You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass • Hacker News Board

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#121

Post by Llamamoe » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:34 AM UTC

vaughands wrote: post #8

This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this. It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email. It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)

Inevitably? Maybe not, but the situation isn't gonna get better by saying "oh I'm sure the tech industry will do a 180 and stop making everything worse"

> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.

There's this meme where person A says "we should improve society somewhat", and B replies "yet you participate in society! curious". Very similar argument.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#122

Post by pharrington » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:35 AM UTC

teiferer wrote: post #77

HotGarbage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…

Did you mean 30 years ago?

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#123

Post by discreteevent » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:36 AM UTC

teiferer wrote: post #77

HotGarbage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…

> But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.

It's not ranting to not ack every positive if the negative clearly outweighs it. I would much rather live 20 years ago than live now without a job. Wouldn't you?

Alternatively suppose you get to keep your job. What percentage of the population being unemployed do you think would make it worse for you personally than going back 20 years. Because there is going to be more unemployment and it will affect your environment unless you have got a private island (some people do - some ai owners do)

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#124

Post by lurk2 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:36 AM UTC

mmaunder wrote: post #19

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or…

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.

We’re nowhere near it, but there is a point at which the marginal utility of laborers is worth less than the security risk the laborers represent by continuing to exist. This is already happening with a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction.

> This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it.

What if I consider the labor conditions that exist after this transformation to be undignified?

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#125

Post by imiric » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:37 AM UTC

teiferer wrote: post #77

HotGarbage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…

> All of them are enabled by big tech

That's not true. All of the examples you mentioned are possible without Big Tech. There are F/LOSS and community supported alternatives for all of them. Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.

Relying on Big Tech is a personal choice. None of these companies are essential to humanity.

> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.

That's not true either. All Alphabet and Meta products are tied to and supported in some way by advertising. All of these companies were/are part of government surveillance programs.

So you're highly overestimating the value of Big Tech, and highly underestimating the negative effects they've had, have, and will continue to have on humanity.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#126

Post by pram » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

DiscourseFan wrote: post #112

pram wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "feudal" part implies the productive assets of the 21st century are monopolized and owned by Big Tech, and even the capital class has to pay rent for access to this. It doesn't mean people are literally serfs on their lords manor growing substance crops. Are you serious?

This is completely false. The owners of big tech must pay capitalists like the owners of TSMC to produce the chips to power their services. Just because we don't produce the chips in the US does not mean that there isn't a distinct commodity producing class.

You are the first person I've seen try and say TSMC, Broadcom, etc aren't "big tech" lol

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#127

Post by RyanHamilton » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

pizlonator wrote: post #56

Let's say that somehow we end up in a world where capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass. Such situations usually correct themselves violently.

Yes, the ability to command a kingdom was relative to the number of people with force you could convince AND pay to be on your side vs the others. With automation, drones and AI, you no longer need any convincing just capital.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#128

Post by roenxi » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:39 AM UTC

DiscourseFan wrote: post #105

roenxi wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure you're literally just wrong on that one - no special knowledge of the weaving market but it seems people do still make a living from hand-weaving fabric. Eg, I found https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics - they claim to have a shop in New York. They can probably afford bread - bread is quite cheap. The issue is if bread becomes insanely cheap and cloth becomes insanely cheap, then a v…

It is a luxury good like Art, which is an elevated form of labor that is only possible on account of the development of technology like the automated loom, which provides clothes for most people at almost no cost, affording some lucky individuals the leisure time to do things like hand weave cloth or argue about capitalism on Hacker News.

Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own.

And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they can make a living hand-weaving anyway and do not need to weave 3,000x faster. They weave at a similar pace to that people always have. They can still afford bread. Society will almost give bread away to people, it is absurdly cheap.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#129

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:40 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #92

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about your labor, but as far as my labor goes, there are basically only three things I am capable of doing: manual labor with my hands and legs, mental labor with my mind, and selling personal charm with my handsome face. If you can perform all the same jobs I can for a penny a day, and food and rent cost a dollar a day, I'll have a hard time earning enough to remain fed and housed. Until now, I've alway…

> Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans Unless you're a few centuries old, you haven't. You've had the potential to be competing agaist industrial and computational technology your whole life. Go back further, and the prevalence of slaves served as a similar cost differential (free humans versus enslaved, human versus AI).

Yes, and even in prehistoric eras people could attempt to compete with the wind at blowing air, but I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted to the point where I couldn't hope to make a living. So I've written off the once-profitable career of "calculator" from the get-go.

Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#130

Post by neuralkoi » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:41 AM UTC

"The people who are leading the AI revolution, 'the tech titans', many of them are thinking in a way which is really alien to most of the people on the planet. People sometimes think 'Oh, these tech titans, they want money. They want power.' They want something far more ambitious than money or power. They want to change the course of the evolution of life and even of the evolution of the cosmos. In the minds of some of them, sometime in the future, millions, billions of years in the future, when they write the history of the universe, it will be like: 'Okay, the Big Bang - 14 billions years ago, 10 billion years later - the emergence of life on earth, the only life we know about so far in the universe, 4 billion years later - Elon Musk and the beginning of AI'. This is the timeline they have.”

- Yuval Noah Harari, Ideas for the Future