So replier is right here: Jobs had opinions about literally every detail, he pushed people to work out those details and challenge their own assumptions, and he talked about these things in public like a designer—not just about beauty but also HCI. You could see in his presentations that he understood the fucking details about why things were good. No tech CEO is able to tell you why their version of showing that a window is currently in focus is good, and on the off chance they do, they probably wouldn’t use the term “key window” because they don’t know it.
There was a Jobs story about how he was bothering the engineer who was working on the calculator so much about the layout that the engineer just made a layout engine Jobs could play with, so he could design it himself.
I do consider that fundamentally different from the people lower in the hierarchy though. That’s what I value about the Cook era keynotes: seeing Apple as not just a single person.
Oh boy, the internet is anything but what it was supposed to be. I can't really bring myself to remember without feeling bad about it. The centralization, the power of certain businesses, the surveillance, dark patterns everywhere. Hell, you catch people simping for billionaires and asking, "Is that legal?" to scraping posts. Here. In HACKER news. So yeah. Depressing.
> asking, "Is that legal?" to scraping posts. Here. In HACKER news.
The capital letters don't make this astonishing. The padmapper vs. craigslist debate was nearly 15 years ago, most people were on craigslist's side (including me) and it was about somebody who was running a site in a less optimal but more human way vs. some startup looking for hockey-sticks.
But I was literally simping for the billionaire (maybe not quite yet then, don't know for sure if he managed it since) against scrapers. They were very much for-profit scrapers, unlike nitter, but the truth is the truth.
The only reason I support scraping Twitter is because it's yet another communications monopoly that was endlessly pushed on us by governments and massive corporations, even though it never made money, and once it finally got traction its priorities were to trash interop and manipulate content. The government should be dictating an interop protocol and expecting everyone to follow it, and instead it is encouraging media monopolies because they are an end run around the first amendment.
If the government created interop protocols for rental property, I'd have been against craigslist. Instead, it seemed very much like some startup play to steal craigslist's content to hopefully bury them, then sell on a valuation that included abusing their new monopoly and making us very much miss craigslist.
Sadly, facebook corralled and trained so many people for so long that their marketplace eventually killed craigslist for most things anyway (didn't have to buy padmapper after all.)
In the era of governments with ubiquitous electronic mass surveillance, complete control over all communication channels, and autonomous suicide drones, humans can't revolt either.
And yet, they continue to do it. States always had the upper hand since the invention of the standing army. The thing with capitalism is, as Engels noted, the military is the proletariat in uniform. Any successful revolt needs to have partial support from the military.
In other words, people don't revolt, warlords revolt. Warlords in control of weapons which are decreasingly reliant on humans and increasingly reliant on remote and autonomous technologies. A drone swarm is not "the proletariat in uniform".
Your argument doesn't really make a lot of sense. Warlords, factions, rebels, or whatever you'd like to call them, they are people, and sometimes they succeed in toppling a form of government and implanting a different one. A drone swarm doesn't control itself. There are no fully autonomous weapons that can continuously implement higher-level strategies to achieve a certain goal. Of course a drone swarm is not part of the proletariat, the same way a rifle is not part of the proletariat. A drone swarm is a tool in the hands of humans that belong to or are in service of a certain social class.
> Of course a drone swarm is not part of the proletariat, the same way a rifle is not part of the proletariat. A drone swarm is a tool in the hands of humans that belong to or are in service of a certain social class.
Every rifle takes one person to wield it; one more person that might decide to turn that rifle against the ruling class. A drone swarm is worth ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people with rifles, capable of being controlled by one person issuing high-level kill orders. The tyrants of the future won't need to risk arming "the proletariat".
What? How many people is a tank worth, or an helicopter, or a fighter jet. You keep insisting that a hypothetical thousand-drone swarm can’t be used against a tyrant in case of a civil war and that the tyrant himself will operate the weapons directly. They won’t. They will need workers and soldiers and a chain of command that is convertible to a cause.
Great stuff. The blog is great too. Beyond that, it's obvious the rising organic composition of capital is much more relevant to the subject of demand loss, but I wonder about the extent of the contribution from "DIY solutions" in reducing demand for services as well.
For example, it appears that the "barrier of entry" for repairs was lowered, and I could pick many examples to try and demonstrate that, but just from a personal anecdote: I usually don't work on my car unless it's something simple that requires a solution I can instantly think of, but just the other day I had my engine temperature light pop up at a rather inconvenient time and place, so instead of calling assistance, towing the car to a mechanic, and having them work on it for I don't know how much time and money, I took a look at the usual suspects (radiator, hoses, coolant tank, etc.), pointed the camera at them, and started talking to ChatGPT which instructed me on how to troubleshoot, find the defective part, buy a new one (which I did by phone and got it delivered to me), and replace it on-site. And now I feel more confident in doing just that for bigger problems from now on, which, granted, is probably a bad idea, but I digress.
The Marxian perspective says the repair I did on my car is an effort that will never express itself as value because I do not intend on selling my car as a commodity in a market, so it's not labor per se. It literally replaced the living labor, the value-producing activity of a mechanic, and added nothing back in its place. So indirectly, that also contributes to the reduction in overall new value production, which can only be created through living labor. But the consequences of that will not happen instantly, because the demand will lower in one sector (e.g. mechanic shops) and increase in another (e.g. I spend the money I saved in a diner or something). But there might not be enough room to absorb the displaced workers in another sector, and even if there is, the wages will tend to be lower for the inexperienced newcomer (say, if the mechanic chooses to work in a kitchen now).
That just seems like a terrible spiral. Think about it: this time, I chose to do the fix myself because of time constraints, but what if I were the one getting caught up in one of these traps? What if I had been laid off or had been displaced to a lower-wage position and couldn't really afford to bring my car to a mechanic? Then it's EVEN MORE pressure to not opt to use services and try an AI-assisted fix.
Anyway, I might be way off here, but it's an interesting topic.
And ever since that and the supposedly marginalist “revolution” people keep pretending their sliced up tautological economics is a science separated from politics because it’s convenient to those who wield capital. Truth is Marx might’ve not made the best case for the general law of profit equalization and presented the transformation of value to price in the best of mathematical terms, but I’ll be damned if the empirical evidence makes up for everything he missed.
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