Post scarcity is kind of an odd man out here. The idea predates tech broism by a solid half century, and informs a lot of contemporary leftist theory. There is nothing inherently wrong with using utopian thinking as a guiding principle for iterative policy. I’d argue that anything which doesn’t do that is cynicism.
Choose wisely!
Submitted 15 hours ago by Godric@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/fb6719e1-cca0-4627-a25a-94a4e87e9d36.png
Comments
socsa@piefed.social 14 hours ago
killea@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
It occurs to me that I’d argue we’re heading towards a forced scarcity society rather than post scarcity. That’s the only way they can make sure we don’t get a Star Trek type future if/when we figure out fusion power. Hell, we’ve already basically been able to feed everyone for ages.
vateso5074@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Artificial scarcity is definitely nothing new. Look at the diamond industry, for example. Diamonds are common as hell, but they regulate the supply so severely in order to sell these cheap chunks of carbon for thousands of dollars.
If there’s no competition in a market willing to race others to the bottom in terms of price, there’s no incentive to actually produce a reasonable amount of something people want. You can just withold supply and charge way more.
ganymede@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
forced vs post scarcity
tbh i’m happy with most stances which at least acknowledges the tension between these two facets.
anyway my point was, imo the “there’s too many humans” propaganda is part of forced scarcity lobby. there’s perhaps too many humans to live as wastefully as we are, so why wouldn’t reducing waste be our #1-3 top priorities?
dev_null@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
There is also nothing inherently wrong with “optimization” and “automation”. It’s just that they are buzzwords and how the tech bros approach these topics.
Godric@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
While post scarcity is excellent and I do believe it is possible in theory, it’s used as a buzzword to handwave away all the dystopian things being pushed.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
We scoff at them both, but seriously pick one and get comfortable, looking reality right in the butt-cheeks is bad for the soul.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Stop looking at the cheeks, grit those teeth, and give that anus a good gander.
(Full disclosure: I am not a therapist, but it’s good advice.)
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 hours ago
We are all stardust though. Billion-year-old carbon.
halvar@lemy.lol 6 hours ago
yes but do you consider that important in any way? if you do you are closer to the person on the left
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
I would say it is a neutral fact.
Imo there is no meaning to life, everyone decides for themselves what to live for.
If someone likes the fact that we are made from starstuff, why yuck that yum specifically? It is kind of a nice perspective to take sometimes when life gets stressful.
It is also a part of a nice song by Joni Mitchell and a nice speech by Carl Sagan, both people I admire, but not something I think about a lot…
Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
I choose death
tourist@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Depending on how serious you are:
Choose weed instead
Or the crisis line. You probably already know where to find it. Help is available. You do not have to suffer alone. I love you homie.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
He’s an assassassin. He never said the death was his own…
andros_rex@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Or the crisis line.
What happens is that they “triage” you, where depending on how you answer their script you get cops at your door and a trip to hell on earth, or you are on hold for 20 minutes to speak with someone who also is reading a script and doesn’t give a rats ass about you.
Maybe states that aren’t Oklahoma have mental hospitals which are preferable to drinking yourself to sleep, but who knows.
Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Just kidding, unless given that exact choice lol. Weed has been a great help this year. Love you too fam, appreciate the thoughtful comment.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
“Everyone and everything will end in my lifetime. I’ll be here to see it all crumble just before I am incinerated in the blast.”
is another popular escapist fantasy.
No one wants to believe they’ll just have to hobble through a slow and painful decline.
seraphine@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
I have met the guy on the right irl. He was unbearable
GalacticGrapefruit@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Stellaris players: How it feels to have a Spiritualist empire on one side of your border and a Materialist empire on the other.
Vupware@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
This is so overwhelmingly hyperbolic I’m not sure what to take from it
DoubleDongle@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I just want to drop in and call out “death is a design flaw” specifically. It is not. Without death, there can be no evolution, and any change to the environment is extinction.
The mountains seem eternal, but there were forests before many of them, and though the trees will be different in the distant eons when the mountains are worn to nothing, the forests will live on.
dev_null@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
Hmm, why can’t there be evolution without death? As long as organism reproduce, genes are passed on, and some reproduce more successfully than others, why would it matter if existing individuals stay around or not? I don’t see how it makes evolution fundamentally impossible.
hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 52 minutes ago
Without death you can’t have reproduction, you’d get way too many organisms to be sustainable in any way.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
So we could go visit our great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents and they’d look like Jabba the Hutt. Holidays would be a beast.
MummysLittleBloodSlut@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
That’s pretty cool in nature, especially with plants and fungi that don’t think. But applying it to people is kinda eugenics-y
tomiant@piefed.social 19 minutes ago
This is interesting because you propose that eugenics is inherently bad because it requires a lot of sacrifice, is that right? Because it doesn’t have to. This line from Gattaca always stuck with me:
[Vincent’s parents are planning a second child, and are shown four candidate embryos]
Geneticist: We want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn’t need any more additional burdens. Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply, the best, of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result.I could argue, could, that not doing eugenics on this level would be immoral. If we can use science to make people less prone to disease, to make them stronger and smarter, why wouldn’t we? I’m not a fucking nazi here, I’m looking for a serious debate. We are already doing this in a different categorical scope with modern medicine. If we claim that all births must be “natural”, then perhaps disease and death are also “natural” and we shouldn’t intervene, and do without medical science and just have nature run its natural course.
DoubleDongle@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Oh, giving ourselves endless lifespans is a fine endeavor. We’ve got plenty of ways to adapt to changing environments without changing our bodies, and we’re pretty close to being able to do that without dying and evolving anyway. Shit might get weird, but it always does with us.
FluidBeef@quokk.au 12 hours ago
Basically the dark shadows of the Hippy Age Of Aquarius and sandal-wearing tech Utopianism corrupted Into evil by the baby boomers ageing into the dominant political class in the West.
Bristlecone@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
At this point they basically have all the money and all the votes that they need, not to mention the cognitive dissonance they are capable of withstanding is absolutely INSANE
stepan@lemmy.cafe 15 hours ago
we will make global anarchy by tomorrow. no more money, capitalism and suffering, trust
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
The thing about Anarchy is that, for many people, the cashless society where you own nothing and are fully removed from the machine of industry is already here. Its just called “poverty”.
The problem is that this kind of poverty isn’t equally distributed. You’ve still got this large, heavily armed occupying force that preserves money, capital, and the painful prodding of induced productivity for everyone else.
BrazenSigilos@ttrpg.network 14 hours ago
I mean scientifically speaking, we are all made of stardust. Everything in the universe is. Including the existential crisis your trying to forget by disassociating.
dzsimbo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
And blue light does keep you awake. Are we team Esotheria?
shalafi@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I honestly think most of these bugfuck crazy views stem from we humans not having evolved to deal with the modern world. People feed us the simple answers we crave.
Godric@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
We were meant to subsist off of grubs, berries, and whatever your extended family could hunt as we trekked around, dying randomly of infections and bear attacks. Then some fucking asshole started farming and it’s all been downhill since!
capuccino@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Really? Are people out there that death is a design flaw? I know it’s shitpost, but it’s based on something after all
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 14 hours ago
Depends on how literally you mean it, in general, those most likely to say it wont think that humans are literally designed not to die and only do so because someone made a mistake, but more that humans might be redesigned or modified not to (or at least not from biological aging). Not a hard to find sentiment if you hang out in spaces with transhumanists, but I find the ones that overlap with AI bros, that tend to have an attitude like “this will totally happen in my lifetime and with no effort because the AI singularity is going to come and give us everything in a few years” impossible to talk to, because all too often they will cite even the tiniest listed improvement in any AI system as proof that literally everything possible or impossible is about to happen and then insist you arent paying attention when you give them skeptcism.
Godric@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yes, there are people who believe we will find a way to transcend death via technology. I personally think a world ruled by immortal omniwealthy methusalas that will never let even death release their boot from the necks of the common man is a bad thing, but…
capuccino@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Once I read a creepypasta where the wealthy spent a lot of money paying research and development of immortality, only achieving a worse version of cancer. The wealthy obviously went dead.
binarytobis@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I’m also hung up on “Crypto is UBI”. Surely this is a one off crackpot quote and not a thing, right?
marcos@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
This one is empirically falsified. I never heard it before, and even though I can believe somebody is saying it somewhere, it’s an incredibly stupid thing to say.
blarghly@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I believe this is an idea most legitimately championed by Nick Bostrom. Here is a video explaining his perspective.
I feel like, at least from the stance of abstract philosophy, he makes some good points. And I’m not enough of a philosopher to refute them (though I’m sure some have). Personally, my stance is “I’ll cross that bridge when I arrive at it” - I expect to die before that happens.
2910000@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I feel like “both” is also an option
Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 14 hours ago
post-scarcicy society
RAM prices going up
Godric@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
It’s funny, just yesterday I looked at RAM prices randomly for the first time in months, thought “wow, that’s high”, and today I see reference after reference after reference about how high it is.
hansolo@lemmy.today 15 hours ago
OoooooooohPleaseNukeItFromSpace
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 15 hours ago
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
no