>But then all of a sudden, around 1980, that progress slowed, stopped, and in many ways reversed.<p>Conveniently the moment, large scale spyplanes confirmed the sovjet union was a messy paper tiger, not the industrial science powerhouse it propaganda made it out to be. Ever after that, it was crisis management and containement towards collapse. Before that it was panic and better-this-then-that-negotations with unions. It was a watershed moment back to the gilded age.
Archive with full text of article: <a href="https://archive.ph/SNZK2" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/SNZK2</a><p>Also, this article is from 2020, but generated hardly any discussion when it was posted on HN back then.
We're leaving in absolutely unprecedent times: automation starting to effectively displace workers, huge demographic changes taking effect and a turning point in capitalistic system that for the last 50 years worked undisputedly to supress wages and erode the standard of o living of the middle class that had the upperhand in the previous 50 years. And I'm not even talking about a certain pandemic nor about the nuclear revival with the ukranian war.<p>I think today we live in a time as revolutionary as the 60's in the XX century but without the optimistic atmosphere. I'm certain people don't notice this because we don't have the cultural effervescence of that time, for example, but I'm sure that in the future historians will write about how difficult and exceptional the 20's of the XXI century were.
This just in: Boomer unsatisfied with the natural outcome of integrating the massive third world labor force into the first world combined with NIMBY politics at home, incorrectly attributes the outcome to "the right" and "evil corporations"
It's interesting that the hippie-to-yuppie generation, of which the author is admittedly a member, seems currently busy publishing a lot of <i>mea culpa</i> pieces like this article. It's a good development, if anything because admitting fault is difficult for everyone. But:<p>- Hopefully this is not a desperate attempt at staying relevant. Taking the author at his own word, that whole generation is now <i>unreliable</i>: they messed up and are fundamentally corrupt. Unless they have a spotless, near-sainthood track record, anybody born before the mid-70s should probably be ignored when defining the strategic horizon.<p>- They never seem to suggest a way forward anyway, exactly like this author. That's probably because they have little knowledge of the now, they can only analyze what came before.<p>The real cultural breakthrough will happen when someone "clean" will manage to elaborate an actual way forward, a <i>democratic socialism for the digital age</i> that actually works (or promises to work) on a mass-scale. It probably shouldn't be called that, it will use new terms so it can eschew old labels; but it should promise redistribution, respect, and creative satisfaction, for all people.<p>Until that happens, we are simply in damage-limitation mode. Technology has enabled capitalist excesses in an unprecedented way, most of the cyberpunk-theorized digital feudalism is already reality. What can we do? That is the question.
The elephant in the room is globalization. The same resources have to be shared among many more people. Even if energy is no problem, there is e.g. a limited amount of fish protein that can be fed to life-stock.<p>>I’m betting that a jobless super-automated future will arrive even sooner than experts have been predicting.<p>We already live in that future. If there were only one type of car, one type of trousers and shirts, a limited selection of food and standardized housing, there would be hardly any work for anybody.<p>The end of the article is kind of funny. It could as well be a plea for Capitalism and startup culture:<p>>Drag dreams out into the light of day, show their sources, compare them with fact, transform them to possibilities … a dream … with a sense of the possible.”<p>>He also wrote that the urgent national inflection-point struggle a century ago was “between those who are willing to enter upon an effort for which there is no precedent, and those who aren’t. In a real sense it is an adventure.”<p>It comes down to taxes and investments. The masses can always vote for politics that shift spending power from corporations to politicians or to themselves. They can also pool their money and invest by themselves.<p>For some reasons, unprecedented efforts seem to require free capital. How else but with Capitalism can that be provided? More democratic investments like kickstarter.com look too much like etsy.com to be viable contenders.
My own observations of this 'blame capitalism' trend in collective social murmuring gained amplitude perhaps a decade ago, becoming really strong in the past 5 years. I am profoundly puzzled at the 'ad-hocness' and superficiality of the oft presented argument (which this articles is just an sample of). It is not because 'capitalism' is some sacred cow, or that the social maladies affecting communities are irrelevant or unimportant. It is the lack of understanding the very assumptions one makes about the alternatives (as well as 'capitalism' as a concept).<p>Just as any non-material concept, such as democracy, love, courage, and etc, so capitalism is a model, an abstraction of reality, which is context dependent.<p>So my contribution to the argument is to bring to attention that just as social-democracy can be de-facto a dictatorship, or 'love' can be a prison, or dictatorship can bring religious freedom and the end of slavery (e.g. early Persian empire) and contrast it with early America colonization governments, similarly capitalism as a concept can be approached.<p>Fundamentally, it is the mixture of government (power) with private enterprise (wealth) that historically is known to generate the greatest human corruption. Just like there people recognized that religion and state should be separated to avoid corruption of both, it should be followed by a divorce of private enterprise and state. [if one should summarize it in one sentence]. It has nothing to do with capitalism, socialism, nationalism, communism... the principle lies elsewhere.
How come the people of Silicon Valley, always so desperately concerned about issues of social justice, never talk about wage inequality?<p>IMO this is an issue for which the scale and impact is far greater than what seems to be the issues of concern for most of the people working in big tech.
Blaming capitalism for corruption while giving government more and more power, solution: let's give the government more power in the name of social justice and expect that no one in the system is corrupted - wow, that's just perfect reasoning...
Socialism never worked in the past, because it simply ignores the fact that people have no reason to work hard when they see someone who's chilling gets the same outcome.
> A union? Sure, fine. But I was talent. I was creative. I was an individual.<p>Seriously, this is the right attitude. We need to find a regulatory framework for capitalism that works with this mindset.<p>The OP seems to advocate a more “Swedish system” where (almost) everybody is unionized and that mental framework is applied to all work (except e.g. sports and literature where everybody understands it’s impossible). As a Swede I’d like to caution against this in the strongest possible way. It is the road to serfdom for every talented and ambitious individual, regardless of background. It just perpetuates the class society.