this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Antiwork
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I do feel like the former or something close to it should be our goal as a society.
Um... you probably meant the latter, as in the second one, right? Eating Doritos while slaves do all the hard work - presuming we aren't talking about non-sentient robots but actual people - sounds kinda selfish to me:-P.
Edit: to clarify, I'm down with the live like a King 👑 and eat Doritos 🔺 parts, it's only the pesky slavery 🤕 part that I'm against!
Lol, I did mean the former, but yes, I was imagining automation/etc taking over the role of most jobs.
Best I can do is bad AI art and music to take away the hobbies of a lot of people and to stop paying people who do that for a living.
Oh man, so very many movies would disagree with you there. "I, Robot" and "Terminator" come to mind, and "The Matrix". But perhaps most important: "Wall-E", as in those fat fuckers sat down and simply... never stood up again. (yeah, you can tell I am old from my selection:-D)
Don't get me wrong, Doritos are effing delicious! But also, we need some amount of balance in our lives to help make them worth living. What we gain in comfort there, we lose in autonomy, and that's not a trade-off I would willingly make, even if I could. I mean, I'm not insane - or Amish - I use technology and I enjoy comfort, but I also value the ability to give something back to society through my work.
What e.g. "made America great" (in the 50-60s) was that people's work would get them something in return for it - a house, a family, college education for their kids, etc. - as opposed to today where other than rent work only buys the ability to purchase barely some food & weed, and many people have lost all hope of ever owning their own home, or getting healthcare.:-( I get it - that's beyond fucked up. But what that means is that something was stolen from us (autonomy & freedom), not given (comfort & ease, e.g. look at Google search).
TLDR: When we become reliant upon the machines, that's when they own us rather than the other way around.
Is it really inherently a reduction in autonomy to remove compulsory labor from society using automation? Why? IMO the whole, spend your life in a job and get the American Dream in exchange thing, is not really freedom and is not much of a choice, even when the work to reward ratio is favorable. Being able to actually choose how your time is spent beyond picking between various jobs which all require you to live the same general sort of on-rails lifestyle could ideally mean a lot more autonomy than we've ever had, and there's no reason I can see to think the result would have to be a bland culture of Wall-E style consumerist vacationers. Our imagination of leisure is defined by its nature as a brief reprieve from working life. Why should we be limited to that, if we had space to grow past it?
To clarify: work need not be "compulsory" in order to give back to society. I have contributed towards multiple Open Source software projects, been a moderator of a small & then another medium-sized Reddit sub, written the sole content for many a wiki page and aided the creation & extension of far many more others, etc. - not one bit of any of that gave me any direct monetary compensation (though may have helped me get other jobs, from polishing those skillsets), but was all fulfilling and helped my common human to enjoy their leisurely pursuits, and that was enough for me.
And doing that kind of non-compulsory work I feel like adds to my freedom, rather than detracts from it. For the same reason that walking or cycling to some places enhances my enjoyment of life, rather than always having to take a car - and yet I have also been without a car entirely for certain periods of my life, and yes that too was constraining. It is best to have choices imho, from my own direct & personal experiences.
The scenario that Wall-E describes is that they leaned so heavily into their "comfort" that they literally lost the ability to have choices anymore - instead of being able to choose to sit, or stand, or walk, or run, or bike, or swim, etc., their only "choice" was to sit in their chairs. Period. This is not "best" - this is not maximum "freedom": when you have zero viable alternatives, that is in fact no choice or freedom at all. Leading up to that: sometimes you have to stand up, even if you don't feel like it in the moment, in order to preserve your ability to stand up in the future. And if not, well that's your "choice" - but is it though, if it is not one based on informed consent?
Why I say the latter is that, remember that the OP graphic specifically precluded automation: it talked about living like a king, eating Doritos, "while other people do all the hard work". Essentially it advocates that we all be like Elon Musk, playing games all day long and then taking credit and all the monetary rewards resulting from that hard work of others. The implication even goes further: that we would be forcing others to do our bidding as our slaves (colonialism = do that to "others" abroad, vs. inflation where we do it to our own citizens at home). To that I say fuck that noise! But then we got off on this other tangent, which is: what if other humans didn't have to be slaves, and robots just did all the work for us? Okay... that's not nearly so ethically unsound as the OP. But my point was that it is still far from the ideal, unless we made (non-compulsory) work a part of the balancing of our lives - exercise and rest, not one or the other but both.
I am not advocating for slavery here, e.g. as opposed to having robots do our work. On that point I think we are in agreement - it sure would be nice if robots would take over the compulsory stuff (NOT HUMAN BEINGS USED AS SLAVES!!1!!), to allow us the freedom to live however we choose. So moving on, next: if we sit down into those couch-chairs, then we make slaves of ourselves, i.e. our comfort takes precedence but at the cost of our autonomy, whereupon we have lost something - our freedom to choose what to do next. So my note was a cautionary tale, to be mindful of the balance, as opposed to the overly simplistic "work=bad (always)" mindset that was so prevalent in that sub, even before bots took it over. In the OP graphic, the second meaning of ditching work would be unquestionably good, but the former one of ditching work MINUS THE HUMAN SLAVERY PART would not be a uniformly positive outcome... and in fact I think it would be quite negative, overall.
I think we're basically in agreement then. Work definitely doesn't have to be a bad thing. It's just so conceptually tied up with the institution of jobs that it's hard to know exactly what people are talking about and considering. The OP image and its responses are a little confusing to me because, not being compelled by force to do a job implies at least the option of sitting around and doing nothing, and there is a popular sentiment that is violently opposed to anyone having that option, often accompanied by arguments about work being necessary for people to have purpose, as if we can only have purpose if made to work. Also arguments like, there is work that needs to be done, so it's only fair if everyone be made to work, and that's the only way.
You'd be dismayed by how many people don't even have that scruple, as long as it's happening in the third world.
Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism after all.
I mean... current democracies are, and all of them throughout history have devolved into plutocracies, before eventually falling. e.g. the USA is neoliberal, and it is not the only one:-(.
But I don't know if all "social democracies" inherently imply that. Then again, that term might just be a fantasy one rather than applicable to irl structures, especially in the modern age of the internet and therefore the "disinformation age". Who could have guessed (cough Reagan cough) that some nations might want to take over other nations, not with overt warfare that could cause mutual nuclear annihilation but by simply buying out a single TV station and being allowed to label it as "news"?
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But from a personal standpoint, isn't gradualism the only way to have any hope of any kind of impact at all, without the weight of a corporation or government behind someone? e.g., upon hearing that children without protective gear are being used to gather cacao used to make chocolates and not being paid fairly, do we personally avoid purchasing chocolate forevermore, or upon further learning that children harness cacao without protective gear purely for fun (apparently it's easy and enjoyable?), and that their only other alternative is actual slave labor like in a mine or some such, continue our purchases and maybe even buy more (getting fair trade wherever available)? Personally I have no fucking clue, but I could see someone ethically going either direction, and that's something, though on an individual level neither seems like it would do much good. (personally I am leaning in the latter direction, lately, b/c you cannot regulate or improve an industry that does not exist, but I suppose that depends on what else you would purchase instead - bananas? sugarcane or a derivative? what foodstuffs even don't involve slavery at some point!? but that's what I mean: you can't improve something unless you keep it alive, so if you switch to something that doesn't involve slavery, that's awesome, but if you cannot, then maybe pick something to improve and work on that until it gets better - which is gradualism, aka vote for Biden now and hope for better later, even if it seems unlikely, b/c you know for sure that Trump will move things in a direction for the worse)Social democracy maintains that very exploitation. There is little disagreement among liberals when it comes to the exploitation of the third world.
You want food stuffs that don't involve slavery? End neocolonialism.
Right, it maintains that exploitation... by keeping the democracies of the Western world functioning. Whereas in contrast, Right-wingers want to end all of that - the democracy, the modern society (of e.g. middle-class), etc. - and replace it with both even higher exploitation abroad, as well as similar levels of it at home as well.
An analogy is a person who stinks, due - in part - to the fact that they refuse to wear deodorant or wash. If we kill said person, they won't stink less - in contrast, they will stink quite a bit moar! - and they still will refuse to put on deodorant and to wash themselves (and in fact, perhaps they could have been persuaded to do such before, but now they are flat incapable of either no matter what amount of either carrot or stick are used).
That said, when I mentioned "keeping the democracies of the Western world functioning", I don't mean to imply that democracy is the only way to survive. Rather, I meant that the two things are not mutually exclusive - we need some kind of government, and then the principles that (meta-? hehe) govern said government will dictate what radiates outwards from it.
To pick one notable example, an "Emperorship" (oh right, "for a day"... r-r-RIIIIIIIGHT) where one man (person? no, who are we kidding) ruling the masses might do it? But that seems extremely doubtful, especially given the propensity of Trump to just grab whatever he wants that is within reach - even if that thing is someone's genitals.:-( (of either gender, one to pet and the other to crush ruthlessly, like Chris Christie's hopes & dreams)
Um... I think you are perhaps not listening to the right set of liberals? Probably there is a more specific (narrow) meaning to what you said like modern philosophers or some such, perhaps adding constraints like what might be viable in the modern world, in the sense of traversing a pathway from here to the desired end-goal, and if so then I probably could not educate you further than you already know. But not all liberal-minded common folk agree that exploitation is either good or even that it is not horribly bad, I can tell you that much! John Oliver is one such exemplar - I know, he's no "philosopher", but at some point shouldn't the opinion of the masses weigh in, especially if the way to get to there from here would be by voting?!
Absolutely, we should! Except right now, Boomers are still in charge, so how about we play Russian roulette with the very existence of our nation instead? And then, even if we survive, we'll leave Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson in charge of our budgets from basically here on out, while also paying lip mere service to liberalism (which doesn't mean that liberalism, in theory, does not espouse certain values, only that like Magats follow "Christianity" and "Patriotism", we'd rather merely say that we do but we really do not).
Most of those "democracies" are dictatorships of capital who depend on the exploitation of the third world to maintain a standard of living at home, the essence of social democracy. Maintaining them isn't a good thing.
I think you are not looking at the history of their actions or reading between the lines. The sales of weapons to western-backed dictatorships for the purpose of putting down restive populations in the event they try to rise up don't stop when a democrat is in charge.
So just let America fall... right into the hands of Putin?
So just let the UK fall... right into the hands of Putin?
So just let Ukraine fall... right into the hands of Putin?
What happens to these nations after they fall, especially those with nukes? Putin will cite a "worry" that the nukes would fall into the "wrong" hands, invade, and start WWIII.
This is not a theoretical game-theory setup we are talking about here, where we could get to wherever we want to from wherever we are, in order to explore some possibility space - irl we have to deal with the practical realities in front of us as they are. Much like a chess game (for the sake of this illustration lets presume the constraint of having to play through a full one) where you may have this fantastic end-game moveset in mind... but you have to get through the middle-game and even before that the early-game portion to even get the opportunity to try it out. Those opening moves might not be all that critical... but they can't be total throw-aways either.
These days, with access to the internet, I don't think many people other than the entirely uninformed are advocating anything other than that the Western world is evil. That's not even a question in my mind? The question is what to do about it, practically speaking.
And remember: Facebook, now Meta, is already all over the world, as too is Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. The USA birthed the likes of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Cook, etc. - so that's legit on us that's true - but it's already happened, and that horror is unleashed upon the world now. So after America falls, what then - do any of these companies now cease to exist, or without the income that previously came from America (but also most other Western nations), do some or all of these people try to more directly take over other nations, make their own empires, and directly subvert their governments by installing themselves a literal emperor?
And if not, what then - China just takes over the world by default? Right now it projects the aura of strength, but like most such nations, that is only b/c they prioritize fighting their enemies over actual internal development (I mean, they do some of that too, but even that is prioritized in order to "pwn" their enemies), and once there are no more external enemies, it too will fall apart, like all the others before it.
Which is not to say that the democracies won't fall apart too - like all others before them. It is difficult to know who to "root for", when there are such troubles on all sides. One thing I know is that Western nations do not have the sole monopoly on being evil - we all are that way, it is the natural human condition, sad to say:-(. Another natural human condition is short-sightedness, i.e. it is far easier to tear down & destroy than it is to build up, but even if the entire Western set of nations were all to fall at once (the tear down part), at some point someone is going to have to start building things up again. And there will be problems with doing so... b/c of humanity. So the Western nations falling only solves the short-term issues, leaving the long-term ones untouched. There are no solutions that I am presenting here, b/c I do not know them, only endlessly new problems as each (pair of) step(s) forward is matched by a step back to discover the next problem after that - e.g. climate change may make all of this a moot point if that ends all human habitation on earth. :-|
lmao you think Russia is capable of invading America? You understand Call of Duty games are fiction right? Modern day Russia can barely take the russian-speaking part of Ukraine, and saw a hostile Ukraine as such an existential threat they went to near total war.
They go to re-education camps and then get real jobs.
Or they don't, historically speaking, it's up to them.
From the french revolution to slavery to segregation to the Russian and Chinese revolutions to apartheid, in every instance the privileged assured everyone else that they would be just as brutal and cruel to them as they were to the oppressed class. They've been wrong every time. The indigenous people of the Americas and Africa are not waiting to put you in camps and erase your language or sell your drinking water to richer countries.
There is more than one way to influence another nation.