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354 points qingcharles | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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K0balt ◴[] No.43748607[source]
Enshitification at its best. This is all part of the inexorable current sweeping us along to the post capitalist society, where corporations no longer sell anything but rather rent or sell access to their things. We’re already there with phones, most consumer computers, farming equipment, cars, and gradually, more and more consumer goods.

With pervasive automation, we are accelerating towards a future where money is meaningless, but not in a nice humanistic star-trek kind of way… more in a dystopian, no need to pay wages to anyone because automation, so we just need land, natural resources, and energy kind of way.

It’s grey goo, on a macro scale so you have to get into space to see it for what it is.

The current pushes us towards a time, soon, when power is the only currency that matters, and justice is reduced to the will of the stronger.

If we want to have something better than trying to compete for resources as squishy humans alongside technofacist enclaves where humans are sparse and wield unprecedented power through massive robotic capabilities, we need to start making changes now.

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1. pmontra ◴[] No.43748788[source]
What is there of "post capitalist" in all of that? I see capital and scarcity all the way down. Maybe scarcity is artificially enforced on things that wouldn't be scarce anymore but nothing changed substantially compared to 100 years ago.
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2. K0balt ◴[] No.43750353[source]
What changed is that “the people” are not serfs, they are irrelevant competitors for resources. The only thing you can do with money is pay people for their time. In the end wages is the end consumer of currency. It serves no other purpose.

We are entering a new chapter, where money will cease to be relevant at all. Only land and energy will be relevant. The elite will not need people at all anymore, people and society in general will become annoyances, at best. Everything is better when you have less people to share it with, so “depopulation” will likely be in vogue.

Technofacist enclaves will have the monopoly of coercive force, and will probably fight amongst themselves for resources, but the population of people outside those entities will be a lot like ants.