Comment by lmeyerov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmeyerov | Hacker News Reader

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Their neighbors whose median per-capita income is 5 figures seem more relevant of an analogy

The serf analogy makes sense for low-income Americans who essentially have to pay more to the capital class: payday loans, cannot afford bulk discounts due to low cash reserves, rent vs buy, crippling debt, etc

FB white collar workers are literally the capital class, eg, paid in RSUs and LI profiles advertising as angel investors

The only reason I am writing this is it's super disheartening to start the day with seeing engineers not understanding how historically lucky they are, and much more importantly, how rotten the situation is for their neighbors. "Tell me you and your family have never struggled without.."

As a historical note, most Americans are taught enough empathy to not joke about slavery. But guess what: serfdom was happening around the same time, has a lot of violent similarities, and also has descendants who are not thrilled by it. But don't let this distract from my primary point about misunderstanding that technologists are the gentry here, not the serfs, in this terrible analogy.

Eh even those Americans are doing pretty well in the grand scheme. We know that we are importing a bunch of illegal immigrants and using them as manual labor in our disgusting factories and brutal fields. We are not paying them the minimum wage nor giving them any kind of retirement benefits or even the basic human decency of being able to visit their loved ones in the hospital without severe risk. And yet we allow this situation to persist with minimal hand waving dedicated to the issue. If we are going to assign serfdom to anyone surely it would be this invisible class of Americans. Then again, they are here by choice, risking much in the process, because ultimately its a better option for them then they had elsewhere so does it really make sense to even compare these people to the brutality of histories serfdom? Doesn't seem so.

Yes it does. Especially when the class of people you are referring to are fleeing their countries as a result of imperialsm, state led terrorism and ridiculous policies the US itself has instituted throughout the americas. The US is responsible, in many cases, for destabilizing these countries, creating the war on drugs and using adversarial and predatory economics to destabilize these countries for the private ends of capital. Just because you can “choose” to flee does not preclude you from being a victim. Your reading of being a the equivalent of a forced laborer essentially disregards the entirety of history surrounding war, conflict, instability and being a refugee in that context. If the question is about being “forced into working” you’ve already over looked the entire forced labor market that exists at the border and fits your definition of “brutality” quite well.

Your comparison of modern day tech workers to gentry is, in my opinion, surface-level at best. The landed gentry controlled far more of the political processes than your average tech worker does which allowed them to capture leverage, capital and influence at a level we could only dream of. A much more apt comparison would be to todays billionaires who actually control the levers of legislative power and use those levers to make themselves practically untouchable. Just because you feel that people are being spoiled relative to their counterparts doesn’t actually give them real power like the landed gentry had. Just because someone has 200k in a bank account does not immunize them from losing their job, getting sick and losing all of that in medical bills. I’m sorry you’re sad that people feel oppressed but it doesn’t change the fact that people are entitled to feel burned by the wheels of unfettered capitalism. Yesterday it was the car factory workers that were told they were spoiled for advocating for themselves and now we rally behind those causes today so your line in the sand drawing around who is entitled to complain about inequality wreaks of a lack of historical context for how these struggles play out longitudinally.

I'd rather be a tech worker than the landed gentry you mentioned. Would you not?

I’d rather be landed gentry since I think not having to work for a living would be pretty sweet. I’d also have to be cold heartless classist which I don’t think I could do. I’d probably die from dysentery though but I’m considering that outside of the question of “which occupation would you rather”

Where did “which occupation would you rather” make it in? I was comparing the overall lifestyle and life outcomes.

Well your question was vague and not actually what you are referring to: it was a simple “would you rather.” I think the comparison is useless given that comparing the entirety of the life experience of people in two different eras does not actually contribute to a conversation around the core point being made here: having ridiculous levels of wealth is not the same as having a decent paying job in which you are still reliant on the income to survive and therefore are essentially tied to that opportunity of labor. A more valid comparison would be, as I pointed out earlier, between billionaires and any class of people who “have to work for a living”

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