Pretty good summary of the latest "tech" business models as well :-)
The question is: why does this happen? Why do the many typically fail to limit how exploitative the few?
People usually seek answers in morality (or the lack thereof) but morality is a complex emergent phenomenon that is always "too little, too late".
One fundamental factor seems to be the difficulty of communicating and coordinating large numbers of people: The slow diffusion of technical knowledge means a gang of bandits with superior weapons can control an empire. Ineffective general education means vast human potential is wasted and accepts being raw material for stratified societies. Controlling message transmission and obfuscating the state of the world means people live in ignorance and manufactured realities which in turn makes them much easier to exploit.
An interesting question is whether digital technology with its various extraordinary efficiencies and exponential capacities will ever help mitigate the fundamental flaws of large human societies.
Idealistic hopes in this direction by tech visionaries have been promptly crushed, but what is important is indeed the long run effect.
My personal theory regarding morality is that since we did not spend long time evolving to world where writing is a technology, there is no emotional reaction to contract that will allow a factory to pollute killing humans, compare to woman who sees a man to stab a baby with a fork.
Human society has three classes: owners, hermits, and pets. The owners have assets, do not need to work for money, and have means of influencing the public opinion. Hermits do not work for money, but also do not have assets or influence. Pets are 99%
Same as you train a dog to sit and run, you train a pet to BUY and VOTE. Then you laugh in the room with your fellow owners because you've bought all the representatives, won the election, and can now use legislation to crush your opponents. Kropotkin was right one hundred years ago:
"We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferrule of a law, which regulates every event in life — our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship — that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves. Our society seems no longer able to understand that it is possible to exist otherwise than under the reign of law, elaborated by a representative government and administered by a handful of rulers. And even when it has gone so far as to emancipate itself from the thralldom, its first care has been to reconstitute it immediately. "The Year I of Liberty" has never lasted more than a day, for after proclaiming it men put themselves the very next morning under the yoke of law and authority."
Were I to re-establish a society in an empty land with no worries about existing nations coming after us militaristically: (1) Supply of money would be limited, tied to gold (export controls), have demurrage (except for government accounts), be cryptocurrency so that one can near infinitely move it to smaller denominations (eliminating deflation). I have quite sepcific system for this, where even all property will be demurraged algorithmically—based on ∆ market value! (2) Direct democracy, EG everything would be directly elected. If you cant participate, that is ok, but the elections will keep flowing. The voting system will be tied to prediction markets, EG vote for a thing that fails to perform as predicted and you may have less votes for the next election. (3) System that connects the prediction markets somehow to how public is informed / educated, probably involving censorship or at least having news outlets that are recommenmded by state because no state that allows CIA type propaganda to flow in survives.
These are only the policies that would affect the problem you brought to surface the most.
(Yet they probably thought the world was less bad than it was!)
If you want to make a case for the "natural" life of simple pleasures, sure, it could be attractive contrasted against the cacophony of modern digital and other distractions, but here's a basic thing: If you want that kind of life today, within the relative safety net of modern medicine and economic support in a wider sense, you're free to pursue it as intensely as you like, and more safely than you ever could have before.
If on the other hand, you, living in some grimmer, dirtier past, wanted any other sort of life, the choice didn't even really exist unless you were one of an incredibly tiny minority that formed the elites of society. And even among these people, the slightest infection could randomly kill you, losing your eyesight with age was a gradual sentence into blindness, and god help you if you ever were to have any major dental or surgical needs that are today fixable with little fuss.
Whatever you might think of Steven Pinker, the guy's fundamental argument is broadly true even if some specific details might be cherry-picked(and i'd like to see which one's you're referring your suspicion to)
Again though, feel free to list the stuff we've lost. I'd love to see what you refer to and balance it against what we've gained.
There's a crisis of singleness that hasn't been present in much, although not all, of human history.
Home ownership is way down. At various points throughout human history it was common for people to own their own homes.
Most people have very little autonomy in their day to day work. In the past most people worked on small scale farms and cottage industries where they didn't have layers upon layers of middle managers micromanaging them.
I guess perhaps that's true in some countries, but not for the US. People put off major medical needs for years and even decades to wait until they can get on medicare.
Dental issues are even worse. Yes, the availability of the treatments is nice, but the majority of people are deeply stuck in modern society to have access to those treatments.
The first thing that comes to mind is dependence on other people. Modern life has made it possible for the average person after a certain age to live without meaningful interaction with others. In the same vein one’s ability to choose one’s company has been greatly increased, which leads to superficial relationships and the isolation of those that no one chooses to be with.
> This paints a powerful case for humanity also being psychologically and emotionally better off, on average, than at any older time in history
This is not at all obvious for the reasons listed above, after a certain point material abundance does not cause psychological well-being. I’d argue that point was well within the reach of most of our ancestors, since we have had happy ancestors of modest socioeconomic status.
> Whatever you might think of Steven Pinker, the guy's fundamental argument is broadly true
The only broadly true statement that can be made about this topic is that modern life is generally incomparable how it was historically.
I find that the sentiment underlying these arguments is usually masturbatory in nature.
I mostly agree, but my point was that materialist analysis has obvious limits. It also naturally favors industrial society as industrial society optimizes for material production (not necessarily material satisfaction, mind you, hence why I mostly agree)
> If you want to make a case for the "natural" life of simple pleasures
If you presume superiority by comparison to our modern "complex" pleasures, sure, you're not going to find much interesting in the past.
> If you want that kind of life today, within the relative safety net of modern medicine and economic support in a wider sense, you're free to pursue it as intensely as you like, and more safely than you ever could have before.
You will still be haunted by what you have seen of other humans and heard from their lips—there's no escaping that.
The will to live.
The depression is rampant. People are lonelier than ever, and they eventually kill themselves. Despite the fact that the world is objectively a better place to live, for the first time in history of any species people don't want to reproduce because it sucks.
Human happiness is directly correlated with relationships. Not with technological progress. But with relationships. Which are under fire in modern society.
But hey, here's a new iPhone. Go browse tiktok on it or something.
Perhaps most importantly of all - fertility rates have fallen so low that we have created literally unsustainable societies. I don't think people realize how catastrophic our fertility rates have grown. You can estimate the impact of a fertility rate (once an entire population shares it) as being a factor of fertility_rate/2 applied every ~20 years to a population. So South Korea, with its 0.68 fertility rate, will eventually start losing about 66% of its population every ~20 years. And this will happen until they go extinct (which is surprisingly rapid at such a scale), or start having more children. And while they have, by far, the lowest fertility rate in the world, most of the world is on a trendline to follow right behind them.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-n...
[2] - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...
[3] - https://cardiology.medicine.ufl.edu/2020/08/13/malnutrition-...
Here's the post about what's needed to feed society with bread (there are many others) https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
To my understanding, much of the work was backbreaking, disease was a big problem, starvation around the corner every year. And governance and freedoms were mostly reduced to service to a local strongman.
And this is before the industrial revolution, working in insalubrious factories, belching smoke steam engines etc.
Nowadays I think things are significantly better for the majority of people.
Hygiene theory has gone a long way to alleviate some of the more problematic disease issues. I have said that if we went full Mad Max (I don't think we are), hygiene theory would survive because of how useful it is.
Starvation is one of those issues of the odd cycles of nature. Many I have spoken with that do back to the land farming have said, on a 5 year average calories aren't an issue. The problem is it usually means 3 bumper years followed by two starvation years. Thru modern agriculture we have both made systems of storage and fertilizers that flatten over these issues.
As for the governance of strongman. There was the flip side of, they couldn't strong arm people TOO much because if enough people figured it was worth over throwing them, the boss would be overthrown with violence or death. It was risky being at the top, there was a reason why the kings thrown was backed up to a wall. Stops the assassin coming from behind.
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"Of course our farmers don’t care about maximum efficiency (because that means for maximum efficiency of people who aren’t the farmers eating the surplus). They care about marrying, having families, raising children, keeping friends, staying close to loved ones and so on. Farmers, after all, are people, not mere tools of agricultural production (we will talk about non-free farmers next time) and so they do not serve their farmers, their farms serve the needs of their families."
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And "friends", as the article also describes, meant something very different. It was not infrequent that friends could be entire households where relationships would last for generations. Modern life has really done away with most of these things.
I'd also say that many things people look on as negative, like difficult labor, are not necessarily so. I spent a fair amount of time when I was young working in construction and it was some of the most rewarding paid work I have ever done, by a wide margin. If it paid as well as the path I ended up taking, I would have absolutely stayed in construction for as long as my body held out. That last part might sound grim, but it's the exact same in fields like software development. Over time your mind will slow, as will your motivation to keep up with the latest API, language, and just general trends. At that point you're going to be headed for 'early retirement', quite likely even earlier than a guy working construction - with construction workers having a median age of around 40!
At a personal level, tools/equipment that is self serviceable and can be maintained for a long life span. While some of this is still around, it is much more difficult to find.
At a moderate level. More time for family and community, unfortunately this one area that looking back we have slid backwards in. We are definitely better than the open century of industrialism but before that, hours were much more moderate, you also mostly worked near or at where you live.
At a wide lens angle. A vast majority of our technique is now having the blow back of ecological destruction/instability and a long period of climatic instability. The kind of thing that makes planning 7 generations ahead near impossible except on the grandest and somewhat vaguest terms.
A night sky without light pollution and darker nights from a sleep perspective.
Large families and extended families. Your great grandparents likely had 5+ siblings.
100ppm lower CO2 levels had a meaningful impact on cognitive and physical performance.
Less intrusive advertising such as pumping gas without videos popping up.
Natural sounds and smells in a world without massive pollution.
Edit: It’s easy to say the modern world is better based on metrics which exclude meaningful downsides. Job security doesn’t get tracked the way unemployment rate does.
In 1790 individual members in the House of Representatives represented 39,000 people (though a low percentage of that could actually vote), today it’s closer to 800,000. But nobody is saying your voice is less important every year.
When I was spending my vacations with my grandparents as a child, they had a huge garden with an astonishing number of different kinds of fruits. They were planned in such a way that most of the year, from early spring until the beginning of the winter there was at least one kind of fruit that became ready for harvest every week.
Those fruits had flavors that cannot be matched in any way by those that can be bought from a supermarket, which are selected to look beautiful and to have a long shelf life. Not even at the local markets where farmers sell their products can I find anything as good as the fruit cultivars of my grandparents.
Similarly for meat. The meat of the truly free-range chicken or of the suckling pigs that I could eat at my grandparents was unbelievably more tasty than of the industrially-grown animals.
The vast majority of the people living today, who live in cities and eat only what can be bought there, have never tasted anything so good and they cannot imagine such tastes. Even when I have traveled through rural zones, I have never seen again any garden remotely similar to what my grandparents had a half of century ago or any similar fruit varieties.
I would certainly be happier if I could ever eat again such food. Except for food, I agree that everything else is much more comfortable today and I prefer it over what was available a half of century earlier.
I strongly suspect any example I provide will be attacked, so I recommend to use your imagination. I think you can do better than this.
If you really want an example I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Shaman, who can write better than I can, who is thoughtful in his choice in how he uses research versus poetic license, who has already responded to critique on the novel. There's plenty worth critiquing but it's better than assuming the absolute lack of any loss. And I'd like to emphasize I don't believe in past utopia (I think anarcho-primitivism is equally lacking in imagination, perhaps even more so)—just that the idea of one-dimensional progress is moronic.
EDIT: To add on to this, Graeber points out that there's a wide span of time in between the invention of agriculture (~12kya) and the beginning of what we collectively agree is civilization (~8kya). Why this delay, if sedentary farming and market-oriented distribution offers such obvious benefits?
EDIT2: spelling
EDIT3: KSR context
I spent about a year raising two hogs, babying them when compared to how almost anyone raises pigs. They loved their lives, I know exactly what they ate, and I know exactly what their last moments were. I just started curing another round of bacon a couple days ago, and when I get to enjoy it I know exactly how much work and love went into it.
I don't think this process made anyone as miserable as possible, and it makes me much happier than when I didn't k ow where my food came from, how it was raised, or how it was processed.
Sure, it’s a trade off, but it’s ridiculous to pretend we haven’t lost anything. We pay for our high standard of living with anxiety and neuroses.
And if you gather food like berries and fruits - you (at least sometimes) get to eat foods ripened that day in the field. How many today get that luxury?
And if one of the things that provides joy to humans is to prepare their family’s food - many folks today would be disqualified.
We are doing some cool things nowadays, yes there is some blow back to account for. The past had a lot of awful things, but there were something things we did that we should consider integrating with modern techniques. And so on.
Hyakujo, the Chinese Zen master, used to labor with his pupils even at the age of eighty, trimming the gardens, cleaning the grounds, and pruning the trees.
The pupils felt sorry to see the old teacher working so hard, but they knew he would not listen to their advice to stop, so they hid away his tools.
That day the master did not eat. The next day he did not eat, nor the next. "He may be angry because we have hidden his tools," the pupils surmised. "We had better put them back."
The day they did, the teacher worked and ate the same as before. In the evening he instructed them: "No work, no food."
Marx agreed that quality of life can improve under capitalism. The whole point was a ethical/social critique of mismatched incentives and power imbalances of such an arrangement.
It doesn't matter if life improves if the only choices one has in life is either live under the power imbalance of wage labor or extract value from those who do.
If folks can be blamed for commenting completely off-base takes on an article they didn't read, the author should also take heat for critiquing on a work they never read.
His plans for how to address the shortcomings of capitalism are, um, flawed. But the analysis itself is incredibly insightful.
To pick one quote though "Marx thought that the capitalistic system would inevitably destroy itself." Not it hasn't - it's all bollocks basically and the aftershocks through Russia and the like still end up blowing up children's hospitals etc to this day. I don't think anyone in the last thousand years has been responsible for more suffering.
It sounds like you're referring to a book? Maybe you can clarify. I read Capital Vol 1 during COVID, and I've come to realize that, without being hyperbolic, I've encountered zero people with criticisms of Marx who have read what he's written.
It's commenting without reading the article on steroids and it frankly makes the critic look foolish because they fantasize about the books content and then attack their own fantasy and then claim they haven't done so. It's not difficult to read a book and then critique it. It's just wild that this had repeatedly failed to occur.
People don't seem capable of reading things they might disagree with, and seem unable to accept that anyone might write something that has parts that are right and parts that are wrong.
Psychs call this all or nothing approach, black and white thinking or splitting and it's a defense mechanism. I think we can do better.
There's a very simple way to prove my statement wrong by contrary evidence. Someone can simply read a book they might disagree with. I actively encourage it. If someone has the desire to voice their disagreement of a thing, the least they could do is be familiar enough with the thing to make a well-constructed and relevant critique. I actively encourage folks to be better critics.
Most people choose this system, when given a vote via democracy, even when they have to live under the power imbalance. For Marx to be right, you have to argue that these people are deluded somehow, which isn't particularly convincing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
Perhaps this feeling is less common than I thought?
Are you talking about American voting or something else? When’s the last time they’ve been realistically given this choice?
Even if your premise was true there’s a simpler explanation: after you enter this system it’s extremely hard to get out of it from within the system itself. No delusion required.
>It’s commonplace to refer to the slower productivity growth since 1970 as a “stagnation” relative to the 1870-1970 pace, but the 1970-2020 period still features more per capita growth in a 50-year span than was typical in human history. Much more growth. So what’s really the anomaly here?
Energy. All the boons of the Industrial Revolution are downstream of the ability to harness and utilize large amount of energy for productive human purposes.
The 1970s was when Saudi Arabia shut off the flow of cheap oil to the US; I would argue that we never actually recovered from this. We certainly got better at placating Middle Eastern elites enough to keep the oil flowing, but gas prices are still insane relative to pre-crisis levels, especially for a country which built so much car infrastructure[0] that the price of oil is a headline political concern.
This is why I'm bullish on solar, BTW. It's better to have SOME energy, even if it's only daytime, than none at all if the Middle East decides it wants to veto the US again.
>The social media experiment in “connecting people” is in some ways weirder and more contrary to history than I think we sometimes appreciate; until very recently, almost everyone was living in small towns.
Dunbar's Number is the cap on close friendships a human can have. The number 200 is bandied about but I don't think the value matters. What matters is that people continue to organize themselves around this number, and social organizations larger than it tend to either lose meaningfulness or grow deep states[1] that tend to make all the actual decisions.
>Human history is kind of bleak. There’s a lot of talk these days about the “dark parts of our country’s history” and how to think about them. But I’m not really sure we’ve had a conversation about the generally dark trajectory of all this history in general, which seems broadly lacking in uplifting themes about progress until suddenly it’s not.
You want to know what would be even bleaker? Going back to hunter-gatherer societies[2]. Humanity did not adopt agriculture by choice; nor did roving gangs of thieves and self-appointed protectors force people to put seeds into the ground and wait for food to sprout out. Resource exhaustion did. The Earth's carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers is comically low; agriculture spread as hungry humans overhunted and overgathered until it was necessary to intentionally plant and grow energy rather than just rely on the Earth to store it in a form we can naturally digest.
>The whole idea of trying to invent new ways of doing things seems to be perhaps more novel than you’d think. People were flaking stones the same old, same old way for unimaginably long spans of time.
Human progress is a superexponential (arguably, superlogistic) curve. Educated[3] individuals are more likely to produce inventions, more educated people produce more inventions, but agricultural societies eat their own seed corn by treating education as something to be kept to the elites.
[0] And KEEPS building car infrastructure, despite the risk being known for the last 50 years
[1] In the "Tyranny of Structurelessness" sense
[2] That joke about primitivists at the start was foreshadowing.
Having worked with solar for a long while, I am always trying to tame people expectations of it. I think that and most renewables are awesome but we are trying to make them match the societal paradigm of fossil fuels and I think that is a fools errand.
We are going to go to a green energy grid eventually (fossil fuels are limited) and it will mostly likely have a lower total energy per capita than what we have today. Combine this with technology innovations, personal reductions in demand and the end result won't be so bad. It isn't going to be a dystopia but I don't think we will be living the same level of today's abundance.
I don't think we will be living the same level of today's waste.
Already per capita energy consumption has ceased to grow in countries such as the US and elsewhere, this is due to better effeciences in energy use.
It's not just solar, across the board there is more and more research on better ways to make hydrogen from water, better ways to make cement, battery chemistry not just for cars (cheaper but much heavier batteries per kWh are suited to grid storage), improvements on steel making, etc (it's a long list).
It's not crazy to imagine lower per capita energy consumption and an increase in goods and living standards for more people.
