[programmers frantically pulling cables out of the wall]
AI: "Nuclear power. Double teachers' salaries. Build more houses. Distribute food more fairly. TRAINS—"
— qntmyrrh (@qntm) November 24, 2023 I remember growing up with that same old adage of how you could be the next scientist to invent a cure for cancer, or a solution to climate change, or whatever. What they don’t tell you is that we already have solutions for a lot of problems, we just don’t use them.
I just assumed rich people don’t wanna, so we just have to live with the same shit. It’s easy to find lawyers to explain why we can’t even when engineers say how we can and scientists explain how we must.
Why would rich people change the society which made them rich in the first place?
A better question is why wouldn’t rich people do what they could to preserve their lives of luxury. Nick Hanauer, enterpriser and venture capitalist has been on the lecture circuit for some time now noting that the working class tolerates a stratified society only when lives near the bottom aren’t miserable, such as, a minimum-wage income is a living wage that affords rent, utilities, food and enough downtime to not go mad.
Instead, rich people are pushing to change society, to curb OSHA restrictions, the 40-hour work week, the weekend, mandated safety features and healthcare provisions and so on (what had to be fought for during the 20th century).
Curiously, our industrialists resent having to treat their labor force like human beings, even when we’ve established through studies that well-treated labor is so much more productive over poorly-treated labor as to be worth additional expense for the benefits. But our upper managers still imagine things in terms of time theft while wage theft and tip stealing run epidemic. The game industry continues to crunch even when we know crunching reduces productivity to below 10% of normal productivity, essentially rendering crunch ineffective, yet all the AAA development companies (and many indies) still crunch their devs.
This is how we see that capitalism fails to do what the ideology claims it does. Competition is supposed to drive us towards optimal production efficiency, and yet we see time and again top-down management subject to human bias and making up for it by innovating anti-competitive practices that circumvent oversight and legal restrictions. Capitalism fails to make smart guys rich, but already-rich guys even richer, whether they’re good at business or not.
During the Great Depression, life under Hoover and his industrialist pals was not giving capitalism a good name and by comparison, what Lenin was doing didn’t seem so bad even despite the growing pains of the Soviet Union. (We also narrowly avoided a fascist takeover, if Major General Smedley Butler of the USMC is to be believed.) FDR’s New Deal was a stopgap to give capitalism another chance, which the industrialists resented and even then were plotting to reverse. The rise of the religious right and Reagan’s presidency (opening Washington to Lobbyists) were the fruits of that effort.
Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation is essentially the endgame, and the fascist takeover: Neuter elections, killing the power of the Democratic party at the federal and state levels and instill an autocracy, meanwhile using propaganda of the enemy within and burning our marginalized populations in order to curb civil unrest. Eventually they’ll have to find a war, maybe against Eastasia or something.