Incidentally I follow him on Mastodon and saw this yesterday. Hacker News is really slow to pick up Cory Doctorow's stuff despite ostensibly being full of freedom-loving techies.
The amount of people here trying to tell me that Lina Khan is an incompetent fail-upwards bureaucrat would seem to agree with that.
I'm going to continue shouting into the void until the void realizes that independent and distributed ownership is a necessary precondition for libertarian forms of governance. Authoritarianism and monopolies go hand in hand. If you don't understand this, then you aren't a freedom fighter, you're an antipope.
I wouldn't call having the article posted here only a day later 'slow', let alone 'really slow' as you described it. A day later is absolutely fine, in my opinion.
Seems rather silly to think we have to be discussing a new opinion piece, that is not tied to any particular recent event, as soon as it comes out.
I'm calling various people's bluffs here. I already know there are plenty of people here who are less angry that Tim Apple is the phone pope and more angry that they don't get to be the phone pope.
Grandpa’s definitions do not need to be our definitions.
People are playing some banal brinksmanship game “oooh that fall afoul of some vague mutable truth we’ve been conditioned to believe is immutable; get im fellas!”
What are you all going to do to STOP the problems? Debating the diagnosis is allowing it to spread. Only real change in agency will stop it and no one seems into that.
So why sit here thinking answering your questions is useful?
Last I checked there is a thriving techno-political culture of decentralization and privacy rights fighting this. A lot of people are in fact doing a lot. Don't worry kiddo! The adults are working on it even if it seems futile.
FYI it isn't a strawman to ask whether you have a cogent argument for why technofeudalism isn't happening.
You asserted the proposition that technofeudalism isn't a thing (strongly implied)
The respondent didn't construct a superficially similar proposition (I.e. a strawman) and simply asked what support you have for your proposition.
A strawman would have been like if someone argued against your proposition that "But the Snowden leaks showed we live in a surveillance state!" This is a Strawman because it constructs a superficially similar position to "technofeudalism is a thing" without actually at all arguing against the position that technofeudalism is not a thing.
None of this is divine mandate. What is “freedom” is not immutable but a contemporary observation.
Is the future better of setting themselves aside to clean up after us? Are they not allowed to be free from our mess? One unique in the history of the species.
Why is today free from the consequences they put upon tomorrow?
The long term investment in us is actually selfish. It’s akin to expecting our religion to be the next generations
This is a good point. Costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities in your car are actually enjoyable to young people. Having your car stolen by anybody with a USB cable is exactly the same as rap music.
TIL my concern that Big Tech is progressively centralizing power to the detriment of society writ large is exactly as shortsighted and dumb a fear like the moral panic that DnD is satanic. /s
Capitalism is not dead, then. The destination of unregulated capitalism has always been feudalism.
Unfortunately the lords think they will be able to survive in little mansions and that climate change will never make them miserable personally. So they have spent small amounts of capital brainwashing rubes against taking any action so they can continue raking in large amounts of capital with destructive practices.
Aren't they kind of right?
If you are a rich dude living in an airconditioned mansion even big climate changes won't affect you that while they can seriously ruin a poor farmer or cause a significant loss of bio diversity.
If it gets bad for them they plan to dim the sun.
Their lifestyles will be fucked when they cannot be pampered in the cities by a pyramid build on low wage labor. They will never be content with hiding in their mansions, we saw that in 2020.
I agree totally. But these billionaires with more money than sense probably wouldn't have their egos stroked as much by saving Earth as they would by being the first settlers of Mars. Plus, by fleeing to another planet they no longer have to interact with 'lesser sorts' and can all have one big billionaire circle-jerk.
No! *The "tech people" are not knights and never will be. The "knights" are upper management. The lords are the centimillionaires and up. The rest of us are slaves, peasants, maybe monks if we're "lucky".
That's the myth that tech people willingly participating in this exploitative behavior tell themselves; that they are going to be part of the elite - that's what they get told by upper management.
That way "upper management" has been turning workers against themselves for ages; just convince the more lucky of them that they are entitled and destined to be part of the elite. Someday.
While I dislike the elecronification trend, cars are definitely better than they were 30-40 years ago, in a completely different league when it comes to reliability. Plenty of people also like the touchscreens or seemingly superflous features like Tesla's dog mode. Not gearheads but many normies genuinely do.
To the extent that cars did get worse, it was mostly to meet stringent emissions regulations, not computers or capitalism. So yeah, maybe worse for owners but better for people around them.
Sadly, it seems like capitalism, yet again, delivered what people really wanted, whether it's shitty toy cars or algorithmic Tik Tok feed. It held a mirror to the society and we don't like what we're seeing.
I have owned both a shitty beginner car without any extras and two more or less fully equipped ones.
I would love a car that does not have a single display and just connects to my phone or pad for setting things up and streaming audio. All controls should be haptic buttons, switches, whatever. Minimal software required to run the car. No internet connection, no subscriptions.
One of the reasons why cars are so much cheaper today is because of electronics.
The creation of the "CANbus", two-wire protocol that wraps around the car to communicate, and the movement of all portions of the car to the CANbus, is what has lead to incredible reliability.
It turns out that these two wires can be made incredibly reliable, and that communications across it (steering wheel, accelerator, brakes, tire pressure, speeds, A/C, etc. etc.) just makes sense.
--------------
All those haptic buttons are "just" CANbus interfaces in practice. Now don't get me wrong, I prefer buttons too. But the next leg of "cheapness" naturally was to shift to an iPad-like capacitive screen, since one-tablet connected to the CANbus is far cheaper (and more reliable) than 20 individual buttons (each of which has a set life and dies on their own).
That being said: physical buttons are clearly more intuitive than an iPad-like floating-moving button that is inconsistent and stateful.
I get your point, but I don’t believe it’s gonna make cars cheaper for me. All the software and connectivity tends to be misused for extracting more money via subscriptions, controlling me and in extreme cases even holding me hostage by updating the software, and making repairs uneconomical by locking me in to one vendor or pairing parts.
Not to mention the various privacy and security risks involved with permanent connectivity, escalating software complexity and questionable ownership of the devices built into the car.
If only we could make the car and most of its parts from a material which doesn’t rust, we could use it forever and just keep replacing parts as they break. I would be happy with such a vehicle without any extras except AC.
I’m old, and live in a snowy salty area. Car body rust is much less a problem that it used to be.
I think they’re all galvanized now. Some parts still rust, but having had some 80s vehicles rust out… plus they always tried to sell some “undercoating” to protect that was snake oil as far as I can tell.
> I would love a car that does not have a single display and just connects to my phone or pad for setting things up and streaming audio.
You need a big screen for cameras and such, because visibility in a lot of modern cars is about the same as the driver's seat in a Sherman tank. Unfortunately.
> The car market appears to be as close to perfect competition as we can muster. Theres an enormous amount of big players that all compete and try to outdo one another
> Cars are heavily regulated
I love that both of these statements, while reflecting opposing ends of political philosophy, are entirely true.
The car market appears to be as close to perfect competition as we can muster. Theres an enormous amount of big players that all compete and try to outdo one another
You can't buy cars at Amazon (?). So there is no race to the bottom trying to compete with counterfeit and/or products made with substandard materials?
Cars can kill people in numerous ways and as a consequence are more regulated pretty much everywhere except the useless things; other items are only where it counts. A washing machine might be a piece of crap wrt its function, but for sure must pass all sorts of certifications for electrical safety. That wouldn't prevent it from being crap, though.
I mean, modern washing machines use much less water and electricity, and leave the clothes less wet so the dryer has less to do. I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were less damaging to clothes as well.
Also worth noting how the car industry fought their damndest against safety features.
After Ralph Nader published Unsafe at any Speed, the car industry set their goons after him. Blurb from Wikipedia
> In response to Nader's criticisms, GM attempted to sabotage Nader's reputation. It "(1) conducted a series of interviews with acquaintances of the plaintiff, 'questioning them about, and casting aspersions upon [his] political, social, racial and religious views; his integrity; his sexual proclivities and inclinations; and his personal habits'; (2) kept him under surveillance in public places for an unreasonable length of time; (3) caused him to be accosted by girls for the purpose of entrapping him into illicit relationships; (4) made threatening, harassing and obnoxious telephone calls to him; (5) tapped his telephone and eavesdropped, by means of mechanical and electronic equipment, on his private conversations with others; and (6) conducted a 'continuing' and harassing investigation of him."[12]
Bel Air? 1955? We can go well into the 90's with many cars which were little more than sheet metal shells on a frame. My oldest friend was killed in his '89 Nissan sentra after he was hit from behind by a wreckless driver sending the little tin foil box into a pole and tree shredding it into a pile of scrap metal along with him.
> consistently hit 150,000 miles
Tell that to Merc 300D's. But aside from anomalies drive-line reliability greatly improved int he 90's after we ditched carbs and early fuel injection. My 1995 tahoe had 175k on the clock when sold and only needed a transfer case rebuild after my mother shifted it while moving (broke the fork and was stuck in 4hi). After the awful demise of my friend I sold my '96 civic (4th owner) with over 300k on the odo, it broke at 300 and I believe it was around 350-360 when I sold it. My 2004 Jeep Libery made it to 220k before it started falling apart and sold it to a guy who ran it for another few years (the 3.7 v6 in them were crap too).
> easier to maintain, consistently hit 150,000 miles, etc. etc.
Back in March my friend woke up to find that his less than 2 month old 2023 Kia Sportage hybrid stone dead in his driveway. Dealer dropped off a 15 year old loaner and took 40 days to find and fix the problem. They told him it was a "bad wiring harness". Super easy maintenance, eh?
> go faster, have more power,
The amount of morons who think they are the king of the road has massively increased thanks to COVID and the last thing we need is to empower these morons with faster piles of metal.
> While I dislike the elecronification trend, cars are definitely better than they were 30-40 years ago, in a completely different league when it comes to reliability.
I'm going to have to strongly disagree here, particularly w/r/t reliability.
We purchased my wife's vehicle new in 2014. While it's relatively well-regarded and we're happy with it overall, it's been far from trouble-free. We recently replaced the engine due to a well-known mechanic defect - but it was a defect that should have been apparent much earlier than it was, but went unnoticed because of a firmware issue in the ECM. In addition to that, we've had problems with the infotainment system needing to be manually rebooted every month or so in response to increasing "weirdness" over time. The buttons on the steering wheel stopped working consistently in ~2019. There were workaround for a while, but these days all of the buttons on the left side do the same thing (activate the connected phone's microphone), and the ones on the right don't work at all. I've torn the whole steering column and dash apart to verify that it's not a wiring issue; it has to be something wrong with the infotainment system at this point.
This wasn't our only experience with newer vehicles. Every one we've ever owned - or just worked on for friends - is plagued by these sorts of electronic "gremlins". They get worse over time, too. Yes, new vehicles are very nice with all the bells and whistles when they're new... but those same features quickly become "just one more thing to break" as the vehicles age. To make matter worse, they're typically very expensive to fix, even if you have the skills, time, and tools to do it yourself. I'm already $1,500 deep into fixing those buttons on the steering wheel, and haven't succeeded yet.
I drive a 2000 Jeep Wrangler. Granted, it's "only" 24 years old, but it has been far more reliable than any other vehicle my family has owned since I got it. When I bought it, in ~2011, I was looking for an older model - ideally it would have been a CJ-7, which was made from 1976-1986 - right at your 40 year cutoff. I've replaced several major components, sure - the engine, the entire rear end, the front suspension, etc. - but it has >200k miles on it, and the engine was poorly maintained when I bought the vehicle. What's more, all of that combined cost less than the engine replacement in my wife's 2015 model year vehicle.
There's much less to go wrong, too. There's no infotainment system to start acting funny, no backup camera to break, no buttons on the steering wheel to start doing random things they're not supposed to... it's just a vehicle.
Complexity is the enemy of reliability, and modern vehicles are very complex. Some of that is due to the market demanding new features. Some of it is due to government regulations. Some of it is just manufacturers using more complex solutions because time marches on.
... I have more to say here, but no time. Maybe I'll come back :)
Please do, it is an insightful comment. Complexity is the enemy of reliability, 100%. I wish engineers were better at resisting it. Sadly, many stars must align for complexity to decrease.
> While I dislike the elecronification trend, cars are definitely better than they were 30-40 years ago
It's interesting that users of US based web-sites (are you an american?) claim that cars are getting better. While people from developing countries say the opposite. Especially, their mechanics. Particularly, they claim that new cars are less reliable, less repairable, and metal is as thick as a can (popular complaint).
Kids these days have no idea what cars were like in the 1970's. Starting a cold car in the winter typically went something like this:
1. The door keylock is frozen over with ice. Chisel way at the lock with your metal car key until you can unlock it (15-20 mins)
2. Put key in ignition lock, turn and
3. rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr
4. rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr
...
5. wroorwr-wroorwr-wroo, @#%!
6. get jumper calbes and running car from family member/friend/stranger
7. remove the air filter cover (big round disk on top of the engine back then), and spray starter fluid directly into the carburetor.
7. start car
8. car immediately stalls as soon as you let off the gas
9. start car again, this time hold at 3000 rpm until engine heats up
10. Enjoy the sweet sweet smell of tetraethyl lead in the copious exhaust while you wait
11. Start driving
12. After about 10 mins steam starts to appear under the hood and temperature gauge maxes out as improper water/coolant mix (sometimes just 100% water) boils
13. Wait 30 mins for radiator to cool enough that you can open it safely and put proper mixture of antifreeze/water (you carry several gallons of each in the trunk)
Once you do get it going, don't forget to stop at a gas station as your car probably gets less than 12mpg. The full service attendant will check your oil and let you know it's "a quart low". Not bad, it's been two weeks since you last put a quart of oil in.
> While I dislike the elecronification trend, cars are definitely better than they were 30-40 years ago, in a completely different league when it comes to reliability. Plenty of people also like the touchscreens or seemingly superflous features like Tesla's dog mode. Not gearheads but many normies genuinely do.
This is because of state (mostly California) and federal laws passed, with the most aggressive taking effect in 2015.
The only reason Ford isn't selling you a Shit-Wagon is because they can't, by law.
Touchscreens are ass for doing anything while driving. I live in a city and cannot safely change my AC unless I'm at a stoplight. No knobs / only touchscreen is definitely a dealbreaker for my next vehicle, and all research suggests that the "normies" hate them too.
>Today, we live in a rentier's paradise. People don't aspire to create value – they aspire to capture it... don't provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer
I think the customer has just changed. Consumers don't have money anymore. Businesses do. Maybe said a different way, for the highest margin products you are targeting businesses.
A consumer spending 100k is a often a lifetime purchase. A business spending that may just be so they can improve efficiency by 5% or hang onto onto their budget next year.
Your competition are large companies taking small amounts of value from a huge number of customers. Consumers have gotten used to "not paying" (e.g. paying through ad views) and, for that reason, a more traditional exchange has become difficult.
This problem seems to be that consumer companies are moving toward an extraction at scale model. It is less market choice but often produces a free or subsidized product.
> It is less market choice but often produces a free or subsidized product.
A lot of companies are going down the “captive customer” path wherever they can. Rental properties are a good example of this.
Nowadays, there are a handful of compulsory services that you, the renter, must pay for on top the rent and there are no options to cancel (the federal government is currently targeting this practice).
I worked for a startup in the media space that did the exact same thing. As soon as we figured out that we could pitch our product to media properties while onboarding their advertisers and forcing them to become our paying users instead of the media companies themselves, we found product-market fit and took off.
> Nowadays, there are a handful of compulsory services that you, the renter, must pay for on top the rent and there are no options to cancel (the federal government is currently targeting this practice).
Off the top of my head:
- cable TV I don't use
- a trash retrieval service my friends don't use (the service is to take it from the apartment door to the dumpster)
- parking space someone without a car doesn't use
Good to know I might be able to tell my landlord someday that I don't care about the deal they got with Comcast, I'm not paying for the stupid cable.
The trash service is the one thing that as homeowner (and former renter) just baffles me. I totally understand the need and value if you are disabled or if you otherwise cannot. But seriously, every apartment I rented the trash dumpster was right there. Just grab the bag on my way out, toss it in
They would do it in Texas at some of the shittiest apartment complexes and I never understood how they could afford to offer such a waste of a service.
The garbage collection service cut a deal with the landlord to pay them $X/mo./unit, and helpfully suggested adding it to the lease so they have a 100% subscription rate.
I really dislike the trash service we have. Its the same deal. They aren't taking it off site, just the onsite trash bin that we would have to take it to anyways, and its ~35 a month for the privilege. Can't opt out at all. They also have onerous rules:
- Can't have more than one trash bag per night
- Trash and recycling must be taken on different nights (I think largely as a result of the above)
- they don't service Friday or Saturday, the two biggest days for trash during the week. This means trash is often sitting outside for 24-48 hours because the complex doesn't have any rules around how long your trash can be set out for.
- Trash can't be too heavy or bulky. These things are not quantified, so sometimes the trash just isn't taken and you have no idea why
- You must use 13 gallon trash bags or larger. They won't pickup smaller ones (no idea why this exists)
- You must use their exceedingly small bin or they won't pick it up. The bin has no lid. If the trash doesn't slide out of the bin naturally, they will refuse to pick it up (IE, they won't tip it to empty it. If it pulls at all they just leave it)
On top of all that, they constantly leave fliers on our doors trying to sell trash bag subscription service through the company. I looked it up out of curiosity and they want $17 a month for the privilege
When I was a kid, the city garbage men used to walk behind our house, grab the metal garbage bins that weren't lined with plastic bags, carry them back to the truck, dump them, and then return them empty back to where they were found. And they did that for every house in a city of 200,000 people. Granted, I'm an ancient relic, but oh my how things have "improved" in my lifetime.
And these garbage men used to have a decent job with good benefits and a salary that was enough to support a family. Contrast that to the people picking up the garbage bags in the hallways that are probably gig workers.
> I think the customer has just changed. Consumers don't have money anymore. Businesses do.
...You...recognize that's not a sustainable state of affairs, right?
Ultimately, if consumers don't have money, the economy will start to collapse. The upper echelons can feed on each other for a while, but you need an economic base to support the whole edifice.
Plus, if "consumers" are unable to get what they need for survival and thriving for long enough, they're going to decide (correctly) that someone has taken it from them, and take steps to get it back by whatever means necessary.
Which is why I expect a basic income to come before it gets to that point. Not enough for anyone to ever save or invest in themselves, just enough money handed out from the government to be sucked right back up into the rent-seeking money machine.
> Plus, if "consumers" are unable to get what they need for survival and thriving for long enough, they're going to decide (correctly) that someone has taken it from them, and take steps to get it back by whatever means necessary.
They'd better do it fast before rich people figure out that robot dogs with lethal weapons and AI vision are a great replacement for human guards that might have the downside of having any empathy. As soon as defense of property rights is fully automated, revolution is impossible.
It was sustainable as long as interest rates were near or at zero. Businesses could raise money seemingly forever, and could grow on the backs of other businesses raising easy money.
A lot of this could be a zero interest rate phenomenon.
> Ultimately, if consumers don't have money, the economy will start to collapse. The upper echelons can feed on each other for a while, but you need an economic base to support the whole edifice.
They will take on debt in lieu of money. And all signs point to lots of that happening, since spending is still high.
The more power shifts to businesses the worse society gets. "Profit motive" is extractive and full of negative externalities. If lone businesses wield more power than the entire government (or capture government) then, as individuals, we're really back to taxation without representation.
I love this idea of taking "taxation without representation" and using it at a lens for companies which are often as powerful as governments in some ways. I'm not sure what a good solution would be, but something like the BBB with more power seems like it's be useful so people can report companies and have them fined proportionally to their income so it's an effective deterrent.
Anti-trust enforcement. Each and every big-name company you can name needs to be broken up into at least 30 different business entities. The current FTC is taking the first steps in the right direction, but it's going to take a lot of time & effort to build that department back up after 30+ years of them being inactive.
> I think the customer has just changed. Consumers don't have money anymore. Businesses do. Maybe said a different way, for the highest margin products you are targeting businesses.
That's seems like a fact-free assertion. Both (inflation adjusted) disposable income and actual consumption spending for US households have grown at a steady rate since WWII. The only substantial deviation from trend (upwards for income, downward for consumption) were 2 yeas of COVID.
Cumulative measures such as these are extremely misleading. Per capita measures only slightly less so. Without looking into the distribution over the population there is no real connection between your comment and the parent's.
You or the parent are more than welcome to post data proving the opposite is true. Instead both of you are just stating things with nothing but vibes to back it up.
You'll note of course that I'm not arguing the opposite conclusion. Don't try to force that on me. I'm just saying it seems really uncritical to assume that cumulative data says anything about median purchasing power.
Up until about 1973, when worker productivity rose, the wages rose in lockstep. Since then, worker productivity is up about 2.4x but wages have remained stagnant.
FYI that graph is very misleading (using different deflators for the productivity and for the hourly comp, also it's missing benefits and other parts of total compensation that are all paid by productivity increases)
I think a more significant factor is growth rate. Free stuff can grow orders of magnitude faster than anything consumers buy for the simpler reason that signups or downloads can be zero friction. Even a little friction slows down growth.
The game online for a very long time has been: grow as fast as possible, then figure out a way to monetize. Free wins in this game, making it almost impossible for anything paid for by the consumer to compete.
So thus we have today's world where the game is: grow fast with free, then enshittify once your network effect has locked everyone in.
He's as skilled at branding as those he ostensibly decries. There were many perfectly good* words to describe this phenomenon - degradation, ossification, sclerosis and more. Instead we've got this ugly neologism, the literary equivalent of a poop emoji. I agree with a lot of Doctorow's ideas, but I don't care for his commodification of dystopia. It feels like using goths to sell cigarettes.
its essentially the same rehash critique of capitalism that's been a thing for a while. he's just given it a fun name. "rent-seeking-behavior" is too sterile.
> capitalism has died – but it wasn't replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:
I wish I could remember where I heard this quote:
"We find two things to always happen in human societies across time and geography:
1. People dancing to rhythmic music at night especially if it is a moonlit night.
2. Some form of feudalism."
I wonder how much of it is game theory (e.g. all companies want to become monopolies) and how much is human psychology (e.g. "I want to be the alpha monkey"). Probably some combination of both.
In its beginnings in the Dark Ages, medieval feudalism was pretty risky for everyone involved (though less risky than a complete societal collapse, but that is a low threshold for judgment). The nobility was expected to defend the land against invaders, who came in droves (Vikings, Magyars, Avars, Pechenegs etc.), and the incessant warfare came with a high risk of death. The peasants were mostly unarmed and any enemy attack would cause them great harm. Not even the clergy was sure to survive such events, as most of the invaders were pagan and would gladly kill priests.
We tend to judge the whole feudalism by its late stage, when pampered barons lived in huge estates and their only real risk was eating and drinking themselves to death, but that was also the stage which led to the system's demise.
That's not even the main risk reduced. Feudalism was invented to reduce risk of dying of starvation. Peasants were always 1 bad harvest away from starvation, they couldn't store wealth for more than a few years (as grain which goes bad). And their labor was either almost worthless (most of the year) or in shortage (during the harvest and a few other occasions).
So they did "cloud farming" :) The people who had access to wider markets and had enough wealth to be able to survive one bad season - provided the infrastructure and shouldered most of the risks. In exchange for the only thing available to peasants - their labor.
As any power hierarchy it quickly turned to shit, but the idea was sound.
Hmm fascinating! So the real "best of both worlds" here is to try and stall the march of entropy where the services we rely on "tun to shit" as you say.
One way i've been thinking of this is crowd sourced alternatives to major apps but the problem with this is the backends. Lets say you make a anti-enshittified youtube client. Well youtube is just gonna change their backend to break the app. Well now you gotta have crowdsourced efforts to constantly reverse engineer their backend.
He's arguing that capitalist systems morph over time into feudalistic systems and the argument is pretty persuasive but there's an issue: capitalism initially emerged out of feudalism.
The text's theory of history requires a hidden variable that controls the feudalism->capitalism->feudalism process, but no candidate for a hidden variable is suggested by the author. Sure, any reader can think up some candidates for the hidden variable, but letting the reader fill in the blanks is a con.
Interestingly it's not the only growth out of Feudalism. Miskin argues, for instance, that France and England had very different post-feudal trajectories, but England's move into Capitalism was so successful in the short term it required France to engage in Capitalism to stay relevant.
England moved to a landlord-rent model for their agrarian society, whereas France moved to a tax on production model for their agrarian society. The distinction there is subtle, but the English model encourages improvidence to ensure you can make the rent, and that improvidence leads to increased output, pressure on workers to move to cities and away from their familial land. The French model didn't put as much pressure on maximizing productivity, and their post feudal agrarian society was perhaps a little slower to take off economically, but wasn't burdened with quite the same social upheaval that capitalism led to in England.
It's a very interesting history, and I do wish we'd been able to see more post-feudal societies develop. I think there's a number of different economic models out there that would be functional. They might not be as economically strong, but they might have different strengths w.r.t. population health, happiness, or sustainability.
> The text's theory of history requires a hidden variable that controls the feudalism->capitalism->feudalism process
During the industrial and chemical revolutions, the technology to feed a large population outpaced the technology to control large populations. Feudalism fell to capitalism because society became too large to be effectively ordered by feudal lords. But this is now changing thanks to the information technology revolution. With information technology, we are developing a new means of feudalism that scales to billions of people.
Same variable that controls the democrats_in_power->republicans_in_power->democrats_in_power cycle: the cyclic nature of complex systems created out of human society. Whats important is not what controls the cycle, but that the only two options - given to us by human nature - seem to be capitalism and feudalism. Humans need to evolve a bit more before any other options are unlocked.
I think it makes more sense to think of it as a two track process. It's not that digital feudalism emerged out of capitalism, the internet wasn't really capitalist to begin with and was more or less immediately captured by private rentiers. Note that almost every example in the article except for the car is a purely digital good, and I'd argue the automotive sector is not overall feudalistic, just the digital parts in it. It's still largely a market where customers pay for cars and manufacturers hire labour.
I don't think the entire economy is reverting back to feudalism, I think it makes more sense to think of the digital economy as its own thing that's speedrunning the exact process we already went through once. Next step is then what, digital commoners and land reform maybe, proper digital currencies and citizenship, actual privacy protection? Feudalism on the internet can only exist for the same reason it existed offline, people flock to fiefdoms because they perform functions in a modern economy provided by a proper state.
Here's one reader's attempt: the hidden factor seems to be "the ability of the collective consciousness to achieve a sufficient degree of internal coherence that it understands how the system works and can exercise agency to break the power of feudal lords". Reality changes -> comprehension has to catch up. New mediums of communication help a lot.
The resulting "agency" has historically been pretty violent, when the injustice and tension are too severe. So it's wise to constantly be course-correcting by recognizing the new skins of feudalism and wresting power away from its lords.
I think feudalism is a misnomer here. Feudalism is a historiographically messy concept to begin with and many Medievalists reject the term outright. But even if we were to distill it down to some simplistic yet workable definition I still don't think whatever we come up with would be applicable to the present situation without seriously torturing the analogy. 'Rentier capitalism' would be more apt.
I've been throwing around the term "neo-feudalism" and people seem to get the gist of what I mean intuitively (paying dues to the monopolistic ownership class, only now you're working digital land) but your suggestion of "rentier capitalism" does ultimately fit much better.
> What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:
I don't actually believe we should (yet?), but I kinda wish we'd just ban Medium.com both for its hostile UI and its generally low-quality TEDx-like content.
Also, the distinct and clear path it carved that went directly towards enshittification. Its not (only) that its so shitty, its that it once represented a truly better thing.
I still have a belief that capitalism and free markets are superior, but not the way we're doing it now. I'm not trying to no true scotsman here, but a man born in germany to 2 austrian parents and dressed in a kilt is no true scotsman.
as i see things there are some major issues are
- Removing money from gold standard, allowing power to accrue to those who can control the supply. Instead of competing for what consumer wants, they just change the rules, or tax the future to line their own pockets today.
- People have bought the lie that the government can do net good things for the economy, not just move the peas around the plate. I think it started with income tax and the social safety net (whereas prior we had charitable works that largely worked by proximity -- you knew the person you were helping or being helped by, meaning you had a spiritual need to treat them humanely, vs a money printer government which seems like it can go on forever, but see my point above about real money.
- An image based society, we no longer appreciate and compete on enduring values like long marriages, objects that last a life time (or longer), making a hard choice that denies ourselves the appearance of gain etc. For example our clothes only need to last long enough to make that IG/TikTok post, then they can be discarded. A BMW when photographed appears identical to the one which has its $120 a month options rented or not.
- Sex (porn/hookups) and attention(likes, foodie calls, onlyfans) have become huge traps to men, and women, respectively. Meaning people feel like why would I work years/decades to get what others print money for, or why would I preserve something my partner might want when I can get what I want in exchange. These tools have made every boy/man a john, and every girl/woman a prostitute exchanging artificial attention for sex, and artificial sex for attention ...
We cannot make real progress while we continue to applaud fake things. A millionaire isnt what it used to be, and neither is anything we see on social media.
- Return to gold standard and constitutionalize that governments cannot take on debt (they can only work with current cash reserves, not even projected taxes).
- A better education system (likely not a state run monopoly) will help people think smarter about everything.
- Social media influencers need to be held liable for inaccuracies and sued into oblivion for what amounts to false advertising and fraud
- Pornography needs to be age gated (and enforced) like alcohol, lottery, and voting. Sellers need to be held accountable just as selling alcohol to an underage person is the seller's fault. So should be providing pornography. Also it should be an Opt in system at the ISP level meaning the biggest names are not accessible.
I know this will get downvoted into oblivion because there's so much content people are likely to disagree with at least one point. But this is my best working model rn for how to get back to the stability that will allow us to make real progress again as a society.
You are getting downvoted, but the article makes a similar observation.
The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.
Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due
> The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.
Locke's argument for private property ownership of land beyond space to live in not being obviously-unjust was built entirely on this: improvement of productivity of land through work and investment. Holding private land to sit on or to wildly under-use wasn't compatible with his ethical justification for private land ownership.
(not that the Second Treatise isn't full of weak reasoning—natural rights as anything "real" rather than arbitrary, LOL—but it's considering one of the top influences on the founders of the US, the founding of which was a major step in the rise of capitalism to global dominance)
haha, whelp. I sometimes can tell what posts are going to be outside the Overton window, but my nature compels me to say them anyways because I believe they're true.
Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. "the invisible hand" sounds good and all, but the problem is that if the owners of capital control the profits produced by the mobilization of capital, then money and power will inevitably become concentrated enough that those capitalists both benefit from and become capable of restricting market freedom. The idea that free markets are a stable state of affairs is a faulty assumption.
[edit to note: this is only one of the many internal contradictions of capitalism, but the most relevant to your argument imo]
You have not understood what I said. I'm not talking about unappealing features of the idealized version of capitalism that GP is lionizing. I'm talking about how capitalism as described brings about the conditions that undermine free competition, by its nature. You're talking about it as though we can just agree as a society "we're doing free competition now" and that's that. Capitalists won't agree to this -- every incentive leads them to want to restrict competition. And they have too much control for a notional agreement among citizens or whatever to overcome.
The proposal is clear from the comment if you read it: it's not a proposal about a socioeconomic system, but about how to analyze socioeconomic systems. Namely, that we shouldn't just think about the first-order consequences of things being arranged according to a certain system, but we should also think about what forces inherent in the system are driving it to change so that it is organized differently. That is all that I am interested in talking about at this point.
Yes I generally agree that the absolute version of "Free markets" as in 0 government (it's very existence is a distortion), is not going to work either, and it will just lead to interested groups using acquired forms of power to create distortions in their own favor.
More so I'd propose a system of government which has baked into its constitution things which remove the power of capital from politics. For example lobbying and non-individual and non limited campaign donations are 2 such things that must be not allowed.
Under capitalism, the wealthy class tend to be the trendsetters and tastemakers, if no reason other than they can afford the biggest billboard and most magnified microphones, so I don't see a path to the solution you've described, if you believe that societal trends need course correction away from this.
I see assertions in favor of a conservative (in the literal sense; a return to a lost past prosperous age) viewpoint, but no attempt to justify why these assertions are accurate or why the proposed solutions would be effective.
Public assets (roads, sewers, other kinds of infrastructure) are always going to be "debt" in the myopic accounting from the perspective of the government. Requiring zero debt means selling these assets off to (presumably private) entities, which sounds like a terrible idea for reasons aligned closely with the kinds of arguments found in Doctorow's blog post.
maybe I'm not fully understanding your point, or public accounting, but it seems me that if government followed this order of operations
1. Collected sufficient taxes (ie money) to pay for a work
2. Built the work spending down the money
3. counted the work as an asset on the public balance sheet (ie, we own the pipes)
Wouldn't that mean no debt and not selling it off to corporations?
The gold standard was far from stable - just look at the US’s economic history - it was continually swinging between inflation and deflation with regular crises, panics, recessions and depressions.
The question you need to ask is “would there generally be a relationship between the amount of gold on hand and the amount of money required in the economy?” There is no reason why the answer to that question would be “yes” over an extended period of time - you can set up some kind of sensible exchange rate at the start but it eventually (and invariably) gets out of whack.
It’s the same with fixed exchange rates, pegged currencies, etc. - these things tend to exist for a time and eventually don’t - because they’re ultimately not sustainable.
yes this is a good point. There is little specifically about gold besides rarity and intrinsic value/desirability that makes the gold standard ideal.
I actually think the function is that it's tied to _something_ of intrinsic value, that the intrinsic value isn't wildly fluctuating, and that it's roughly fixed in supply. Then by tying the currency to the resource it means that the currency cannot be created (fiat) without addressing those properties of the backing asset.
The ending section discussing Web Environment Integrity, Google's recent foray into attestation technology, with the ultimate goal of ensuring you're not running an ad-blocker or doing anything to limit their rent-seeking behavior is great:
"Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread!"
> How does this affect browser modifications and extensions?
Web Environment Integrity attests the legitimacy of the underlying hardware and software stack, it does not restrict the indicated application’s functionality: E.g. if the browser allows extensions, the user may use extensions; if a browser is modified, the modified browser can still request Web Environment Integrity attestation.
They can play with semantics all they want but the point of WEI is so the server can tell apart modified and unmodified browsers at which point the server can tell modified browsers to go away.
I don't know if it's me nor if the author is aware that in order to read the article I need to enshittificate myself with a medium account to proceed. Please Mr. Doctorow de-enshittificate yourself from Medium!
Medium was an early adopter of the trend. It tried to pretend it was a little bit better than the rest of the web although it was always a little bit worse. It pulled a Jedi mind trick on people, particularly those too lazy to blog. (Like the guy who was blown away he got 70 views on a Medium post, I had to break it to him that it would take 70,000 views on a blog post to blow me away.)
It may be less ironic than it seems. If there is anyone impervious to the concept of enshittification it would have to be the paid Mediumm subscriber, they need to get this message more than anyone.
Indeed, f* medium, how did they get to be gatekeepers to so much of everyone's content anyway?
I did register (free), and am now paywalled to upgrade to read almost anything on there - it would be ok if it was just 'paid content' where the authors are getting paid, but it seems to be way beyond that.
I think Cory is going a little too harsh on Uber/Amazon. People use them because they provide convenience and ease-of-use, and are willing to pay for a better customer experience. If anything, 'taxi medallions' are literally the original form of feudalism and collecting rent from doing nothing.
In the places I've lived, the real problem with taxi medallions is that municipalities failed to keep the medallion price in line with its value, which created a secondary rental market. Uber fares tend to cost more than taxis after their initial loss-leader to break into the market, and Uber drivers make less than cab drivers after costs.
It's one of the reasons I continue to purchase from them. I don't return a lot but I've never had a problem with it - and at least once they surprised me on that.
I think you misunderstand his point slightly. Amazon, Aliexpress, etc. aren't feudal from the buyers' perspective, they are from the sellers' side.
The taxi permits also fit to some extent, though the one time payment isn't exactly rent seeking but more for creating artificial scarcity. They're BabyTaxiShibaCoins from the 60s with about as much price fluctuation as the average crypto shitcoin according to wikipedia.
> People use them because they provide convenience and ease-of-use, and are willing to pay for a better customer experience.
This is a worthwhile talking point. There was nothing holding back taxi companies from building an uber-like experience, just there was no incentive to do so.
Uber took advantage of that opportunity to spin up an exploitative business that did an end-run around existing regulation of that industry.
All that said - many cab companies now have uber-like apps.
I don't feel bad for the cab companies particularly; there's too many damn cars in big cities. That's a city planning problem. I do feel sorry for all the drivers out there, as it's a tough gig no matter who you're working for.
His observations are mostly on the mark, but I'm kinda dubious this is actually any better or worse than ever before. I'm not sure if there's an econometric measure of rents per GDP or whatever, but I kinda doubt it's sky high by a historical standard.
I don't have a full essay on the subject, but I have a gut feeling that the informalization of society has relieved a ton of useless costs on people. Spending money on cultural imperatives like going to church, wearing a tie to the office, wearing diamonds to look prosperous are no longer mandatory in much of the first world.
It is just me, or is having every paragraph of a 200 paragraph essay punctillated by a link that takes you to another page full of paragraphs dotted with links a little too overwhelming?
I didn't follow the links. I generally like Cory Doctorow but this was just a huge doom rant.
>there's still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips.
I disagree with this statement - at the very least for safety. Modern safety systems are leagues ahead of anything from even 10 years ago - and microelectronic machines (MEMs) and all the various sensors and processors are key to making that possible. It's not just the obvious things like pedestrian and car collision detection and brake assist - it's also things like sensors that can better time the deployment of airbags.
Cars are only getting safer and safer. (Though there's obviously the problem with trucks and SUVs, but that's a side discussion)
Another aspect is fuel efficiency. In the name of fuel efficiency, many new systems had to be developed and older ones made more complex. We can't just have fixed valve timings anymore - we need varible valve timing. We can't just shoot out exhaust, we use EGR. And again, these systems need advanced sensors and processors more often then not. This complexity hurts the reliability of cars somewhat. But it's worth it to not only increase power, but also improve fuel efficiency.
Also, this isn't true at all:
>The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write.
I guess finite state automata just don't exist.
The rest of this article seems like a mess that almost doesn't deal with cars. There are some real, legitimate complaints with some modern cars. Some automakers have gone the route of touchscreens where physical controls would be far better for a variety of reasons. Subscriptions for features that don't cost the automaker anything after the fact is also awful. But the article rants on about (in my view) unrelated topics so much that it detracts from more concrete problems.
Sure, but it's a side discussion to the concern the post originally brought up - which suggested that increasing complexity and use of microprocessors made cars less safe - which is obviously untrue. The SUV problem is separate from the discussions it makes.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] thread- Sign up with Google
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https://archive.li/wT815
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-de...
Incidentally I follow him on Mastodon and saw this yesterday. Hacker News is really slow to pick up Cory Doctorow's stuff despite ostensibly being full of freedom-loving techies.
Doctorow's egalitarian, syndicalist and somewhat socialist tendencies don't usually play well with that crowd.
I'm going to continue shouting into the void until the void realizes that independent and distributed ownership is a necessary precondition for libertarian forms of governance. Authoritarianism and monopolies go hand in hand. If you don't understand this, then you aren't a freedom fighter, you're an antipope.
Seems rather silly to think we have to be discussing a new opinion piece, that is not tied to any particular recent event, as soon as it comes out.
> ostensibly
this is a tech news site in an incubator. they're not here for freedom, they're here to make $$$.
a non-trivial number of posters here are, or wish to be, the people that Doctorow is criticizing.
https://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/comic-book-c...
Same with jazz, DnD, same with rock music, same with rap
No one seems to have much rage for the environment, just their mind palace
Grandpa’s definitions do not need to be our definitions.
People are playing some banal brinksmanship game “oooh that fall afoul of some vague mutable truth we’ve been conditioned to believe is immutable; get im fellas!”
What are you all going to do to STOP the problems? Debating the diagnosis is allowing it to spread. Only real change in agency will stop it and no one seems into that.
So why sit here thinking answering your questions is useful?
FYI it isn't a strawman to ask whether you have a cogent argument for why technofeudalism isn't happening.
You asserted the proposition that technofeudalism isn't a thing (strongly implied) The respondent didn't construct a superficially similar proposition (I.e. a strawman) and simply asked what support you have for your proposition.
A strawman would have been like if someone argued against your proposition that "But the Snowden leaks showed we live in a surveillance state!" This is a Strawman because it constructs a superficially similar position to "technofeudalism is a thing" without actually at all arguing against the position that technofeudalism is not a thing.
Light from one “edge” of the universe has yet to reach the edge directly across from
Same reason we need shifts in gravity to detect planets
Diffusion, attenuation of signal given all the other stuff are physical properties of the universe, they’re properties in us
The universe prefers tribalism; a quasar far off over there, neutron star far off over there.
There are a lot of meat suits who refuse to propagate the signal.
Doesn’t mean it won’t shine bright in some local part of space.
Even so, are we better off if people decide to stop driving, however misguided their reasons?
Is the future better of setting themselves aside to clean up after us? Are they not allowed to be free from our mess? One unique in the history of the species.
Why is today free from the consequences they put upon tomorrow?
The long term investment in us is actually selfish. It’s akin to expecting our religion to be the next generations
This to me is what is really happening. A good symbol of this is income inequality and to a lesser extent, no real action on climate change.
Eventually, the "lords" will be in their castles were we most people bake. The "knights" could be the tech people.
Unfortunately the lords think they will be able to survive in little mansions and that climate change will never make them miserable personally. So they have spent small amounts of capital brainwashing rubes against taking any action so they can continue raking in large amounts of capital with destructive practices.
That way "upper management" has been turning workers against themselves for ages; just convince the more lucky of them that they are entitled and destined to be part of the elite. Someday.
It's working splendidly.
In it the Knights were the devs, CEOs were earls, Kings were presidents/dictators.
Users (naturally) were serfs.
It fits pretty well to current megacorp structure.
To the extent that cars did get worse, it was mostly to meet stringent emissions regulations, not computers or capitalism. So yeah, maybe worse for owners but better for people around them.
Sadly, it seems like capitalism, yet again, delivered what people really wanted, whether it's shitty toy cars or algorithmic Tik Tok feed. It held a mirror to the society and we don't like what we're seeing.
That mirror is heavily influencing the way we behave.
And we really, really don't like some of the things that some people want.
There was a recent story about how people do not like the touchscreens and tech in their cars.
https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-...
Personally I'm not a fan of most of the recent car tech, it's often trying too hard and not making things any easier for people.
I would love a car that does not have a single display and just connects to my phone or pad for setting things up and streaming audio. All controls should be haptic buttons, switches, whatever. Minimal software required to run the car. No internet connection, no subscriptions.
The only extras that I would keep are:
* Heated seats
* Automatic air conditioning
* Hill hold control
* Automatic transmission (not standard in Europe)
That’s it.
The creation of the "CANbus", two-wire protocol that wraps around the car to communicate, and the movement of all portions of the car to the CANbus, is what has lead to incredible reliability.
It turns out that these two wires can be made incredibly reliable, and that communications across it (steering wheel, accelerator, brakes, tire pressure, speeds, A/C, etc. etc.) just makes sense.
--------------
All those haptic buttons are "just" CANbus interfaces in practice. Now don't get me wrong, I prefer buttons too. But the next leg of "cheapness" naturally was to shift to an iPad-like capacitive screen, since one-tablet connected to the CANbus is far cheaper (and more reliable) than 20 individual buttons (each of which has a set life and dies on their own).
That being said: physical buttons are clearly more intuitive than an iPad-like floating-moving button that is inconsistent and stateful.
Not to mention the various privacy and security risks involved with permanent connectivity, escalating software complexity and questionable ownership of the devices built into the car.
I think they’re all galvanized now. Some parts still rust, but having had some 80s vehicles rust out… plus they always tried to sell some “undercoating” to protect that was snake oil as far as I can tell.
Also has all the features you mentioned.
You need a big screen for cameras and such, because visibility in a lot of modern cars is about the same as the driver's seat in a Sherman tank. Unfortunately.
Malibu vs Bel Air crash test.
You better believe that modern cars are better, its incredible how _BAD_ cars were before we cared about safety.
And that's just safety. Today's cars have better MPG, go faster, have more power, easier to maintain, consistently hit 150,000 miles, etc. etc.
Monkey wrenches, kitchen aids, washing machines. Even static tools like frying pans, screw drivers. You name it.
But not cars.
> Cars are heavily regulated
I love that both of these statements, while reflecting opposing ends of political philosophy, are entirely true.
After Ralph Nader published Unsafe at any Speed, the car industry set their goons after him. Blurb from Wikipedia
> In response to Nader's criticisms, GM attempted to sabotage Nader's reputation. It "(1) conducted a series of interviews with acquaintances of the plaintiff, 'questioning them about, and casting aspersions upon [his] political, social, racial and religious views; his integrity; his sexual proclivities and inclinations; and his personal habits'; (2) kept him under surveillance in public places for an unreasonable length of time; (3) caused him to be accosted by girls for the purpose of entrapping him into illicit relationships; (4) made threatening, harassing and obnoxious telephone calls to him; (5) tapped his telephone and eavesdropped, by means of mechanical and electronic equipment, on his private conversations with others; and (6) conducted a 'continuing' and harassing investigation of him."[12]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed
Bel Air? 1955? We can go well into the 90's with many cars which were little more than sheet metal shells on a frame. My oldest friend was killed in his '89 Nissan sentra after he was hit from behind by a wreckless driver sending the little tin foil box into a pole and tree shredding it into a pile of scrap metal along with him.
> consistently hit 150,000 miles
Tell that to Merc 300D's. But aside from anomalies drive-line reliability greatly improved int he 90's after we ditched carbs and early fuel injection. My 1995 tahoe had 175k on the clock when sold and only needed a transfer case rebuild after my mother shifted it while moving (broke the fork and was stuck in 4hi). After the awful demise of my friend I sold my '96 civic (4th owner) with over 300k on the odo, it broke at 300 and I believe it was around 350-360 when I sold it. My 2004 Jeep Libery made it to 220k before it started falling apart and sold it to a guy who ran it for another few years (the 3.7 v6 in them were crap too).
> easier to maintain, consistently hit 150,000 miles, etc. etc.
Back in March my friend woke up to find that his less than 2 month old 2023 Kia Sportage hybrid stone dead in his driveway. Dealer dropped off a 15 year old loaner and took 40 days to find and fix the problem. They told him it was a "bad wiring harness". Super easy maintenance, eh?
> go faster, have more power,
The amount of morons who think they are the king of the road has massively increased thanks to COVID and the last thing we need is to empower these morons with faster piles of metal.
I'm going to have to strongly disagree here, particularly w/r/t reliability.
We purchased my wife's vehicle new in 2014. While it's relatively well-regarded and we're happy with it overall, it's been far from trouble-free. We recently replaced the engine due to a well-known mechanic defect - but it was a defect that should have been apparent much earlier than it was, but went unnoticed because of a firmware issue in the ECM. In addition to that, we've had problems with the infotainment system needing to be manually rebooted every month or so in response to increasing "weirdness" over time. The buttons on the steering wheel stopped working consistently in ~2019. There were workaround for a while, but these days all of the buttons on the left side do the same thing (activate the connected phone's microphone), and the ones on the right don't work at all. I've torn the whole steering column and dash apart to verify that it's not a wiring issue; it has to be something wrong with the infotainment system at this point.
This wasn't our only experience with newer vehicles. Every one we've ever owned - or just worked on for friends - is plagued by these sorts of electronic "gremlins". They get worse over time, too. Yes, new vehicles are very nice with all the bells and whistles when they're new... but those same features quickly become "just one more thing to break" as the vehicles age. To make matter worse, they're typically very expensive to fix, even if you have the skills, time, and tools to do it yourself. I'm already $1,500 deep into fixing those buttons on the steering wheel, and haven't succeeded yet.
I drive a 2000 Jeep Wrangler. Granted, it's "only" 24 years old, but it has been far more reliable than any other vehicle my family has owned since I got it. When I bought it, in ~2011, I was looking for an older model - ideally it would have been a CJ-7, which was made from 1976-1986 - right at your 40 year cutoff. I've replaced several major components, sure - the engine, the entire rear end, the front suspension, etc. - but it has >200k miles on it, and the engine was poorly maintained when I bought the vehicle. What's more, all of that combined cost less than the engine replacement in my wife's 2015 model year vehicle.
There's much less to go wrong, too. There's no infotainment system to start acting funny, no backup camera to break, no buttons on the steering wheel to start doing random things they're not supposed to... it's just a vehicle.
Complexity is the enemy of reliability, and modern vehicles are very complex. Some of that is due to the market demanding new features. Some of it is due to government regulations. Some of it is just manufacturers using more complex solutions because time marches on.
... I have more to say here, but no time. Maybe I'll come back :)
It's interesting that users of US based web-sites (are you an american?) claim that cars are getting better. While people from developing countries say the opposite. Especially, their mechanics. Particularly, they claim that new cars are less reliable, less repairable, and metal is as thick as a can (popular complaint).
This is because of state (mostly California) and federal laws passed, with the most aggressive taking effect in 2015.
The only reason Ford isn't selling you a Shit-Wagon is because they can't, by law.
Touchscreens are ass for doing anything while driving. I live in a city and cannot safely change my AC unless I'm at a stoplight. No knobs / only touchscreen is definitely a dealbreaker for my next vehicle, and all research suggests that the "normies" hate them too.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/08/yes-touchscreens-really...
https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/good-news-touchs...
For a while he was trending towards clickbaity articles.
I think the customer has just changed. Consumers don't have money anymore. Businesses do. Maybe said a different way, for the highest margin products you are targeting businesses.
A consumer spending 100k is a often a lifetime purchase. A business spending that may just be so they can improve efficiency by 5% or hang onto onto their budget next year.
Your competition are large companies taking small amounts of value from a huge number of customers. Consumers have gotten used to "not paying" (e.g. paying through ad views) and, for that reason, a more traditional exchange has become difficult.
This problem seems to be that consumer companies are moving toward an extraction at scale model. It is less market choice but often produces a free or subsidized product.
A lot of companies are going down the “captive customer” path wherever they can. Rental properties are a good example of this.
Nowadays, there are a handful of compulsory services that you, the renter, must pay for on top the rent and there are no options to cancel (the federal government is currently targeting this practice).
I worked for a startup in the media space that did the exact same thing. As soon as we figured out that we could pitch our product to media properties while onboarding their advertisers and forcing them to become our paying users instead of the media companies themselves, we found product-market fit and took off.
Off the top of my head:
- cable TV I don't use
- a trash retrieval service my friends don't use (the service is to take it from the apartment door to the dumpster)
- parking space someone without a car doesn't use
Good to know I might be able to tell my landlord someday that I don't care about the deal they got with Comcast, I'm not paying for the stupid cable.
The garbage collection service cut a deal with the landlord to pay them $X/mo./unit, and helpfully suggested adding it to the lease so they have a 100% subscription rate.
The landlord is the customer, not you.
- Can't have more than one trash bag per night
- Trash and recycling must be taken on different nights (I think largely as a result of the above)
- they don't service Friday or Saturday, the two biggest days for trash during the week. This means trash is often sitting outside for 24-48 hours because the complex doesn't have any rules around how long your trash can be set out for.
- Trash can't be too heavy or bulky. These things are not quantified, so sometimes the trash just isn't taken and you have no idea why
- You must use 13 gallon trash bags or larger. They won't pickup smaller ones (no idea why this exists)
- You must use their exceedingly small bin or they won't pick it up. The bin has no lid. If the trash doesn't slide out of the bin naturally, they will refuse to pick it up (IE, they won't tip it to empty it. If it pulls at all they just leave it)
On top of all that, they constantly leave fliers on our doors trying to sell trash bag subscription service through the company. I looked it up out of curiosity and they want $17 a month for the privilege
...You...recognize that's not a sustainable state of affairs, right?
Ultimately, if consumers don't have money, the economy will start to collapse. The upper echelons can feed on each other for a while, but you need an economic base to support the whole edifice.
Plus, if "consumers" are unable to get what they need for survival and thriving for long enough, they're going to decide (correctly) that someone has taken it from them, and take steps to get it back by whatever means necessary.
> Plus, if "consumers" are unable to get what they need for survival and thriving for long enough, they're going to decide (correctly) that someone has taken it from them, and take steps to get it back by whatever means necessary.
They'd better do it fast before rich people figure out that robot dogs with lethal weapons and AI vision are a great replacement for human guards that might have the downside of having any empathy. As soon as defense of property rights is fully automated, revolution is impossible.
All entities run out of deployable assets eventually.
A lot of this could be a zero interest rate phenomenon.
They will take on debt in lieu of money. And all signs point to lots of that happening, since spending is still high.
Anti-trust enforcement. Each and every big-name company you can name needs to be broken up into at least 30 different business entities. The current FTC is taking the first steps in the right direction, but it's going to take a lot of time & effort to build that department back up after 30+ years of them being inactive.
- reversal of Citizens United
- higher taxes on extremely rich businesses and individuals
All these things would help, but they are also government actions, which have been captured by business interests.
there is a lot of history as to how this was done before.
The more inequality grows, the poorer average man becomes, the more this becomes true.
The more everything is enshittified, the harder it becomes to hold on to your money. It's a vicious circle.
That's seems like a fact-free assertion. Both (inflation adjusted) disposable income and actual consumption spending for US households have grown at a steady rate since WWII. The only substantial deviation from trend (upwards for income, downward for consumption) were 2 yeas of COVID.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEC96
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/produc...
The game online for a very long time has been: grow as fast as possible, then figure out a way to monetize. Free wins in this game, making it almost impossible for anything paid for by the consumer to compete.
So thus we have today's world where the game is: grow fast with free, then enshittify once your network effect has locked everyone in.
It works incredibly well.
* Not 'cromulent'
I wish I could remember where I heard this quote:
"We find two things to always happen in human societies across time and geography:
1. People dancing to rhythmic music at night especially if it is a moonlit night.
2. Some form of feudalism."
I wonder how much of it is game theory (e.g. all companies want to become monopolies) and how much is human psychology (e.g. "I want to be the alpha monkey"). Probably some combination of both.
We tend to judge the whole feudalism by its late stage, when pampered barons lived in huge estates and their only real risk was eating and drinking themselves to death, but that was also the stage which led to the system's demise.
So they did "cloud farming" :) The people who had access to wider markets and had enough wealth to be able to survive one bad season - provided the infrastructure and shouldered most of the risks. In exchange for the only thing available to peasants - their labor.
As any power hierarchy it quickly turned to shit, but the idea was sound.
One way i've been thinking of this is crowd sourced alternatives to major apps but the problem with this is the backends. Lets say you make a anti-enshittified youtube client. Well youtube is just gonna change their backend to break the app. Well now you gotta have crowdsourced efforts to constantly reverse engineer their backend.
The text's theory of history requires a hidden variable that controls the feudalism->capitalism->feudalism process, but no candidate for a hidden variable is suggested by the author. Sure, any reader can think up some candidates for the hidden variable, but letting the reader fill in the blanks is a con.
England moved to a landlord-rent model for their agrarian society, whereas France moved to a tax on production model for their agrarian society. The distinction there is subtle, but the English model encourages improvidence to ensure you can make the rent, and that improvidence leads to increased output, pressure on workers to move to cities and away from their familial land. The French model didn't put as much pressure on maximizing productivity, and their post feudal agrarian society was perhaps a little slower to take off economically, but wasn't burdened with quite the same social upheaval that capitalism led to in England.
It's a very interesting history, and I do wish we'd been able to see more post-feudal societies develop. I think there's a number of different economic models out there that would be functional. They might not be as economically strong, but they might have different strengths w.r.t. population health, happiness, or sustainability.
During the industrial and chemical revolutions, the technology to feed a large population outpaced the technology to control large populations. Feudalism fell to capitalism because society became too large to be effectively ordered by feudal lords. But this is now changing thanks to the information technology revolution. With information technology, we are developing a new means of feudalism that scales to billions of people.
I don't think the entire economy is reverting back to feudalism, I think it makes more sense to think of the digital economy as its own thing that's speedrunning the exact process we already went through once. Next step is then what, digital commoners and land reform maybe, proper digital currencies and citizenship, actual privacy protection? Feudalism on the internet can only exist for the same reason it existed offline, people flock to fiefdoms because they perform functions in a modern economy provided by a proper state.
The resulting "agency" has historically been pretty violent, when the injustice and tension are too severe. So it's wise to constantly be course-correcting by recognizing the new skins of feudalism and wresting power away from its lords.
> Read the full story with a free account.
Please don't link to Medium when you can link to, in this case, Pluralistic. https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-de...
Medium.com has been thoroughly enshittified :)
> What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:
as i see things there are some major issues are
- Removing money from gold standard, allowing power to accrue to those who can control the supply. Instead of competing for what consumer wants, they just change the rules, or tax the future to line their own pockets today.
- People have bought the lie that the government can do net good things for the economy, not just move the peas around the plate. I think it started with income tax and the social safety net (whereas prior we had charitable works that largely worked by proximity -- you knew the person you were helping or being helped by, meaning you had a spiritual need to treat them humanely, vs a money printer government which seems like it can go on forever, but see my point above about real money.
- An image based society, we no longer appreciate and compete on enduring values like long marriages, objects that last a life time (or longer), making a hard choice that denies ourselves the appearance of gain etc. For example our clothes only need to last long enough to make that IG/TikTok post, then they can be discarded. A BMW when photographed appears identical to the one which has its $120 a month options rented or not.
- Sex (porn/hookups) and attention(likes, foodie calls, onlyfans) have become huge traps to men, and women, respectively. Meaning people feel like why would I work years/decades to get what others print money for, or why would I preserve something my partner might want when I can get what I want in exchange. These tools have made every boy/man a john, and every girl/woman a prostitute exchanging artificial attention for sex, and artificial sex for attention ...
We cannot make real progress while we continue to applaud fake things. A millionaire isnt what it used to be, and neither is anything we see on social media.
also see my pseudo rant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34560255
How would I fix things?
- Return to gold standard and constitutionalize that governments cannot take on debt (they can only work with current cash reserves, not even projected taxes).
- A better education system (likely not a state run monopoly) will help people think smarter about everything.
- Social media influencers need to be held liable for inaccuracies and sued into oblivion for what amounts to false advertising and fraud
- Pornography needs to be age gated (and enforced) like alcohol, lottery, and voting. Sellers need to be held accountable just as selling alcohol to an underage person is the seller's fault. So should be providing pornography. Also it should be an Opt in system at the ISP level meaning the biggest names are not accessible.
I know this will get downvoted into oblivion because there's so much content people are likely to disagree with at least one point. But this is my best working model rn for how to get back to the stability that will allow us to make real progress again as a society.
The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.
Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due
Locke's argument for private property ownership of land beyond space to live in not being obviously-unjust was built entirely on this: improvement of productivity of land through work and investment. Holding private land to sit on or to wildly under-use wasn't compatible with his ethical justification for private land ownership.
(not that the Second Treatise isn't full of weak reasoning—natural rights as anything "real" rather than arbitrary, LOL—but it's considering one of the top influences on the founders of the US, the founding of which was a major step in the rise of capitalism to global dominance)
If those downvoters would comment, we could all have a healthy debate.
[edit to note: this is only one of the many internal contradictions of capitalism, but the most relevant to your argument imo]
More so I'd propose a system of government which has baked into its constitution things which remove the power of capital from politics. For example lobbying and non-individual and non limited campaign donations are 2 such things that must be not allowed.
Public assets (roads, sewers, other kinds of infrastructure) are always going to be "debt" in the myopic accounting from the perspective of the government. Requiring zero debt means selling these assets off to (presumably private) entities, which sounds like a terrible idea for reasons aligned closely with the kinds of arguments found in Doctorow's blog post.
1. Collected sufficient taxes (ie money) to pay for a work 2. Built the work spending down the money 3. counted the work as an asset on the public balance sheet (ie, we own the pipes)
Wouldn't that mean no debt and not selling it off to corporations?
The question you need to ask is “would there generally be a relationship between the amount of gold on hand and the amount of money required in the economy?” There is no reason why the answer to that question would be “yes” over an extended period of time - you can set up some kind of sensible exchange rate at the start but it eventually (and invariably) gets out of whack.
It’s the same with fixed exchange rates, pegged currencies, etc. - these things tend to exist for a time and eventually don’t - because they’re ultimately not sustainable.
I actually think the function is that it's tied to _something_ of intrinsic value, that the intrinsic value isn't wildly fluctuating, and that it's roughly fixed in supply. Then by tying the currency to the resource it means that the currency cannot be created (fiat) without addressing those properties of the backing asset.
But it's profane.
"Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread!"
You'll be denied.. but you can request it.
Like I _can_ install my banks app on my rooted phone. It won't run but I can install it.
It may be less ironic than it seems. If there is anyone impervious to the concept of enshittification it would have to be the paid Mediumm subscriber, they need to get this message more than anyone.
He has a rundown of the various ways to access his content at the bottom:
> How to get Pluralistic:
> Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
> Pluralistic.net
> Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
> https://pluralistic.net/plura-list
> Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
> https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic
> Medium (no ads, paywalled):
> https://doctorow.medium.com/
(Latest Medium column: "When the Town Square Shatters: Once again, sf fandom shows us how to use the internet" https://doctorow.medium.com/when-the-town-square-shatters-a7...)
> Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
> https://twitter.com/doctorow
> Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
> https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralisti...
To the point of the commenter, you can't read that as it's blocked. A better approach is to change the link to this HN post.
I did register (free), and am now paywalled to upgrade to read almost anything on there - it would be ok if it was just 'paid content' where the authors are getting paid, but it seems to be way beyond that.
The taxi permits also fit to some extent, though the one time payment isn't exactly rent seeking but more for creating artificial scarcity. They're BabyTaxiShibaCoins from the 60s with about as much price fluctuation as the average crypto shitcoin according to wikipedia.
This is a worthwhile talking point. There was nothing holding back taxi companies from building an uber-like experience, just there was no incentive to do so.
Uber took advantage of that opportunity to spin up an exploitative business that did an end-run around existing regulation of that industry.
All that said - many cab companies now have uber-like apps.
I don't feel bad for the cab companies particularly; there's too many damn cars in big cities. That's a city planning problem. I do feel sorry for all the drivers out there, as it's a tough gig no matter who you're working for.
I don't have a full essay on the subject, but I have a gut feeling that the informalization of society has relieved a ton of useless costs on people. Spending money on cultural imperatives like going to church, wearing a tie to the office, wearing diamonds to look prosperous are no longer mandatory in much of the first world.
I didn't follow the links. I generally like Cory Doctorow but this was just a huge doom rant.
Everythings' terrible. Got it.
Now how do I participate in fixing it?
I disagree with this statement - at the very least for safety. Modern safety systems are leagues ahead of anything from even 10 years ago - and microelectronic machines (MEMs) and all the various sensors and processors are key to making that possible. It's not just the obvious things like pedestrian and car collision detection and brake assist - it's also things like sensors that can better time the deployment of airbags.
Cars are only getting safer and safer. (Though there's obviously the problem with trucks and SUVs, but that's a side discussion)
Another aspect is fuel efficiency. In the name of fuel efficiency, many new systems had to be developed and older ones made more complex. We can't just have fixed valve timings anymore - we need varible valve timing. We can't just shoot out exhaust, we use EGR. And again, these systems need advanced sensors and processors more often then not. This complexity hurts the reliability of cars somewhat. But it's worth it to not only increase power, but also improve fuel efficiency.
Also, this isn't true at all:
>The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write.
I guess finite state automata just don't exist.
The rest of this article seems like a mess that almost doesn't deal with cars. There are some real, legitimate complaints with some modern cars. Some automakers have gone the route of touchscreens where physical controls would be far better for a variety of reasons. Subscriptions for features that don't cost the automaker anything after the fact is also awful. But the article rants on about (in my view) unrelated topics so much that it detracts from more concrete problems.
There are less and less cars and more and more SUVs, though, so it's kind of a central issue when discussing safety.
Wow. Love this.