We stopped believing in progress. Now, we're stagnating. [video]

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3 points·dartharva··3 comments

I wonder if there’s a paradox that in order to want progress, we have to exist as a unified populous, and progress in and of itself excludes people / causes de unification.

Count me among the people who say, we don’t need progress, we need to figure out how to more fairly distribute what we have.

Also, right now, tech CEO’s are actively talking about the end of work, while governments are trying to reduce the social safety net. There are a non-zero number of tech CEO’s who think that if we replace meat-intelligence with artificial-intelligence to “extend the light of consciousness” that would be a reasonable trade-off.

Like, who is promoting a really optimistic vision of progress that doesn’t have a huge fucking asterix adjacent?

The next generation just wants a world where they have a shot at doing meaningful work, prospering, and maybe being able to hew a place for themselves. It's telling to me that these billionaires are busy guiding us in directions whereby all business goes through them, they hold the purse strings, their hold on the purse strings is solidified by government enforcement or non-enforcement, and socioeconomic mobility only happens at their behest, and systems they can influence, but no one else can are this generation's economic wunderwaffen.

Say what you will about The Greatest Generation, and those that went through the Great Depression, but they did leave a legacy of knowledge recorded, and discoverable/accessible based on being organized. Ever since the 80's/90's, we've attacked that system, and poisoned that well of inter-generational knowledge transfer.

And here we are now about to blunder into the same mistakes they made. It's heart wrenching to see.

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