better." If anything the "You'll own nothing and be happy" is LESS distopian than the essay. I mean, unless you don't read it as a peon completely beaten down into Stockholm syndrome. Plus it's all predicated on "free energy" and other such fantasies, while STILL looking like a nightmare to anyone who reads it.

> Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

She coulda beat people over the head with stuff like this more, but it's pretty clearly not a strictly utopian view there...

Even this, right:

> Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods.

and the later complaints about how there "used to be"

> lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment

Like, we're clearly not actually solving all those problems by "free transportation of tools instead of buying them", we're just ignoring them.

You're not supposed to take everything you read as a policy prescription, especially in works of imaginative speculation.

But if that's exactly what the WEF did...

That is what she claimed after the fact yes. Too bad the social media department of the WEF didn’t realize that and claimed it was a prediction for the year 2030:

https://m.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/8-predictio...

It seems quite possible that she meant it as a thought experiment, but that other people, when they heard it, thought yeah that's how it will go down, turning it into a prediction, not her prediction exactly, but a prediction.

Or her essay was actually about what it's title and content literally said and the "thought experiment" line was a pitiful backpedal.

I mean, everything you write is a "thought experiment", that doesn't mean you are immune to the responses to the content.

For example, if you wrote something really racist and then got backlash, could you just claim it was a thought experiment to invoke discussions about race? Not successfully.

Does the semantics of "thought experiment" vs "prediction" really matter though? The point is it's a dystopian view being discussed at THE platform of world leaders... It doesn't look good at all.

The thing is this isn’t some sort of group proposal/idea, but essentially a blog post by a not-very-famous MP. And it’s not crazy for a socialist MP from that part of Europe to think about a system like this - a system of decreased cost and increased access.

IF that's the case, they shouldn't have put it in their 2030 predictions video and hosted it on their platform.

Handwaving it away as some low level actor's wacky vision isn't really a good or original excuse.

> One thing I've noticed on HN is the dislike of 'Own nothing and be happy' while celebrating gig-economy companies that are essentially empowering this.

I suspect that is two different groups expressing their opinions, although there probably is some overlap in the Venn diagram.

I'm not sure that there exist any dystopias (outside of YA novels) that were planned as such. They all seem to be about naivete and creating perverse incentives.

This. Very nearly zero people want to bring about a dystopia. They think they're doing the opposite, even when everyone else is telling them they're making a mistake.

It's part and parcel of how very nearly everybody thinks they're one of "the good guys".

Direct link: https://web.archive.org/web/20161125135500/https://www.wefor...

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