Posted by RickJWagner 15 hours ago
I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market. They thought they had careers. Now they're struggling to survive.
Knitting is not the answer. This is a survival issue. Somehow I suspect the author inherited money.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...
There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor.
In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing.
Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s.
But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike.
Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.
You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).
You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good.
I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.
I wonder what they’ll do next with EVs becoming more popular? Outlaw home charging?
But you don't give out UBI and let people become potatoes. You give out UBI to allow them to meet their basic needs and then have them work a job they kfhr genuinely be OK at, and, ideally, enjoy. Ideally.
So yeah, even if no one ever really enjoying being a gas station attendant, getting up and going to a job to earn money and pay rent gives people a sense of purpose. And UBI definitely risks robbing people of that purpose. The alternatives to UBI soon though might be creating fake jobs or letting people starve.
Not a joke.
All the folks talking about it, it sounds like some sort of fantasy cope to get people going along willingly into the void.
On the east coast I could understand not wanting to get out of your car in the winter. And an attendant standing out in the snow is a tough job. Not sure it should be mandated. But in Oregon there's really no time of year it's that great a hardship to pump your own gas.
The attendants weren't fired, btw. At most stations they're still there and they'll offer to pump your gas. You're just allowed to do it yourself now.
I think the optimistic excited people are thinking more 'What a time to be alive' than 'All praise be, for they have come'
Which is not to say there won't be people deifying AI, I just don't think there are many of those yet.
The cynical side of me thinks it will happen, but right now I feel like most of those who seem susceptible to that kind of thinking are tending towards the Butlearian.
...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible.
I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.
No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.
[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
It's also not like I would do more work for less effort and be home by lunch. It will still be same 8 hours of doing something and be compensated to have the same general level of lifestyle with or without AI.
I'm certainly not excited to have a new office chair or a coffee machine.
Surely, on Hackernews, we know we can get excited about technology that maybe boring to most of the public. And in this case, I think the technology has wide-ranging productivity enhancing applications
Maybe your question is about why the tech billionaires are trying to get the public so excited about it? Totally different question.
>> It will still be same 8 hours of doing something
Yes but your 8 hours of work will serve more people. Will you see the fruits of that productivity gain? Very good question, but again, orthogonal to the usefulness of the technology.
I can imagine an alternate future where AI advances without all of the social, environmental and economic harm that it does, where there isn't a literal cult of neo-reactionaries using it to advance their authoritarian political agenda, where mass copyright theft isn't an issue, where the internet isn't consumed by slop and businesses aren't trying to put their workforce out on the streets as fast as possible. Where people don't literally believe it will evolve into some kind of techno-God whose judgement we should fear. Where we're not shoving it into every nook, cranny and orifice of our society, even when it doesn't work, because it's "inevitable" and we "just have to learn to live with it." A world where AI is just technology and not whatever this insanity is that it breeds in people.
I wish I lived in that world, because the hacker in me finds the technology fascinating, and I'd like to be able to use it without abandoning my morals or supporting the infrastructure of fascism.
Does this distinction matter practically? It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. Do I care if I'm the one falling from 10 meters high?
I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not only English into Spanish, but business requirements into code. Sure, not perfectly, but well enough that I feel like I'm living that joke about a mechanic who charges $1 for a new bolt and $999 for knowing which bolt. #LeopardsEatingPeoplesFacesParty2026, but seriously, LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.
I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. I hear rumblings of problems from copyeditors, translators, and mathematicians. It's affecting a lot of people at the same time, even if they can all point to ways it kinda still sucks or "lacks taste" or "has no common sense" or whatever. I can point to the models doing bad code, but I know from experience that "bad code" can win awards at the product level.
Robots have been milking the cows and sorting the post for decades now. But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land.
Ironic that I only hear praises of AI-driven cars from one place, which has been saying "just a few years" for the last 13. The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).
That, too, is a job that's gone. I used to know some actress/model/waitress types in LA. They'd sometimes do catalog modeling: "OK, the next one is the blue sweater, and hurry it up, we have thirty more to do before lunch".
I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.
Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.
Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid.
"Normal"?
It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare.
But:
AI cannot do your job
Your boss bought AI to do your job
You're fired
This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not.
[1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook...
Being almost more boring than the thing that caused Malthus to become wrong is quite an accomplishment.
He had classes set up for kids and grown-ups to learn printing and they had a ton of cool projects to show for it. We went through all his letter blocks and he told stories about a giant building in the U.S. Northeast that was just stacked with those blocks. He loved the idea of that place and saw threats to its existence as real problems, but not as existential. Faith never came up. It was just there and that's how I know it was real.
people could convene in secret, organize, and coordinate without leaving a digital trail
impossible task in the present. lot of gen z can't even read or concentrate for more than 5 minutes
so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j
Which is an AI booster:
https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries
You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.
The about page says this:
> In the cultural realm, Studio B is networking frontier technologists with Hollywood auteurs and science fiction authors who will shape the next narrative.
The organization was founded in 2010. Asking filmmakers about AI seems pretty on brand for their goal of talking about frontier technologies intersecting with Hollywood, does it not?
Is there some definition of “AI booster” that I’m not aware of? Or does it really just mean anyone who talks about AI in a positive light? I don’t see any smoking gun financial incentive connection here where they’re getting paid to “boost AI”
> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.
Means they are invested in AI companies
> shape the next narrative
With pro AI narratives because they have an interest in pro-AI
Thank you for that, and look who one of their speakers is? Hardcore technocrat and transhumanist Mr. Harari! You can read his opinions about transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in "Homo Deus" and on the WEF website.
Does this article seem like an AI boosting article? Perhaps exactly the opposite?
I dislike this article intensely, and disagree with it, but its lot because somehow the Berggruen Institute is shadow pushing AI here
This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on, even if the connection is barely relevant. NPR will tell you about every ad buy that relates to their reporting.
This source could have and should have mentioned this connection in a disclosure, and it would not have detracted from the article. But the fact that it is effectively hidden is a detriment to the level of trust the reader can put into it.
Where is the financial tie between this organization and the AI companies?
The throwaway account's comment above implied some financial connection, but when I clicked the links all I saw was a couple videos where one of their other journalistic outlets had interviewed some filmmakers about AI.
I don't see anything to support this accusation that they failed to disclose reporting about some financial investment in AI companies.
He’s an advocate for universal basic capital, and this article is about how AI taking our jobs might free us from “workism.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Berggruen
In other words, this article is directly tied to the opinions of its financial backer and isn’t being presented in an independent journalistic way.
To be clear I’m not even saying that this is a bad dude or that the organization has bad opinions.
"The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the US government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide," Jobs said the Apple Expo, CNN reported in September 1999. (edit: added link)
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-jobs-us-export-c...
A bricklayer can be excellent at his job. He can work hard to become so (to paraphrase Inigo Mendoya). He should pride himself on this excellence, but it is unlikely he will think he was put on this earth to be a bricklayer. The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them.
In a culture where the highest goods are production so you can feed the appropriate level of hedonic consumption, and without any transcendent meaning its a rough go.
Isn't that exactly a concern for those who find meaning in other things than their job? If you find meaning in your job then getting paid enough to support your family is obviously important, but it is ultimately a secondary concern.
Defiantly not something most countries have setup.
The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"?
This is all, assuming of course, that the end is nigh and our profession really is close to extinction. I personally don't buy it, but if it is, so be it.
We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, don't do basic "Journalism" things, so it's just another arm of the PR industry.
Journalism is a great example of how bad this will go. It might look superficially like we still have some journalism right now, but we don't at all. We have a couple media orgs producing content, and they are all owned by the capitalist class explicitly, which is putting it's thumb on the scale every single day.
The death of the local newsroom is part of the reason local politics have gotten so corrupt. There used to be people who's job was to go sit in local town meetings, for your local town paper, so that everybody could see when the local town council did shitty things.
Another great example is how bad ESPN has become. They found that having a guy who's job it is to make wild statements to drive controversy is more profitable than just talking about basketball, so now the network is basically satire of its former self, and is made up of people who literally don't even watch sports, or care at all about it. The network spends millions of dollars on one big name who plays solitaire during games he is supposed to pay attention to. Basically all of their sports journalists are gone.
Youtube of all places had to pick up the sports journalism slack, but youtube is not a good platform for real journalism either.
But there is still journalism.
* Propublica
* The Economist
* The Guardian
* 404 Media
Life is much harder for journalist now, and joining g the "darkside" of PR is the best/lucrative career path, but it exists
If nobody actually needs your work's output and you are simply allowed to do it out of some kind of state benevolence because it's some quaint tradition, you're laughing stock. We should not put up with being that.
I sense the inverse: a demand that we make ourselves irrelevant to satisfy interest rate inspired demand for cost savings.
Executives have developed a religion around AI and it is inspiring an orgy of value destruction in software orgs as they try to slash costs and increase efficiency. But theyve done it rather stupidly with this new religion rather than with more prosaic and altogether more boring improvements.
Quality has plummeted everywhere and there aren't even any meaningful cost savings to show for it, just empty promises and more hype.
Yeah, I imagine that there won’t be much sympathy for the cognitive elite when the benefits of being smarter disappear. Even if we get AI-powered communism, they’ll get the same UBI check as everyone else.
If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much.
If you mean UBI that would allow anyone to stop working and live a modest life, that just doesn't work. UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work. That's not just a "safety net" because you could decide to stop working forever just because it's more comfortable than working.
I would possibly exploit such a system. Take 4% from my portfolio + UBI on top. Maybe work 3 days a week if I find a job that I enjoy.
It is NOT about enabling "a modest life" or stopping people from working! On any serious UBI proposal everyone is still incentivized to work.
This is, IMO, why UBI has to be timed almost perfectly for when the AI is ready to be the one who does the work.
If you believe this, then surely you also believe pension plans are the devil? If we can't have UBI then we can start by tearing away pension plans for all of the old people my tax money is being wasted on.
But yes National pensions can have the same problem, as is currently the case in France. The elderly vote themselves higher and benefits, waiting to back breaking taxes on the diminishing number of middle-aged workers
That is what earned income tax, payroll taxes, and Medicare and Social Security taxes are.
I think we've largely been able to avoid large scale disruption in society for the past several decades because the groups losing their careers were small enough, but we can see negative effects in things like health data. I think Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case does a pretty good job at talking about this. However, AI now threatens a much more visible work segment, the upper middle class, so I do agree that now is a very interesting time to see what happens.
Have you seen who we elect to run our countries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
Skimming this list, there seems to be one really marked failure, in Finland, but that’s disputed I read also.
Can you list more failures?
> Among all the people, only two key groups were found to be discouraged from working by the Mincome project – new mothers and teenaged boys, who, instead of entering the workforce at an early age, decided to study until grade 12, increasing the proportion of students who graduate high school.
Remind us what the U stands for?
This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses.
A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.
"have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."
"If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."
I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.
Most of my friends are in some form of tech or creative work, so perhaps that is my bias, but with the threat of destitution removed the vast majority of people I know would turn into maelstroms of creation: art, crafts, coding, building, organizing, civic participation, scientific experimentation, and raising strong families.
Instead they are trapped spending the majority of their time navigating corporate politics to deliver a fraction of their value to society. Seems… dangerously inefficient and corrosive to the human spirit, no?
That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.
I live in Eastern Europe now where they also have free health care, and it's so bad that almost everyone pays for private medical insurance - essentially we pay twice because the first system is mostly not fit for purpose.
Are there historical or contemporary examples of this? I googled but couldn’t find any specifics.
The reason I ask is that I in the US, employer-provided health insurance is a large expense for businesses. And anecdotally, I’ve never spoken to any US small business owner that feels that choosing employee insurance plans is a real competitive advantage. But perhaps the historical/contemporary alternatives are worse?
Today, many of those activities are either toxic, like fossil fuel subsidies, or useless, like casino stock markets which force everyone to play PR con games that are divorced from bedrock physical fundamentals - like clean water, a safe food supply, and a stable climate.
Guns won't help anyone when farming dies.
Not for long, anyway.
Money and trade as we know it today was invented by the Romans because soldiers were raiding their own villages for supplies. Paying soldiers with coins then demanding them back from villagers got them to start trading. That’s where incentives started.
Oh yes, the usual argument of how what most industrializes nations (and many poor nations as well) have achieved, is somehow seen as impossible just because the US can't manage to do it (because it doesn't profit the oligarchs).
Smaller EU countries cannot even today introduce a fair revenue tax on big tech so that they pay any tax without being threatened about retaliatory steps by US administration.
Americans would largely languish if big tech wins, big tech is already profiting of our misery now they want to profit in other domains too?
80% of this country is not going to benefit at all from any American corporations because American corporations have open disdain for workers.
University graduates are often considered min-bar for white-collar work hiring, so if it takes 4 years to train someone, how are people supposed to decide on a career path when it takes less time than that to completely alter the workplace?
My daughter is entering her first year of nursing, a career path that she is greatly looking towards. Who says in 3 years that robotics companies don't actually deliver on their promises and completely up-end the care industry? While I think that unlikely, it's not like people aren't trying to automate nurses away.
Support that AI is now threatening.
Recording is too much work. ;-)
You say no plausible path to automating - I beg to differ.
It would get officers out of harms way.
Not imminent but not zero risk either.
Unless it's a criminal record holding you back, I really don't think this is the case. Since 2012, I know lots of people that changed careers.
The first step to solving the problem is acknowledging the problem, not throwing earnest observations of dysfunction into the, "I know a short guy who gets lots of sex, height doesn't matter," bin.
I know plenty of people who went into contracting (aka self-employment) and later found full-time jobs (frequently with clients) across multiple white collar industries, including programming. They were all in their 30s and 40s. In many cases, going the self-employment route actually made them more valuable to future employers. I also know plenty of people without a degree who went into programming.
Over the years I've built my own Linux distro from scratch, developed a heavily customized version of the Chromium web browser, and other interesting stuff.
If this were true you'd be gainfully employed by now. Coming out of COVID, companies were hiring people just because they knew what an IDE was.
Based on your comments though, it's easy to understand why you haven't been able to find a job. I wouldn't want to work with someone as negative as you and I can't imagine anyone would want to work with someone so emotionally draining.
Thanks for having a clue.
EDIT: I would say more, but what's the point? If any honest feelings are expressed that in any way reflect negatively (perish the thought) on anyone here or their crock-of-shit pet theories, it will be flagged and censored with no recourse. Because God is the moderator of this forum, and His judgment is all knowing and perfect.
It's not possible to criticize these raging assholes or any of the daily doings of their fucked up, selfish, corrupt society, as they have outlawed all criticism of themselves. Only they are allowed to criticize others.
This place is a toxic shithole, and I can't wait to watch it burn.
Go ahead and flag this one too, fucking losers.
You don't need to be an extrovert to be employed. I'm not, and neither are most of my coworkers. But you do need to not be a hyper-aggressive sack of negativity that emotionally drains everyone around you. So deal with that, and you might be able to land a job before you pass.
You're 40+, you have like potentially another 40+ years to live a life you want. If all it takes is a degree from a public university and some white knuckling for 4-6 years to then get the life you want to work in, is that such a burden to bare?
Wouldn't you want to at least try to achieve your dreams before giving up? You have the experience and smarts to know how to succeed if you want, so why give up 4 decades before the game is over?
So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.
I increasingly believe that if we really do want to keep moving forward faster and faster, we will be forced to take one of two paths:
(1) Some kind of socialism with a much bigger social safety net, probably basic income, retraining, and universal health coverage.
(2) Absolute totalitarian surveillance state with drones and cameras everywhere and an iron-fist police force to suppress the constant threat of violent revolt as millions upon millions of people constantly lose their careers. This looks like dark cyberpunk, basically, and it's even kind of miserable for those at the very top. You can be rich and powerful, sure, but if you get on the wrong side of it you will be crushed. Look at what happens to oligarchs in Russia.
The path to (2) is unfortunately an idea that was just, even noble in the past: the puritan work ethic and its corollaries. It's a great idea when you have a society that doesn't change much where a person can pick a vocation and make a living. It doesn't work in a society that reinvents itself completely every 10-20 years, rendering entire employment verticals totally obsolete.
I think we've been able to ignore it until now. The change was still slow enough to tolerate.
AI is the end of that. It's going to be the end of stable careers.
Edit: I can think of a third option:
(3) Tax anything that is labor-replacing for a period of time equal to the time it usually takes people to retrain. e.g. AI would be taxed for the next 10-20 years in this scenario with the tax rate decreasing each year.
I greatly prefer (1) since the third option is likely to just freeze progress.
I find this comparison to printers arbitrary, precious, and specious. Aren’t the armies of software engineers in tech more akin to the line-level autoworkers than artisans? The numbers would certainly suggest so. But it’s also silly to pretend such a new profession is anything akin to a generations-old trade. But maybe those tradesmen aren’t such victims either in this context? How privileged to be able to pass your profession down to the next generation! No one in my family has had that since farming, when only the oldest benefited.
I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed.
Going online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year. This really took a nosedive during the pandemic, but looking back this had been going on for several years before. Every election cycle makes things worse too.
It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year. Like what Bannon did with gamer gate is an amateurish precursor to what everyone with is doing everywhere now. With AI you can even run these campaigns with a very small budget.
All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. Used to be more tabloid territory but now I don't know if anywhere is spared. A lot of the focus now is on AI, but when it isn't the world is burning in some other fashion. Reading the news, we've been in a permanent state of crisis for years now.
This information diet just isn't good for your mental health. It isn't just tech workers, but they're probably more exposed than most.
Candide's closing remarks spring to mind. Tend your garden.
I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life and a job they feel satisfied with is going to spend time socializing with friends and working on their job. They may read online feeds, they may write very occasionally, but that will be the extent of most interactions. On the other hand the folks that feel the most negative tend to spend inordinate amounts of time online posting about how sad and angry they are.
In a real life conversation when a depressed friend gets on their soapbox most folks give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on. If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Nothing like this happens offline. If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content. And oh boy is it finally the time to let your hair down and tell everyone how f-ed everything is on the inside. Constantly.
This makes a flywheel. People who want to avoid negativity start avoiding negative online spaces. People who are fine with it or feel similarly keep reading. Eventually negativity becomes the default.
"Misery loves company" is much older than the Internet. There's no doubt to me that the net makes it that much worse.
I dont disagree that depressive online spaces breed more depressive cycles, but good lord, what you seem to be implying is even worse. You can’t just brute force “hey cheer up” no matter the group structure.
like particularly this:
> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.
Is not ever helping a clinically depressed person. especially when offers of “help” are often quite victim blamey and threatening like the tone of your post here - stop bringing the vibe down, or we’ll make you feel even more isolated! good lord. Try bringing them a meal or giving them a compliment first? holy shit.
I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream.
And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt.
It all feels wrong.
Agreed.
From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious."
I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom stew everywhere, and the beacons of solace are pieces like this one driving home to anyone who's missed it how demoralized their peers are.
I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful).
But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot. How is that supposed to work? Are they secretly feeding creatures from the 4th dimension by harvesting misery or something?
Fear is the best driver of attention and clicks.
Someone can choose to pass on a light-hearted fun article. If they feel their life or the fate of the universe is in the balance, they will read it.
There isn't some evil mastermind behind it, just the banal economic incentives and evolutionary psychology.
Edit: by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant, their social media instantly filled up with stories about dead babies. Nobody hard coded that, but the algorithm picked up on the fact that pregnant women will pay attention to stories of dead babies. After all, it is incredibly heartbreaking and the next Tick Tock might include the fact that will save their own baby.
It takes a lot of self-awareness to say "while I might learn information that saves my baby, that is incredibly unlikely so I will refuse to watch this 30 sec video or read this article"
There isn't some evil mastermind behind it--at least, in the click-case; in the psyops or vote-for-us! cases there might sort of be, but even there they aren't profiting from the misery per se.
For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the the banking crisis in 2008 poisoned the entire economy.
I'm not sure if it's true, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.
“Night must fall, now! Darker! — darker!”
It feels to me like the change from:
- old: going downtown to the restaurants and shops of your small village to enjoy a relaxing evening.
- new: downtown is a crowded confusing mishmash of unregulated blaring music, over-the-top blinking flashing signs, intrusive people accosting you and dangerous thieves lurking everywhere. don't go.
there's no "regulated" that makes thing better for anyone, it just gets morphed into oppression of the vistors making them more vulnerable without fixing any problems.
I'd like to see something like that take off, because I'd be willing to give it a try. I also think the communities should be limited. Maybe have several sizes and see how it plays. Something that never grows beyond 250. Never past 1000. Something along those lines.
Relatedly, I'm just about on board with the idea of a modern day Compuserve or Prodigy. Pay to play, but in return you get no ads, no malware, no algorithms, no AI. A gated community for the Internet.
But most people will still opt to stay on the slop-filled web because it’s free and because they like being angry. And as long as they stay the societal problems that stem from the toxic internet will live on.
As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me.
There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information.
By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?
Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.
Why take the web seriously? It’s more fun to be some ridiculous person. Of course, some people are genuine and this kind of behavior chews them up when they take it seriously.
I think you make a strong point here. I will add a note of hope.
In my opinion, besides the 'this too shall pass' nature of life meaning this outrage-focused moment, we on HN have hope here.
I've been a lurker for a while around here, IDK when this account was made and I don't care, I feel confident that I've been watching the great techies of our era and HN celebrities and dang and other mods presiding over it all for at least a decade.
It's probably my own media bubble bias, but I have noticed this trend where HN is discussing a given subject that the general public is not aware of, and it after years filters into the greater consciousness. I don't think HN is necessarily magically head of the curve, but I do think it concentrates where curious and possibly-open-minded people's thoughts are at, before internet-point-seeking/popularity echo chamber communities like Reddit/FB/Twitter or algorithm-driven hivemind homogenziers like YT/Reels/TikTok/Periscope all become aware of something.
HN saw the centralization of control with the SOPA/PIPA/encryption in public fight, that has been ongoing since the clipper chip and before, but in this modern form with end-users not needing PGP and friends and just getting to have e2ee with Signal, HN was talking about and using Signal for years before now our government figures and traditional + social media companies have talked about Signal.
Similarly, the broader privacy questions, turning off Google Location History was happening on HN (and XDA back when custom android ROMs were more popular) as soon as Google Reader was axed, people only now have learned to fear 'the internet' because of how many more egregious things have happened across all powerful web platforms.
And of course we can't ignore HN playing with cleverbot and that dall-e precursor who's name I forget, ML models and markov chains and tech beyond my ability to teach about, before OAI ever released a single product like ChatGPT.
HN still has heavyweights of each industry and titans of tech who pop by on occasion to grace us mere plebians, pushing back the Eternal September for just a few happy moments (looking at you BWK, Walter Bright, and other famous names I can't rattle off) to share with us what happened 'in the room'. Just the other day someone posted 'I was the guy who controlled the rollout for Apple MacOS X Snow Leopard, it was a bugfix only release no really' ... only on HN by the power of the internet do we get that, we don't get that on a TikTok. So HN has still got 'it' at least for now, and therefore I can make a broad observation.
If the HN being directionally appropriate even if getting particulars wrong is true, I'm seeing future trends that will lead us out of this populist/blackpill moment.
People will get emotionally overwhelmed/numbed to overwrought angry moments, they will want to move forward. Americans tend to be keen as a people, whatever the 'thing' is. 90s tech utopia optimism was a keen-thing. Support for or opposition to the Iraq War was a keen-thing, whatever we Americans do, we do with gusto.
So right now, we are all in on outraged doom/gloom/anxiety/this sux!! feelings.
I'm hopeful that perhaps we as a people go with a decision to move in what a figure from my current media bubble named Aaaron Renn says where there are New Constructivists, who are intellectuals on all sides of American political aisles looking to revitalize and create new institutions.
I'm fearful that we will have to fall down hard to learn our lessons first and/or learn the wrong lessons where we decide the fix to ennui is to blame 'those' people over there (whoever that happens to be). The fix to the fear and ennui won't come from us fighting with our families, community members, internet strangers, or political opponents, it will come from us choosing to change our media diets away from garbage in/garbage out (I Know, I know, you who read this and disagree with everything I say and my media diet sources want me to change my media diet, that may very well be true) that is focused on emotional inflammation (didn't we used to ban people from our forums for flaming?) instead of genuine debate and encouragement and online civility.
It's boring and its lame, but circling all the way back to the parent comment: the web used to be a homogenous unified place made up of professionals and nerds and group think. We need more diverse opinions than that, but what has happened is that the internet (and its mobile app/web/private chat mediums) has become a borderless place where people who never encounter each other have diametrically opposed views constantly, and so retreat into echochambers and don't get the media literacy experience needed to peacefully coexist with the rest of the online anglosphere without constant acrimony. Grifters feed the flames for likes/subscribes/patreon subs/etc.
No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.
For the first couple weeks it seemed like a mild to moderate improvement. Especially not having Elon’s tweets and the Twitter memes of the day in my head 24 hours a day.
But after a month my baseline pretty much reset with the same levels of anxiety, just with different sources/triggers to attribute those feelings to.
And after a few more months, I started to feel to absurdly detached from the real world that it started to become a problem in casual conversations and stuff just being so out of touch with everyone else’s collective experiences.
My boss referenced some big natural disaster or something that everyone knew about from the news and looked at me like I was crazy when I had no idea what he was talking about. Little awkward moments like that kept popping up, never a big deal but started to feel uncomfortable as they added up.
The tipping point was when Biden dropped out and I didn’t know about it for like three days and had to nod along when a friend mentioned it obliquely while I was internally like “uh wtf” until I had a second to Google it to get caught up.
All in all the net change in negativity/anxiety was pretty much a wash, the mind finds different ways to justify how it feels even after losing the ‘20s go-to of “doom scrolling” as the universal source of all life’s problems.
But feeling like an alien interloper posing as a resident of “America, Earth” tipped the scales into hurting more than it helped.
For better or worse we live in a highly interconnected world of immediate information delivery, there’s no quick fix to make that all go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.
I still miss a lot of the people I got to know on Twitter, and with hindsight that was probably more emotionally valuable than the negativity and addiction that came with the package (I know many/most of them have left by now too, so can’t teleport back to that point in time either). But that’s just life, it is what it is.
Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.
Politics matters a lot, but for most of us are just going to vote or donate. I don’t need to hear somebody’s opinion for that, and I especially don’t need to hear speculations about political events that’ll happen in the next couple days (the speculation possibilities will collapse before I do either).
> Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.
The idea was this would teach something. And another idea was All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. What could someone do for months or years? Cycle outrage porn and detox. Or avoid all news. But you saw news differed and you could control your news.
I think you are right that there’s some middle ground between 0 and doomscrolling that is preferable, though.
Cutting off corporate media is good, but you don't have to cut off all sources of media. I'm a fan of alternative media myself, so I listen/read things like Citations Needed, Zeteo, American Prospect, Dropsite News, or specific journalists like Edward Ongweso Jr. One thing to remember that it's still just consuming news, consuming things are very little part of the human experience. You need to actually socialize and discuss things with other humans, it's a real need; but you can still find high quality people to follow the news, maybe this is up your speed:
https://www.slow-journalism.com/
Creating is a human urge that you need to fulfill, as is socializing; with socializing it comes in many forms, but a core component needs to in some form of mutual aid. You need to have solidarity with your fellow man for we all share the same struggles together.
The urge to create for others is a human trait founds for 100s of thousands of years before industrial usage (people created + shared art with one another before things like replicated tool usage). Don't deny your urge to create and share with others. For some it's baking, for others it's raising children; you just need to create tangible things and share them with others. You can do this digitally but it's very hard, and IMO after 10ish years of doing so, also not really rewarding compared to writing music for friends or baking deserts for family. Got way more fulfillment out of helping children set up a bake sale than any amount of open source I've done in my entire life.
Just my experience, but I know I'm not along in thinking so because I ask people about this all the time. Seems to be the simple way to live a meaningful life for very little cost.
Please find your tribe, it is out there and it may give you more meaning in your life than any form of digital consumption/creation.
> A fresh U.S. residential IP address (especially one behind carrier-grade NAT and harder to block individually) is “gold.” Customers pay up to $95 to lease a single U.S. residential IP address for 2 weeks (versus $0.30 for an Eastern European IP).
That's bananas. The place I found a link to that story was jwz's blog, a site that is actively getting hammered by one of the many Rube-Goldberg machines behind these scrapers.
I take your point wrt, say, recommendation engines. But this is a bizarre and fascinating period we're living through right now. I don't plan to stop reading blogs and news any time soon.
1: https://www.nokia.com/blog/one-year-later-the-residential-pr...
If I'm wrong give me another case that isn't a crypto scam and I'll read up on it.
The assumption I had not was false.
If you want to make the world a better place, you have to retain a headspace that actually lets you do that, and right now, the easiest fix for that is to just unplug, and then work with what you can change, which typically involves things and people around you.
I don't think you realize how ridiculous and out of touch it sounds to tell me to "disconnect" from politics to be less angry. I am extremely angry, and I will continue to let that anger fuel my choices until the vile bullshit that has infected this nation is gone.
Enlightening my ass. Tell that to the trodden upon and the dead. Reality sucks and sometimes you have to do something about it or else you're the problem. Tough shit if you don't like it.
narrator: actually, it's you who is the problem.
"I'm only happy when I'm in my misery" - Offspring
But ARE you doing anything about it? Because unless you're actually taking action it's basically just self flagellation to the benefit of no one. Like if you have some measure of power (community action, organized resistance, political lobbying) and are taking action that's great, reading articles that make you sad and angry and then going to bed isn't doing anything.
> what I was also doing - relentlessly recording and documenting their behavior and addition to protesting.
You can be 99% sure that the people currently saying that wasn't such a big deal are also saying you should not pay attention to the media because it is just about making you angry.
They say this as they've been consuming Conservative AM radio for decades, which was entirely about making up stories to make people angry.
Meanwhile the local legal immigrant community is terrified, many people have been literally kidnapped and are missing, and this idea that they would somehow be fine if they just didn't pay attention is absurd.
It's insane. These conservatives are acting like it's no big deal real harms are happening, like this is just some sort of game. My brother visited and talked about his complaints about what is happening as if it was a milquetoast yelp review of a local burger joint. Asshole doesn't care that his voting choices has literally killed hundreds for no reason.
Predictably, he's the kind of person that talks about sports teams as if he is a member. "We did so well" in reference to the bruins winning a game for example.
You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided.
I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.
Yes.
You can't always expect to be able to fix everything yourself, but you often can take steps to help or at least protect yourself. It just depends on what's in the news. Very recently, I've started avoiding produce from Taylor Farms. Good thing I was paying attention to the news when that mess started. It was only by reading the news that I became aware of a change in how postmarks were being added by the USPS and that saved me some potential headaches.
Being informed can result in things like patching vulnerable software, withdrawing supporting a political candidate, reaching out to your representatives about issues that concern you, asking your doctor about treatments/medications/vaccines, exploring new media, changing or delaying travel plans, changing your spending habits, making adjustments to investments, etc.
What does ignorance get you?
This is very obviously not the type of situation and behavior marginalia_nu and then I were commenting about.
marginalia_nu said all news.
The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)
I've been working in tech for over 20 years now in various roles, and this is the least I have cared about it. I used to want to get better, and was constantly excited about learning new things just for the sake of it. Now I daydream about being homeless. I look around at all the meaningless crap I have accumulated, and feel shame that I didn't use that money to retire early.
I am surprised that remote work didn't get a bigger mention in the article. In a few weeks I will have been working from home for 12 years, and I believe it is the cause of most of most of my angst. At first, the convivence was such a relief, but it has become a trap. The effort of the commute, forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day, they all felt like a burden at the time but they were good for me and I didn't realize it. Not to mention that it makes my house feel like work, and I now I hate it here.
I will say as an anecdote counter to the AI examples given in the article. I have a young co-worker who is very excited about AI and is using it way more effectively than I am. Talking to him gives me hope for the future, the kids will be alright.
But to the point of the article: I have many friends my age that are making less than half of what I do working objectively harder jobs for way longer hours, but they all seem so much happier than I am.
Every time I told anyone that I personally didn’t like working from home, and was excited about the return to office that would inevitably come, I got SHOUTED at. Absolutely flayed for not being 110% in support of this thing that made their lives worth living or whatever.
When it first happened I thought it was a weird interpersonal conflict situation. Maybe I had broached it wrong. But it kept happening! So many people were so upset when megacorp said they had to return or find other employment.
But I’m an extrovert and working from home was suffocating.
Teams should really be choosing their model of work themselves, and anyone who doesn't like it should shuffle off to a different team within the company. Top down RTO is nuts.
I am back at the office now, and am enjoying the separation between work and home.
Is it really surprising that people have this preference?
Their reaction to you in the moment might not be reasonable, but it's coming from an injustice done to them, and one they perceive you to be in favour of.
* simplifying, of course.
EDIT: wow, I had this lodged in my brain without even realizing it was an XKCD reference
It's not popular, but the reality is that many don't want help ----- but only because they don't understand they're making terrible decisions due to chemical imbalances or chemical dependencies.
It's never popular, but it's the truth. It's also super, super hard because these people are already at risk of being taken advantage of, and I'm literally talking about letting someone else take control of their lives. It would require an insane amount of oversight, audits, and checks and balances. I don't know of anywhere equipped for this
This part is strange to me. I've worked from home for about 10 years and I've never once had an issue with twice-daily showering, meeting people face-to-face, going out for coffee, going outdoors, going to the gym, etc. The fact I can just go sit in a park, on a hiking trail, or whatever and work there is a genuine "killer app" for me. I'm surprised at people who tell me that they are isolated by home work when there are so many opportunities for social and natural connection everywhere...
For a lot of people, that was commuting to a job outside of their home.
There is a lot of research that spending time in nature, even if the nature is not ideal (bare trees, winter, bad weather, too hot), has measurable impacts on human cognition, memory, and similar mental benefits. It's not even correlated with mood improvements: even if you return indoors more miserable than you left due to the weather, you still measurably mentally benefit from spending time in nature.
Find some shade and don't stress it Europal! (I hate climate change too.)
This isn’t a disagreement or a hook into some discourse or anything. I don’t have a point. Just thoughts
it doesn't but it's more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes.
I think people get this meaning wrong all the time. The love of money doesn't buy happiness. Having money can definitely make your life easier, and you can spend it on things that make you happy.
I don’t even buy a lot of things, really, I still don’t own a car and hope I never will. But now I just don’t feel quite so wracked with guilt over getting a haircut or getting the organic raspberries or whatever. There are so many little waste-of-time tasks that I don’t have to waste as much time on. I dunno. It’s funny. “Selling out” is real easy. It makes everything real easy.
I do wonder if this is the first step down the path to “I am a prisoner to my Stuff. Where did my life go”
Just thinkin out loud into the internet
Literally the world’s easiest ambition to achieve.
1. Got a director at Google fired for something he didn't even do.
2. Got an AI startup to shut down by convincing the CTO to divorce his wife, setting his entire stupid Danish life in turmoil, loving every second personally.
3. Murdered in cold blood my old manager while he was walking home from work and never got caught by SFPD, turns out they don't investigate shit.
4. Framed an investor as a pedo when I'm pretty sure he wasn't one, but the manufactured evidence pitched to his board made them feel so weird they parted ways anyway.
5. Incessantly bullied a VC's child at a local skatepark until he stopped going. I kinda felt bad about this one, but I kept telling myself to remember who his dad was.
I'll do more when the opportunity arises. These days though I'm very focused on the people, for example Eric Schmidt just bought a penthouse in Nob that I'm thinking about.
Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech.
They wanted gold.
For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're miserable and they want to get back to knitting, pottery or whatever thing they want to do but not tech.
For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. There's new tech in town, one has to adjust, and it's still possible to discover new things and pave new paths. Tech was always shifting and I suppose people who worked in it for it always knew it, and it doesn't derail them.
I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.
Maybe instead of engineering, you’ve been subtly shifted into project management and hate that career.
But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.
There's more toxicity, more waterfall, more authoritarianism, less autonomy, more pressure. Consequently lower productivity, too.
Sometimes AI is just the label that gets slapped on "all the ways the tech industry has changed over the last 3 years".
All these "Working in IT isn't stressful at all - John 25yo" memes didn't come come from nothing.
But I wouldn't really put it on LLMs/AI. It was always like this. Jokes about how hopeless development cycle is, and how everybody have impostor syndrome etc.
I think it's pretty strongly related, honestly
Everything has this arc.
A civil engineer who signed on at a firm that did sewers, culverts and irrigation in 1970s was doing real work his customers wanted to pay for because they had water that needed to be elsewhere.
By 2000 the bulk of his trade was providing compliance solutions for customers who didn't want it, it didn't provide value for and were just doing it to check a box and get permission from the government to do the thing they actually wanted.
I got into computer science because the problems in physics were either already solved or couldn't be solved without trillions of dollars invested in new accelerators.
From my point of view the tech side of things is a gig I did on the side to pay the bills. LLMs are amazing and useful. Even Knuth thinks so: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf
Now instead of spending weeks on side quests I can just burn some money and get either a counter example or proof without sinking hours/days/weeks into it.
Yeah it did. The environments became a lot more toxic and the decisions became a lot more stupid.
I also miss working with people who actually cared about the craft. They exist on the IC level but they're burned out and on the executive level it's mostly just insecure morons these days.
I noticed it most when the slurs they used against us became status symbols, as a hoard of grifters traded in their ties (remember ties?) and golf doodads for SF franchise bling and proclaimed themselves "geeks" and "nerds".
Geeks and nerds are back to being derogatory.
That said I do think it is useful from a societal perspective that programmers are both doing this and getting hit. I'm not going to celebrate someone's job being threatened but in this particular case I think that symmetry is a major societal win for surfacing the question as to how are we collectively as humanity going to figure this whole AI situation out.
See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had. It did wiped out a bunch of people's lives and did NOTHING to trigger discussions around what are we going to do here.
Twitter connected programmers feeling the heat with a large audience may prove better to spark discussion
It did at one time! I think that’s what’s so alluring initially about Workism. People waited with bated breath for the iPhone and iPad and its new versions. Those iPod commercials and the marketing campaigns for “rip. Mix. Burn.” did change the music world.
But the quote is also right. It doesn’t happen anymore, and I think that’s why the religion of Workism is especially vulnerable at this point.
In someways, it sorta feels like the article is cheering AI on? Like, it judges Workism, and goes on to say that AI shatters the illusion, but then.. that’s it? Deriving value from good work is pointless now and we should all just go volunteer?
I dunno, i clearly identify with those who loved work and now feel a bit lost, and yes i have been thinking about alternatives, but I feel like there must be knowledge work that is still valuable both financially and socially and also provides some sense of pride and purpose… if not, i fear the situation is much more dire than we are prepared for
Might we ask how large your sheep farm is, by current commercial (vs. hobby) standards?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6O-4zbP6E
I'm not a farmer so I can't speak to how much of this is unreproducible, but it does seem very interesting. The paper pot transplanter blew my mind.
The title says they make $13k per week, which would be $676k... so $13k must be just during the weeks they produce. And it seems to be based on the grocery-store price of that food, rather than the actual wholesale price that they're able to sell it for.
I wanted to watch at least enough to understand how the title is misleading. If two people could make $13k/week on an acre there would be a hell of a lot more people doing it.
It's still cool though, they've clearly worked hard and made great use of their land.
When it comes to revolting against industry change, there's a good paper by Eric Hobsbawm called The Machine Breakers. Yes, he's focused more on the Luddite-style reaction of destruction. But interestingly, he notes two types of machine breaking.
There is the type that is not hostile to the machine itself, but which was used to coerce employers to improve conditions and pay. Unpopular employers and owners were often the ones targeted with what has been called “collective bargaining by riot.” Those machine breakers were more pro trade-unionist than anti-machine.
Hobsbawm mentions that a benefit of machine breaking was that destruction built the “habit of solidarity which is the foundation of effective trade unionism.” That solidarity was more naturally built in places like coal mines where workers were closely collocated and was more difficult to build in framework knitting, where workers were scattered.
But the second type of machine breaking was more about resistance to machines themselves, especially those that were labor-saving devices. That type of anti-tech Luddism is where I’ve mostly focused my own recent research. For that second type, Hobsbawm notes that workers, manufacturers, and the general public often shared in the discomfort of machine impact on peoples’ livelihoods.
Unlike the conditions and pay, this other type of machine-breaking helped workers slow down the loss of control on their employment. That included situations where machines made workers more productive and where, as a result, fewer of them were required. Or situations where machines enabled pay to decrease, as highly-skilled and highly-paid workers were replaced by less-skilled and lower-paid workers.
The alternative was the impossibility that Hobsbawm describes as follows: “The small shop-keeper or local master did not want an economy of limitless expansion…. His ideal was the secular dream of all 'little men,' … a small- scale society of modest property-owners and comfortably-off wage- earners, without great distinctions of wealth of power.”
I'm due to update this, but I've been keeping a running list of examples: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...
Because the world sure needs more goat farmers and surf instructors.
It's all pointless, you can't outrun the pointlessness - so just enjoy it!
