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David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
121–130 of 194 posts
Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
#122How do people on HN deal with the potential disappearance of work altogether ? physical labour -> boston dynamics office labour -> ~cloud + smartphones (i'm in an office job right now, and it's near zero work, it's full on redundancy, ambiguous and contradictory information, political friction.. any computer could replace the entire building and operate faster 24/7) it's really not a huge stretch to predict 90% of ta…
> it's really not a huge stretch to predict 90% of tasks will just vanish You may be falling for AI propaganda: https://monroelab.net/attack-mannequins-ai-as-propaganda
No, not at all, I just see so many jobs where things are impossibly inefficient, bad software, bad education, bad management, bad everything. A lot of it due to the mismatch of old paper practice and human interfacing between lame digital UIs and printers. It's so bad that people are faster writing down documents instead of using software. Now if you go full digital.. what takes 15 min is now 15 ms. Same goes for a lot of operations across society.
Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
#123How do people on HN deal with the potential disappearance of work altogether ? physical labour -> boston dynamics office labour -> ~cloud + smartphones (i'm in an office job right now, and it's near zero work, it's full on redundancy, ambiguous and contradictory information, political friction.. any computer could replace the entire building and operate faster 24/7) it's really not a huge stretch to predict 90% of ta…
The book - Fabric of Civilization takes an informative dive on what happened as cotton/wool fabric technology evolved and different bottle necks in the process changed, along with who was compensated more and who lost their jobs in the process.
I didn't read that book but remember the topic a bit. But things have changed, a lot less people back in the days and a lot more limited technological capabilities.. now tech can really cover most of what people do. There's a shift IMO.
Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
#124Began "The Dawn of Everything" about a week ago, still on chapter 3. Chapter 2 was very, very good. Worth the whole book alone. It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture. It is very well argued, soli…
>It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"?
I really hope he doesn't say that because Rousseau is just the high point of a debate about luxury and sociability that runs throughout the whole eighteenth century. He and others like him were influenced by travelogues from the New World describing natives as living simply and equitably. But he was equally influenced by the objective conditions of early modern capitalism, ancient Stoicism, and Christian writings about greed and pride. He wrote his own 'Confessions' in tribute to St.Augustine, after all.
I like Graeber, and he has a truly original mind, but he doesn't have the best reputation in academia for being 100% scholarly.
Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
#125Began "The Dawn of Everything" about a week ago, still on chapter 3. Chapter 2 was very, very good. Worth the whole book alone. It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture. It is very well argued, soli…
The problem with that part of the book is that it's wildly historically inaccurate. The Diggers and the Levellers were not just trying to enact a much more egalitarian society 100 years before Rousseau but were also (along with a bunch of other non conformist thinkers and doers across Europe) busy producing a vast body of populist pamphlets that later Enlightenment thinkers drew on, stripped of their theological content and rendered more palatable. Dismissing these as peasant revolts is the sort of intellectual snobbery that most early modern historians got over 50 years ago when it was realised that the Enlightenment didn't suddenly spring from nothing in France in 1715 and actually started much earlier in the protestant lands. Maybe this hasn't penetrated David Graeber's corner of academia yet?
It's good to see the Jesuit Relations (basically the National Geographic of its time) being introduced to a popular audience but the notion that the ideals of liberty and social equality didn't exist in European thought prior to contact between American and European cultures is just wrong.
Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
#126It's a well-written biography and Graeber comes across as a great guy but on the other hand the Brad DeLong takedown linked in the article [1] is quite something. I'm wondering how he wrote a 500 page book on debt without really understanding banking? [1] https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-david-g...
David Graeber had an account here and defended himself from DeLong's accusations in a comment [1]. They even had an exchange in that thread. At best I think DeLong has been pretty uncharitable to Graeber. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17163449
Thanks for that link, I somehow missed it when DeLong's article was discussed in here, it helps explain lots of stuff.
Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have more and more examples of many very large rural places that very much go against the idea and drive a big hole in the idea that hierarchy is a natural biproduct of increasing populations. For those that are unaware, this is basically the core of anarchist political theory; hierarchies aren't merely natural consequences of human society, but were in fact created via force.
To add to it, “an-archy” literally means the absence of top-down order, in a way the opposite of “hire-archly”.
hier-archy
Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
#128Graeber's posts on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidgraeber
I never knew he was getting trolled by someone who one could classify as a stalker (see: 2018 comments).
In any case, thanks for the link.
Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were plenty of Westerners who were concerned with inequality -- there were numerous failed peasant rebellions throughout Europe ever since the Middle Ages.
He fully addresses that in the book. Don't take my word for it, I don't have his explaining skills. But what he addresses is radical equality, as a fundamental value, as opposed to "less inequality". Equality under a ruler or rebellion against abuses is not the same as thinking the whole society as composed of equals. Think of no-slavery, equality among genders, sexual freedom, etc. Even thinkers that thought about e…
To give one example, the leaders of the Münster Rebellion of 1534 certainly weren't content with "less inequality."
Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were plenty of Westerners who were concerned with inequality -- there were numerous failed peasant rebellions throughout Europe ever since the Middle Ages.
He fully addresses that in the book. Don't take my word for it, I don't have his explaining skills. But what he addresses is radical equality, as a fundamental value, as opposed to "less inequality". Equality under a ruler or rebellion against abuses is not the same as thinking the whole society as composed of equals. Think of no-slavery, equality among genders, sexual freedom, etc. Even thinkers that thought about e…
How would contact with “First Nations” in any way help European elites to come to the concept of the radical equality you are describing? They neither had nor believed in any of these things.