Entire article fails to mention "alienation from one's labor"
What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#952Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. 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…
Blackpill depression post complaining about "blackpill depression circklejerks"...
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#953Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems. I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel,…
>I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The output, in my case, feels just as mine as the toppings I tell my local pizza store to add to whatever they're about to cook for me. It's tasty, and fills my stomach, but I didn't make it. I ordered it.
Ok. I had pizza last night. It was delicious. Most meals are packaged protein workout food. But I have a griddle and I love to make brunch, burgers, sliders whatever.
A lot of my job is really pizzas. Massive scale pizzas but still pizzas. God I hate making pizzas. Now I don’t really have to. That means I can focus more on a perfect burger. Or cooking a massive brunch for a crowd of friends. (Think: refactoring some giant hole that 5 years of pizza dug us, or rearchitecting an application rather than just porting it).
I’m definitely in the vocation not job position. I would do this even if we got post-scarcity utopia tomorrow.
I just remembered I used to make pizzas in college if they were short and I drew the short straw. Fuck me that was soul destroying. Much better to be working the bar.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#954Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. 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…
> a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become.... Like what [person in my ideological group] did [allegedly, with no explanation or description] with [thing that happened online]... [this comment made online]
I see.
You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#955Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. 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…
Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.
> I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet.
We do, and we knew decades ago.
The problem is, they can't become large or useful. That limitation is inherent, and due to human social behaviour.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#956Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who's making money off our misery exactly? 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-mo…
Advertisers make money on clicks, and content creators get a cut. This is the backbone that the entire internet operates on. 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 p…
> by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant
Impressive work, but surely there were suspicions?
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#957Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. 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…
Many folks have talked about optimizing for engagement and while I do think this is a factor, I don't think this is the cause. HN has a pretty simple set of algorithms and yet it's largely followed the same trend of negativity and despair. 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…
> If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content.
I agree with you, but would also add that, ~99% of people do not post anything. They mostly consume. When your consumption habits are constantly doomerism, and "all the bad stuff that will happen in the next 5 years", your mind also starts thinking that way. And spirals down that way. There's a lack of healthy dose of reality in online circles. So everything just becomes outrage/doomer hell.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#958Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.
I feel like we're probably going to have to give up something, most probably anonymity, to get back to anything like sanity. We'll see communities that are militantly anti-AI where it's hard to get in and easy to get kicked out, and it will probably cost money and require you to divulge who you really are. It could still be semi-anonymous at the user level but not at the administrative level. I'd like to see somethin…
Giving up anonymity would be giving up on the entire idea wholesale.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#959Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. 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…
The fact you say "on mastodon" proves it's effectively centralized, just pointing that out
As much as I'd like to endorse the decentralization model of Mastodon, it's annoying that I'm constantly shown Mastodon messages from new, often very suspicious looking domains that then want me to enable JavaScript yet again in order to run the same damn Mastodon app.
This problem is not inherent to the task. Nitter instances can do almost everything without JS.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#960> “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid. Uncle Ted is being proved correct in his assessment day after day after day. Too bad that the normies in the article wont' ever look at the world through Uncle Ted's nor through Ellul's eyes, they're too intellectually limited (to not use the word "stupid") for that. Too bad, had they known they could have turned their lives for the better earli…
Who's Uncle Ted and how does ine see thru his eyes?