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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Specifically this, from Idiomrottning:
Owner concentration, wealth gaps, global warming… we’re seeing ownership of comfort-giving and labor-saving devices (like AI or data centers) becoming incredibly concentrated.
I grew up in your typical midwestern US household. My father worked for 30+ years in a factory and my mom was stay at home until I (being the youngest child) was old enough to not need constant supervision. I was taught all of my life about the value of hard work. As such, for much of my life I very much subscribed to the idea that the world doesn't owe you anything; that everything you get should be something that you worked for. This is a very difficult notion to get rid of. It's only now, as I settle into middle age, that I'm seeing another truth. That truth is that long before I was born, all of the valuable land was already carved up amongst the wealthy. All of the resources are spoken for, by and large. In fact, our society is borrowing against our future generations' resources and potential. In short, we were all bought and sold down the river from day one. So yeah, maybe we're owed something for that.
We have more than enough resources to go around. We have had the ability to get at those resources in a way that previous generations could not even imagine, that would make it possible to provide for the basic physical needs of every human on earth and then some. What we lack, collectively, is the desire and willpower to do so. Desire, when it comes to the segment of the population which has been recklessly collecting all of the world's wealth unto themselves, and willpower, when it comes to those of us who have failed to stop them from doing so. And to be fair, the attitudes that many of us grew up with are a hurdle that we're having trouble getting over. The situation is ever changing, and the realities that lead to previous generations' values don't always apply to present day life. Technology increasingly makes it attractive for business to treat humans as just another replaceable commodity. In point of fact we are not just replaceable, we are ever more easily replaceable as business chooses to leverage technology not to increase quality but to attempt to make every task mind bogglingly simple. Modern Capitalism gives no reward to a business that values loyalty towards employees, nor does it reward loyalty to a company from it's workers. Capitalism instead rewards making money quickly and then moving on to the next thing. And many of us, myself included, grew up with the value that we are owed nothing and should expect to work for whatever we get. I think we're collectively beginning to awaken to the reality that our technological success as a species has been employed in the most disgusting of ways possible - that of rapidly depleting our collective resources and funneling wealth ever more quickly into the hands of a smaller and smaller chosen few.
This is unsustainable, and will end one way or another. We would do well to choose to end it by making a concious decision about the problem than to wait until those who are stretched beyond breaking band to gether in violence.
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