Interested to see the conversation here on HN. Tech independence and the idea of owning the systems and machines we operate are topics that frequently surface among enthusiasts. Yet, independence may not be the best way to describe it. Does autonomy fit the bill, satisfying a sense of self-direction while also reaping the benefits of our interdependence at large?
I think that's closer. There is no full independence, it cannot exist in civilization. But the degree of control and autonomy varies, and arguably is the important stuff.
And I feel this is actually aligned with the "invisible" independence vs. "visible" one, because asking someone for help is invoking social mechanisms, with all their complexity and messiness, and basically giving up autonomy on the task.
There's a very poor political movement that I have a strong distaste for (libertarianism) which preaches pure autonomy, but almost always fails because we need to put our resources together to build infrastructure.
We don't live in a utopia where we can behave with impunity - humans need to regulate, cooperate, and manage resources
I believe every individual and organization should understand the tradeoffs between the two and have a backup plan. The backup is typically unnecessary assuming stable times but when incentives change, everyone should be vigilant for rug pulls. As an individual, I can calmly build a self-hosted inference stack based on EOL crypto mining accelerators but when building for clients, support and replacements becomes more important than budget and novelty.
while it is true that interdependence has always been there. But there are different levels. Can a person unclog the sink and toilet without calling the plumber. Can a person change the flush mechanism without calling a plumber. Can they change the bathroom fixtures without calling a contractor; Can they renovate the kitchen without hiring contractors. Can a person fix the lawn without calling professionals. Can they trim the bushes in backyard without hiring someone. Can they clear the snow themselves or would they need to hire a person. Can they wash their own car without going to car wash. Can they cook without ordering food. Can they clean without hiring cleaning people. Can the paint the wall without calling painters. Can fix the fallen button of the jacket without help. Can they cut their nails without going to a nail salon. Can they cut their own hair; Can they call their bank to figure who is billing them without using an Ai agent and cancel services they don't use. Can they invest without hiring professionals. Can they do their homework without using Ai. Can they learn how to swim without a teacher.
So there are many levels and many are more independent than others. There is a huge cost difference between one who is less interdependent and one who is very interdependent.
If you can make $100/hr and can pay a contractor $30/hr to do something, why should you do it yourself (especially if you work full time and would rather use your free time for something else)?
If the skill is quick to learn, does it make sense to pre-learn it (and maintain the skill!), or just have the resources on hand to learn it if necessary?
I think this is presupposing that your skills are fixed and if anything happens you're stuck with always being dependent on others even if it's a really bad deal for you. That's not the case for most of these
You have to make the extra $100 per hour to pay the $30. So the employer has to agree to hire you for more hours. Don't forget you have to find unpaid time to find a person who would do the job.
A lot of these skills generalize way beyond the immediate problem. I don't have a "fix the faucet" skill, I don't even think in these terms - more in terms of "operate wrench", "operate set of screwdrivers", "understand how water faucet works", "understand how plumbing works" (at high level), and these skills let me diagnose and fix many problems myself, most of them not even related to water faucet. Etc.
Other considerations:
- Sometimes you need a solution NOW. Household infra tends to break down on Saturdays and Sundays a lot for some reason.
- Sometimes it's not even about efficiency. Like, we got ourselves an allotment garden recently. Per your $100/hr vs. $30/hr math, I could and should just hire a bunch of contractors to clean it up and set it up for us. But for me, this defeats the point of getting that garden in the first place.
- Some work is too small for a contractor with necessary skills to come, unless you let them bill you for 10x the work. I had to learn how to patch holes in ceiling myself, because the price for getting the 4m x 5cm hole fixed was the same as for renovating the whole ceiling.
EDIT:
Also what 'lotsofpulp said - sometimes you want the outcome to have a very particular shape or quality level, and to guarantee it, you'd need to micromanage the contractor so badly, that in many cases it's easier to do it yourself.
There is a lot of your time involved in hiring someone else even if not active labor. And potentially stress in finding a contractor who will do a good job and the right job.
Doing it yourself can be rewarding and potentially much quicker. Why not do it yourself if you're able ( and assuming its not one of those things a pro could do in 1/10th the time).
Finding someone who will take your money is easy. Finding that they can actually be trusted to do the work correctly, on budget and on a compatible schedule may or may not take more time than actually doing the thing itself.
Also, if you do not bother to learn at all, you have no way to verify that the work is actually done correctly. People will absolutely take advantage of your ignorance.
If you are capable of doing it yourself, but choose to hire somebody else to do it, then you are not dependent. If you are not capable of doing it yourself and must have somebody else do it for you, then you are dependent.
You'll typically need to wait at home for the contractor to arrive, and while he's working. Unless you can work while you're doing that, that's $100/hr lost for that time, in addition to what you're paying the contractor.
Unless you have a spouse or partner at home who can be there, but then you're losing whatever they could have been earning.
It's the same k-shaped tug of war and general grift as ever.
A good design is an accessible design, but those with the means to pay for good design are increasingly being funneled into buying more bespoke products that prioritize materials and aesthetics over functionality. When the damn thing doesn't really work as expected, it's a waste. You don't even need to cram it full of quickly obsoleted gadgetry to pull this off. It doesn't really matter if it's durable and looks amazing when it's useless. Whatever gets you to buy another one anyway.
The only people happy with this situation are those who sell us overpriced junk. They're laughing all the way to the bank.
If we want more accessibility, we need to be making better designed products with mass appeal. We're well into a postmodern world where cost can be adjusted for any price point without sacrificing the design. Their trick is to introduce deliberate subtle flaws into products that keep you buying. It needs to stop. We need standards.
Anything we do to stop enshittification at this point is like fixing a sinking ship with duct tape. You're working against human nature, it's not going to happen.
I avoided saying "enshittification" because this is something distinct.
If you want to dilute the term, maybe it says more about some consumer beliefs than the actual problem.
I'm saying that accessible design is caught in this crossfire, not that we can't make things more accessible until we fix "enshittification".
Much of accessible design actually does overlap with what's demanded in higher-end products. We lost some of that during previous eras of enshittification back when it used to be more expensive to make such designs. Now it all costs the same. I'm saying it's now a marketing problem, not an enshittification problem.
I mostly agree with the point, and I love the little soundbite from it - "care is infrastructure" - but I also can't help but to think there is something to the "society's version" of independence. It's actually the paragraph about care being not usually thought about as infrastructure, that made me think it needs to be said.
The difference between driving your own car vs. having a spouse/friend get groceries for you is precisely the direct involvement of another person, the dependence of relationship there. Yes, the car needs maintenance and roads and fuel/electricity, etc., we're all connected through network of relationships this way, but those relationships are indirect, they're mediated through things.
If I need something now[0], the car is there, fueled and ready, and so are roads and streetlights, and my watch tells me the store is open. I can make decisions myself, react to situations, and there are no other people I need to consider. There is no power relationships, no messy social stuff. My car won't be elsewhere because they had a sudden appointment, or be awkward to operate because my kid had an argument with its kid in the morning, etc.
To be clear: I'm not saying we should seek to distance ourselves from other people, and eschew deep, real relationships. But I am saying that the distance and things intermediating is actually a feature in many cases, and that kind of independence is valuable.
Why? I'm not sure. Two main factor I know are real, are:
- Social stuff is messy and exhausting, you don't want to invoke it every time you need to take trash out or fix a leak, if you can avoid it;
- Doing something yourself is often immediate, while asking for help (including hired help) takes much, much longer, so this kind of independence is worth it for time/focus savings
Just some thought. Again, I mostly agree with the author, and am grateful this article was posted here.
--
[0] - Figuratively, I don't actually drive myself.
I find the article to be morally upright and goodfeeling nonsense being used as a cudgel to redefine independence as dependence rather than acknowledging that the two factors coexist in different concentrations depending on class.
Independence is not infrastructural support, it is *choice*. You may depend on a housekeeper, but I depend on my own body to clean. That housekeeper doesn't get to say "I'm too busy to do my job"; not many times, at least. Because wealth means you get a new housekeeper, while poverty means you get a single aging body.
In the context of a world with AI increasingly being positioned to become a mediator of reality and access, I find the article distasteful and dishonest.
Just for the record - it's not a class thing; the colonial cultures stem from the Viking culture (largely) which favoured independence over interdependence.
Most other cultures favour interdependence - Asia, rather famously, doesn't have a pension/superannuation program (in general) because their cultures are heavily geared toward elderly living with their children and grandchildren.
How is that not pseudo science. Colonialism and Vikings would be separated hundreds of years and long distances. And there are no indication Vikings were less dependent on each other than in other iron age cultures.
Not sure why you think lashing out with claims of pseudo science is anything but poor behaviour and misinformation, but let's have a quick look at your claims.
1. Colonialism and bookings would he separated by hundreds of years...
Vikings were colonists, famous colonies include Normandy, large parts of the British isles, and, Russia.
Now that they also settled in other lands.
2. The iron age comparison.
Not sure how carefully you read, but you might notice that there is a parenthesised word in my comment, (generally) indicating precisely what you are arguing i missed.
Before pensions in the West, they'd get help from other relatives, nieces and nephews most commonly or others from the extended family. If there were no relatives, usually the village or church would give some very meager charity to them, called "going on the parish", or they'd become beggars in towns.
In China, at least 100 million retired people with rural Hukou (户口) can only get 100-300 CNY (or ~15-45 USD) pension per month from the goverment. That's why raising children so they can help you when you're old (养儿防老) is so wide spreading in rural China.
Ask me how I know this? You meet them and ask them personally. Then you check the statistics from Chinese goverment about pension distribution.
> Social stuff is messy and exhausting, you don't want to invoke it every time you need to take trash out or fix a leak, if you can avoid it;
I think it's a lot less exhausting when it's a skill you use often. The problem is that modern society and technology allow us to solve 99% of our problems alone so those social muscles are deeply atrophied for many people.
> To be clear: I'm not saying we should seek to distance ourselves from other people, and eschew deep, real relationships. But I am saying that the distance and things intermediating is actually a feature in many cases, and that kind of independence is valuable.
> - Social stuff is messy and exhausting, you don't want to invoke it every time you need to take trash out or fix a leak, if you can avoid it;
> - Doing something yourself is often immediate, while asking for help (including hired help) takes much, much longer, so this kind of independence is worth it for time/focus savings
This is one of the cases where our impulses to reduce friction may ultimately be harmful, in this case especially for introverts. You solve all the "problems" like the ones you list, and then you find yourself isolated and alone without really meaning it.
I don't think people have the instincts to directly seek all the things they need (proof: if we did, almost everyone would be fit and no one would be fat). We're adapted to live in a particular environment, and features of that environment (especially in the past) would indirectly force us to get some of the things we don't have an instinct to directly seek, even if we didn't really like it at the time (e.g. if you have no option but to walk everywhere, you're going to be a lot fitter than most of us who can drive).
Is it worth it or not can be function of your income and your skill set obviously; So it it about your level of independance.
During covid era, I fixed someone else's toilet because her condo management was not picking up the phone. You assume that there is always someone that would respond and that is not always the case.
I will change the dishwasher that is leaking at the bottom my self and I am capable of figuring if say the dishwasher is fixable at a cost lower than buying a new one or not or is it just the hose that is leaking. If you can't diagnose it, do indeed call the plumber but make sure that you turn off the valve or you would have damage to the walls and the floors below. Interdependence will not necessarily replace the ability to diagnose and figure what are necessary actions.
> Independence, as our culture usually defines it, means completing a task without help.
This isn’t true. A business owner completes tasks with the help of employees, but unless he is indebted to a lender, he is still ordinarily thought of as being independent. Independence is a spectrum, and people who require that the world be re-engineered so that they can access it are generally on the lower end of that spectrum.
> The difference between their dependence and mine is not that mine exists. It is that mine is visible. […] A person who drives to the grocery store is considered independent, although the car depends on fuel, roads, mechanics, insurance, and a global manufacturing network. A person who orders groceries because they cannot walk through the store may be considered dependent.
The author is conflating two kinds of dependence. Lots of people rely on food delivery. If a food delivery system breaks down, it could be an existential threat to both parties, the difference is that the able-bodied will tend to have a greater level of optionality in how they respond to this kind of breakdown.
Someone suffering from kidney failure is obviously more dependent on the supply chain than someone who is not suffering from kidney failure. There is a debate to be had about how much this gradation matters if both categories of people are still mortally dependent on a system; am I independent if I can cross the street by myself but don’t know how to grow enough food to feed myself?
You talk about still different things, like resilience.
The idea, a business owner must be "independent" refers to them being financially independent regarding their income streams relative to "dependent" employees.
That doesn't necessarily hold true in all cases, it's an over-generalization to begin with. But it also is independent from your "lower end of the spectrum": you can be disabled and own a business. And demands of disabled people aren't worth less?
So, (in)dependence is context-dependent. Hence your spectrum. But the author's point is, it's not the same as (it's independent from) autonomy.
Shaping society based on vaguely defined/understood concepts leads to undesirable outcomes.
> And demands of disabled people aren't worth less?
You’re making an implicit argument about the nature of worth. I am using a simplified model based on economic value; if the author has a certain lifestyle that she believes she is entitled to live, and she cannot provide this lifestyle for herself, then the obligation to provide it will necessarily fall on other people. Disability advocacy groups obscure this detail constantly; they want to purchase their dignity using other people’s money.
I think there is a strong case to be made that a just society would be organized around these sorts of principles, but where disability advocates have failed is in wanting to put these obligations on others while resenting the idea that the disabled should even have to show gratitude for the gift they are being given (because this would, in their minds, diminish their dignity). Social justice in the 2010s was built around this idea that marginalized minority groups could treat the majority of the population as workhorses simply because it was considered to be the right thing to do. The model fell apart when people realized they could game the system by claiming marginal status, and also led to a trend of people traditionally tasked with serving as workhorses checking out of the workforce altogether.
Apparently you didn't even read the article, otherwise your exposé hardly makes sense. She is bodily disabled, not financially.
There is a thing called human dignity and it involves granting everybody the basic right of dignified sustenance. You seem to have difficulty imagining yourself in such a situation, but that is the fundamental starting point to understand it and its justification.
How would the disabled "show their gratitude" to you, the supposed provider of the financial support? Why do pretend it was a "gift" and not a simple necessity for you to live in a just society?
You go on veering off into generalities about imaginary 'leeches' to your efforts. The author details how you yourself are dependent on that society you denigrate here.
This is an extremely boring way to engage with others.
> There is a thing called human dignity and it involves granting everybody the basic right of dignified sustenance.
I think I am still obligated to throw you the life vest even if I don’t personally like you, but if after the fact you then scream at me that I didn’t do enough, I think you’ve committed a transgression. Screaming that no one is doing enough is by and large all that comes out of these circles and why they ended up fading into irrelevance. People were discussing this issue during the Obama years; you haven’t brought anything new to the discussion.
> The author details how you yourself are dependent on that society you denigrate here.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I was arguing to the contrary. My premise was that the word independent is semantically meaningful and that the article is making an attempt to undermine that meaning in order to further an agenda. I don’t disagree that e.g. someone who buys their food at a grocery store is dependent on the logistics system in a way that someone who is dependent upon having an oxygen tank delivered is dependent on others, but like I said, this is a spectrum based on the ability of the dependent to make substitutions between the person or thing they are dependent upon. It still makes semantic sense to say that so-and-so is independent of his father, but the children of so-and-so are dependent upon their father, even if so-and-so’s existence is ontologically dependent upon the existence of his father.
You appear to over-generalize personal experiences beyond their domain of applicability. Then you ignore the crucial points I made, pretending to know it all already, contradicting the absence of rational arguments on your part.
Because you do. You take your own vague "meaning" (that you never specify sufficiently) and lament how it's not being adhered to by others.
The meanings of words are context-dependent. You ignore that here. Dependency in particular has many different meanings. Nobody "denies" you the specific ones you use there.
Your own agenda, that you argue in favor of, is somehow invisible to you? It contradicts the essence of the article, clearly the source of your antagonism here.
> This isn’t true. A business owner completes tasks with the help of employees, but unless he is indebted to a lender, he is still ordinarily thought of as being independent. Independence is a spectrum, and people who require that the world be re-engineered so that they can access it are generally on the lower end of that spectrum.
This concept is a myth - the "self made" isn't any such thing
The business owner has the illusion of independence until he/she pisses off enough of their staff all at the same time that they walk out and there's nobody to open the store.
This is an AI-generated essay about AI. And I know what the rebuttal is going to be, but I'm getting older and it's really hard for me to keep up with all the AI essays on HN. To streamline the concept of online engagement, maybe we could have AI comment and respond...
As you engage with this blog post, let me ask you this: is that the future you envision? Where HN is just an Clawdbook-style playground for agents? Or do you favor a future where AI generates an infinite number of blog posts, but we're expending human resources to read them and engage? Or... what's the end game for the "it doesn't matter it's AI-generated" crowd?
A simple version might be that we share or upvote posts if we think they're good or say something that seems true to us, and we don't share them if they don't appeal to us. Basically, "death of the author."
But that's not going to work very well for journalism. Sharing evidence requires trust. Maybe strangers will find it harder to prove that they are for real, and we'll go back to established brands that supposedly adhere to journalistic standards and do some vetting?
Sadly, I think most people don't care about journalistic standards. They will just share things that they agree with, however flimsy the evidence.
That's already true for certain subjects on Hacker News. People can make up anything like they like about designated villians.
> Sadly, I think most people don't care about journalistic standards. They will just share things that they agree with, however flimsy the evidence.
We need a better term for this, because journalists are precisely the people exhibiting the least amount of standards named by their profession. It's the big part of why blogosphere and early social media became popular in the first place - because on the Internet, you had a good chance someone who wrote something actually cared about it being true, unlike in journalism.
I’m normally very sensitive to this and didn’t pick this up in my initial (partial) read. But yes I think you are right and gptzero is dead certain. It’s definitely one of the most readable AI works I’ve come across.
When children are young, parents and grandparents take care of them. When a spouse gets sick, the other takes care of them. When children are older, they take care of their parents and grandparents.
When people aren’t getting married and having children, things get very weird as far as caretaking goes (and other things) and no amount of pleading or social engineering can solve this.
>no amount of pleading or social engineering can solve this
Isn’t the institution of marriage itself a form of social engineering? I agree that trying to build new social institutions from whole cloth is a huge lift, but at the same time I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine alternative social arrangements that allow for the care of the elderly.
When children are older, they take care of their parents and grandparents
Not around here; many parents and grandparents are put away into care homes. The tax code even penalizes multiple generations living together as many elderly benefits are conditional on total household income.
Western societies aren't behaving the way they do around family and care issues because they have a grand plan, but because they don't have one.
In particular, the public is wildly uneducated about the interdependencies they implicitly rely on and take for granted, until they get old one day and realize the negligence.
The general idea in the US is, you have to prepare for yourself, in the EU the premise is, the state prepares for you. Both are oversimplifications that don't really work more often than people want to admit.
Most the young people I meet are quite cynical about the future, affordability, the existence of any pension at all, or the retirement age rising above the life expectancy or something like that. But simply there are a million things to be worried about. Like they are also worried about the climate, about AI and jobs, maybe about other things too.
But we in the U.S.A. have cast off the chains of interdependence, and adopted the Enlightenment ethos of rugged individualism and consumerism that defines American values. Who needs grandparents, or husbands, or family support when we can train and pay mercenaries to care about us! All praise, glory and power be to our Constitution!
The obvious book recommendation here is: Joseph Henrich: The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
It's not really west vs east. It had been a core value in "western" cultures too, and is changing in "eastern" cultures as we have this discussion.
The change seems to have more to do with the atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite. Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional, career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions, and that necessity then supersedes the actual relationships and responsibilities that had traditionally been taken for granted and free from accounting.
It's a death spiral towards alienation that we stumbled into in modernity and need to collectively address, not a cultural divide between east and west.
What isn’t mentioned in monideas’ comment is that it is women who do the caring. The change has to do with women being able to not do that. Of course, this might also mean that they might not have a daughter-in-law to take care of them, but if it’s me, I would also choose to avoid that caretaking role.
Assets and income were passed down patrilineally, and hence women were expected to fold into their husband’s family and become the primary caretakers (unless super rich and they had servants).
Economies of scale make the commercial services more efficient. Similarly to how my grandma cannot compete in keeping chickens and selling eggs against a huge agricultural corporation, for a working-age person to stay at home and care for their parents is less economical than if this person performs some specialized work at a job, and there are a bunch of other, trained employees taking care of several old people e.g. in a retirement home.
It may have some social functions that get lost, but it gets outcompeted by scalable, specialized, formal-economy alternatives.
Also industrialization made many tasks possible to do alone. With washing machines, microwaves and TV dinners, people can live on their own indefinitely, while this simply wasn't possible before in a farming and manual labor context where you constantly had to ask for and to provide help getting things done. Like building a house, slaughtering a pig, doing field work etc.
AFAICT this is a value in most cultures in all directions. I think "the west" invented pensions, social security and medicaid (or whatever you call it in your country) so parents nor children had to plan on caring for the elderly when they had trouble working (and with white collar jobs, that may be a long time).
Multi-generational, western (American) guy here: caring for the older generations is a core value to everyone I know and to me. We just don't _have_ to. My mom has money, can drive, owns a nicer house than I do. So, it's really only for 'values' that I check in on her and handyman for her whenever I can. In fact, for the latter, I cause her more problems than I fix.
This isn't about some fundamental East/West attitude difference. From time immemorial it was like that in the West too, the change came with the late 19th century and mainly the 20th century when government took on the role of caretaker with pensions, welfare and various government transfers, reducing interpersonal dependencies, and allowing more atomized lifestyles.
I don’t see it as a big government intervention that drove the change. I think it was a big change in housing availability and the suburbs. This was driven by WW2 victory and the industrial production machine. Making housing affordable available to small families.
The same thing happened also in Europe which didn't have that type of suburbia, nor necessarily that sort of WW2 win. These social changes were a slow ramp, not some single event changing things. It was in part technology, in part state centralization capacity via administration development, in part ideologies and philosophies etc. Both socialism and capitalism pushed against traditional kin and clan structures in favor of universal platforms (markets, or universal co-ownership). But already the Church laid some of the foundations of all this. And then the church also weakened as a slow erosion and social norms were markedly more liberal in e.g. the 19th century than in the 18th and so on.
Europe had the weird circumstances of being destroyed both families and buildings after WW2. They also experienced the Marshall plan of rebuilding. No doubt there is no simple answer to how we got here. The move from agrarian society to industrial society also had an effect. I just have a hard time applying a motivation to a government. I can see it as a by product.
Personal context: I am an American of European descent, with most of my ancestors having arrived between 1880 and 1950 (pretty solidly "Western"). Extended family is broadly well-off enough to not be financially in need in retirement.
Observation: Sooner or later, all of our family's elders have wound up cared for by a mix of children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. Even those who didn't have children. We're an ornery bunch, so quite a few stubbornly insisted they didn't need anyone, yet eventually they did. Care often came at an inconvenience to those providing it, but one way or another, in one form or another, care was given. I can only think of one person from my extended family who wasn't cared for by the younger generations in his final years.
Speculation: The average number of children in my extended family hovers around three, and most of us are in a few geographic clusters (not the same city, but still a cluster). Perhaps if the average litter was between one and two, and/or we were more spread apart, we may have slipped into line with that stereotype?
To some extent, yes, it is unfortunate that Western culture has abandoned that cultural value.
However, it's also been incredibly liberating to a great many people.
When it's a cultural value to take care of your parents when they are elderly, to the point of shaming adult children who refuse to do so, it lends itself all too easily to abuse. And there are a lot of abusive parents out there. This is particularly true among queer people, who have only recently (generationally speaking) been able to be out in a widespread manner.
Furthermore, for the current generations of elderly and their children, the chances are higher than ever that the elderly parents have much, much more in the way of resources to take care of themselves than their children have.
The atomization of our society is a genuine problem, and we need to find some good society-level solutions for it. But socially demanding that children care for their parents, no matter how awful those parents were to the children (or still are!) is not something that we should bring back.
The beginning of the film "Threads" comments on the total interdependence of modern society. The rest of the film proceeds to show what happens when it is forcibly removed, and it's not a good outcome.
The Door by Magda Szabó has a humbling take on our interdependence and what we all owe to the people around us. I can't recommend the book enough to you all.
I don't agree when people say that "Humans need each other to survive."
Sure, not everyone would survive in the wild on their own, but some would, with ease. They would probably be happier too. The hard part is maintaining a family because this requires convincing other people; the psychological aspect of this is way harder than the survival aspect of foraging and hunting for food.
Of course, if you or a family member becomes seriously injured or sick with a critical illness, then you have to accept death as the outcome.
Also, people don't understand that civilization collapse is a distinct, much harder, survival challenge. If you live in a big city with millions of people, you are highly dependent on other people/civilization because there is nowhere near enough food or water natively accessible within your local area to support that many people without functioning infrastructure.
People who exist in these extreme high-dependency environments tend to develop beliefs and phobias which serve the collective, not themselves as individuals. The group selects individuals and manipulates the individuals within it to instill in them the fears and motivations which the group needs them to have to guarantee the survival of the group. Sometimes the group will sacrifice individuals to protect itself.
A large group of interdependent humans has a distinct intelligence which hijacks the subconscious minds of its members to support a singular goal: its own survival. This is what we call 'culture' but it's essentially a mind virus for the individual. The more dependent someone is on the group, the harder they will try to spread and maintain the collective mind virus within the group.
Maturity is the transition of dependence to independence (from childhood to your teens) and then from independence to inter-dependence as you grow older towards becoming an adult. When you get "stuck" in any of these, and don't make timely transitions to the progressive stage, your psychological growth is stunted and you have a less fulfilling life.
Uhhh, it has always been the case. This libertarian idea of every man for himself is a sickening concept that does not work at scale. You are going to get psychopaths that genuinely does not need other people, then what do you do? He's just exercising his free will and rights after all.
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[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 38.1 ms ] threadAnd I feel this is actually aligned with the "invisible" independence vs. "visible" one, because asking someone for help is invoking social mechanisms, with all their complexity and messiness, and basically giving up autonomy on the task.
We don't live in a utopia where we can behave with impunity - humans need to regulate, cooperate, and manage resources
So there are many levels and many are more independent than others. There is a huge cost difference between one who is less interdependent and one who is very interdependent.
If the skill is quick to learn, does it make sense to pre-learn it (and maintain the skill!), or just have the resources on hand to learn it if necessary?
I think this is presupposing that your skills are fixed and if anything happens you're stuck with always being dependent on others even if it's a really bad deal for you. That's not the case for most of these
Other considerations:
- Sometimes you need a solution NOW. Household infra tends to break down on Saturdays and Sundays a lot for some reason.
- Sometimes it's not even about efficiency. Like, we got ourselves an allotment garden recently. Per your $100/hr vs. $30/hr math, I could and should just hire a bunch of contractors to clean it up and set it up for us. But for me, this defeats the point of getting that garden in the first place.
- Some work is too small for a contractor with necessary skills to come, unless you let them bill you for 10x the work. I had to learn how to patch holes in ceiling myself, because the price for getting the 4m x 5cm hole fixed was the same as for renovating the whole ceiling.
EDIT:
Also what 'lotsofpulp said - sometimes you want the outcome to have a very particular shape or quality level, and to guarantee it, you'd need to micromanage the contractor so badly, that in many cases it's easier to do it yourself.
Doing it yourself can be rewarding and potentially much quicker. Why not do it yourself if you're able ( and assuming its not one of those things a pro could do in 1/10th the time).
Also, if you do not bother to learn at all, you have no way to verify that the work is actually done correctly. People will absolutely take advantage of your ignorance.
Unless you have a spouse or partner at home who can be there, but then you're losing whatever they could have been earning.
A good design is an accessible design, but those with the means to pay for good design are increasingly being funneled into buying more bespoke products that prioritize materials and aesthetics over functionality. When the damn thing doesn't really work as expected, it's a waste. You don't even need to cram it full of quickly obsoleted gadgetry to pull this off. It doesn't really matter if it's durable and looks amazing when it's useless. Whatever gets you to buy another one anyway.
The only people happy with this situation are those who sell us overpriced junk. They're laughing all the way to the bank.
If we want more accessibility, we need to be making better designed products with mass appeal. We're well into a postmodern world where cost can be adjusted for any price point without sacrificing the design. Their trick is to introduce deliberate subtle flaws into products that keep you buying. It needs to stop. We need standards.
If you want to dilute the term, maybe it says more about some consumer beliefs than the actual problem.
I'm saying that accessible design is caught in this crossfire, not that we can't make things more accessible until we fix "enshittification".
Much of accessible design actually does overlap with what's demanded in higher-end products. We lost some of that during previous eras of enshittification back when it used to be more expensive to make such designs. Now it all costs the same. I'm saying it's now a marketing problem, not an enshittification problem.
The difference between driving your own car vs. having a spouse/friend get groceries for you is precisely the direct involvement of another person, the dependence of relationship there. Yes, the car needs maintenance and roads and fuel/electricity, etc., we're all connected through network of relationships this way, but those relationships are indirect, they're mediated through things.
If I need something now[0], the car is there, fueled and ready, and so are roads and streetlights, and my watch tells me the store is open. I can make decisions myself, react to situations, and there are no other people I need to consider. There is no power relationships, no messy social stuff. My car won't be elsewhere because they had a sudden appointment, or be awkward to operate because my kid had an argument with its kid in the morning, etc.
To be clear: I'm not saying we should seek to distance ourselves from other people, and eschew deep, real relationships. But I am saying that the distance and things intermediating is actually a feature in many cases, and that kind of independence is valuable.
Why? I'm not sure. Two main factor I know are real, are:
- Social stuff is messy and exhausting, you don't want to invoke it every time you need to take trash out or fix a leak, if you can avoid it;
- Doing something yourself is often immediate, while asking for help (including hired help) takes much, much longer, so this kind of independence is worth it for time/focus savings
Just some thought. Again, I mostly agree with the author, and am grateful this article was posted here.
--
[0] - Figuratively, I don't actually drive myself.
Independence is not infrastructural support, it is *choice*. You may depend on a housekeeper, but I depend on my own body to clean. That housekeeper doesn't get to say "I'm too busy to do my job"; not many times, at least. Because wealth means you get a new housekeeper, while poverty means you get a single aging body.
In the context of a world with AI increasingly being positioned to become a mediator of reality and access, I find the article distasteful and dishonest.
Most other cultures favour interdependence - Asia, rather famously, doesn't have a pension/superannuation program (in general) because their cultures are heavily geared toward elderly living with their children and grandchildren.
1. Colonialism and bookings would he separated by hundreds of years...
Vikings were colonists, famous colonies include Normandy, large parts of the British isles, and, Russia.
Now that they also settled in other lands.
2. The iron age comparison.
Not sure how carefully you read, but you might notice that there is a parenthesised word in my comment, (generally) indicating precisely what you are arguing i missed.
https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2026/01/china-elder-care-p...
Ask me how I know this? You meet them and ask them personally. Then you check the statistics from Chinese goverment about pension distribution.
I think it's a lot less exhausting when it's a skill you use often. The problem is that modern society and technology allow us to solve 99% of our problems alone so those social muscles are deeply atrophied for many people.
> - Social stuff is messy and exhausting, you don't want to invoke it every time you need to take trash out or fix a leak, if you can avoid it;
> - Doing something yourself is often immediate, while asking for help (including hired help) takes much, much longer, so this kind of independence is worth it for time/focus savings
This is one of the cases where our impulses to reduce friction may ultimately be harmful, in this case especially for introverts. You solve all the "problems" like the ones you list, and then you find yourself isolated and alone without really meaning it.
I don't think people have the instincts to directly seek all the things they need (proof: if we did, almost everyone would be fit and no one would be fat). We're adapted to live in a particular environment, and features of that environment (especially in the past) would indirectly force us to get some of the things we don't have an instinct to directly seek, even if we didn't really like it at the time (e.g. if you have no option but to walk everywhere, you're going to be a lot fitter than most of us who can drive).
During covid era, I fixed someone else's toilet because her condo management was not picking up the phone. You assume that there is always someone that would respond and that is not always the case.
I will change the dishwasher that is leaking at the bottom my self and I am capable of figuring if say the dishwasher is fixable at a cost lower than buying a new one or not or is it just the hose that is leaking. If you can't diagnose it, do indeed call the plumber but make sure that you turn off the valve or you would have damage to the walls and the floors below. Interdependence will not necessarily replace the ability to diagnose and figure what are necessary actions.
This isn’t true. A business owner completes tasks with the help of employees, but unless he is indebted to a lender, he is still ordinarily thought of as being independent. Independence is a spectrum, and people who require that the world be re-engineered so that they can access it are generally on the lower end of that spectrum.
> The difference between their dependence and mine is not that mine exists. It is that mine is visible. […] A person who drives to the grocery store is considered independent, although the car depends on fuel, roads, mechanics, insurance, and a global manufacturing network. A person who orders groceries because they cannot walk through the store may be considered dependent.
The author is conflating two kinds of dependence. Lots of people rely on food delivery. If a food delivery system breaks down, it could be an existential threat to both parties, the difference is that the able-bodied will tend to have a greater level of optionality in how they respond to this kind of breakdown.
Someone suffering from kidney failure is obviously more dependent on the supply chain than someone who is not suffering from kidney failure. There is a debate to be had about how much this gradation matters if both categories of people are still mortally dependent on a system; am I independent if I can cross the street by myself but don’t know how to grow enough food to feed myself?
The idea, a business owner must be "independent" refers to them being financially independent regarding their income streams relative to "dependent" employees.
That doesn't necessarily hold true in all cases, it's an over-generalization to begin with. But it also is independent from your "lower end of the spectrum": you can be disabled and own a business. And demands of disabled people aren't worth less?
So, (in)dependence is context-dependent. Hence your spectrum. But the author's point is, it's not the same as (it's independent from) autonomy.
Shaping society based on vaguely defined/understood concepts leads to undesirable outcomes.
You’re making an implicit argument about the nature of worth. I am using a simplified model based on economic value; if the author has a certain lifestyle that she believes she is entitled to live, and she cannot provide this lifestyle for herself, then the obligation to provide it will necessarily fall on other people. Disability advocacy groups obscure this detail constantly; they want to purchase their dignity using other people’s money.
I think there is a strong case to be made that a just society would be organized around these sorts of principles, but where disability advocates have failed is in wanting to put these obligations on others while resenting the idea that the disabled should even have to show gratitude for the gift they are being given (because this would, in their minds, diminish their dignity). Social justice in the 2010s was built around this idea that marginalized minority groups could treat the majority of the population as workhorses simply because it was considered to be the right thing to do. The model fell apart when people realized they could game the system by claiming marginal status, and also led to a trend of people traditionally tasked with serving as workhorses checking out of the workforce altogether.
Apparently you didn't even read the article, otherwise your exposé hardly makes sense. She is bodily disabled, not financially.
There is a thing called human dignity and it involves granting everybody the basic right of dignified sustenance. You seem to have difficulty imagining yourself in such a situation, but that is the fundamental starting point to understand it and its justification.
How would the disabled "show their gratitude" to you, the supposed provider of the financial support? Why do pretend it was a "gift" and not a simple necessity for you to live in a just society?
You go on veering off into generalities about imaginary 'leeches' to your efforts. The author details how you yourself are dependent on that society you denigrate here.
This is an extremely boring way to engage with others.
> There is a thing called human dignity and it involves granting everybody the basic right of dignified sustenance.
I think I am still obligated to throw you the life vest even if I don’t personally like you, but if after the fact you then scream at me that I didn’t do enough, I think you’ve committed a transgression. Screaming that no one is doing enough is by and large all that comes out of these circles and why they ended up fading into irrelevance. People were discussing this issue during the Obama years; you haven’t brought anything new to the discussion.
> The author details how you yourself are dependent on that society you denigrate here.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I was arguing to the contrary. My premise was that the word independent is semantically meaningful and that the article is making an attempt to undermine that meaning in order to further an agenda. I don’t disagree that e.g. someone who buys their food at a grocery store is dependent on the logistics system in a way that someone who is dependent upon having an oxygen tank delivered is dependent on others, but like I said, this is a spectrum based on the ability of the dependent to make substitutions between the person or thing they are dependent upon. It still makes semantic sense to say that so-and-so is independent of his father, but the children of so-and-so are dependent upon their father, even if so-and-so’s existence is ontologically dependent upon the existence of his father.
You appear to over-generalize personal experiences beyond their domain of applicability. Then you ignore the crucial points I made, pretending to know it all already, contradicting the absence of rational arguments on your part.
Because you do. You take your own vague "meaning" (that you never specify sufficiently) and lament how it's not being adhered to by others.
The meanings of words are context-dependent. You ignore that here. Dependency in particular has many different meanings. Nobody "denies" you the specific ones you use there.
Your own agenda, that you argue in favor of, is somehow invisible to you? It contradicts the essence of the article, clearly the source of your antagonism here.
This concept is a myth - the "self made" isn't any such thing
As you engage with this blog post, let me ask you this: is that the future you envision? Where HN is just an Clawdbook-style playground for agents? Or do you favor a future where AI generates an infinite number of blog posts, but we're expending human resources to read them and engage? Or... what's the end game for the "it doesn't matter it's AI-generated" crowd?
But that's not going to work very well for journalism. Sharing evidence requires trust. Maybe strangers will find it harder to prove that they are for real, and we'll go back to established brands that supposedly adhere to journalistic standards and do some vetting?
Sadly, I think most people don't care about journalistic standards. They will just share things that they agree with, however flimsy the evidence.
That's already true for certain subjects on Hacker News. People can make up anything like they like about designated villians.
We need a better term for this, because journalists are precisely the people exhibiting the least amount of standards named by their profession. It's the big part of why blogosphere and early social media became popular in the first place - because on the Internet, you had a good chance someone who wrote something actually cared about it being true, unlike in journalism.
When people aren’t getting married and having children, things get very weird as far as caretaking goes (and other things) and no amount of pleading or social engineering can solve this.
Isn’t the institution of marriage itself a form of social engineering? I agree that trying to build new social institutions from whole cloth is a huge lift, but at the same time I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine alternative social arrangements that allow for the care of the elderly.
Not around here; many parents and grandparents are put away into care homes. The tax code even penalizes multiple generations living together as many elderly benefits are conditional on total household income.
In particular, the public is wildly uneducated about the interdependencies they implicitly rely on and take for granted, until they get old one day and realize the negligence.
The general idea in the US is, you have to prepare for yourself, in the EU the premise is, the state prepares for you. Both are oversimplifications that don't really work more often than people want to admit.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01312b.htm
But we in the U.S.A. have cast off the chains of interdependence, and adopted the Enlightenment ethos of rugged individualism and consumerism that defines American values. Who needs grandparents, or husbands, or family support when we can train and pay mercenaries to care about us! All praise, glory and power be to our Constitution!
The change seems to have more to do with the atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite. Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional, career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions, and that necessity then supersedes the actual relationships and responsibilities that had traditionally been taken for granted and free from accounting.
It's a death spiral towards alienation that we stumbled into in modernity and need to collectively address, not a cultural divide between east and west.
Assets and income were passed down patrilineally, and hence women were expected to fold into their husband’s family and become the primary caretakers (unless super rich and they had servants).
Could you explain these a bit more (or maybe provide a pointer to they mean):
> "atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite."
How & why exactly do they invite atomization?
> "Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional... career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions"
By this do you mean something like: instead of relying on friends and family for interdependece, we pay for services in a formal economy ?
> How & why exactly do they invite atomization?
Economies of scale make the commercial services more efficient. Similarly to how my grandma cannot compete in keeping chickens and selling eggs against a huge agricultural corporation, for a working-age person to stay at home and care for their parents is less economical than if this person performs some specialized work at a job, and there are a bunch of other, trained employees taking care of several old people e.g. in a retirement home.
It may have some social functions that get lost, but it gets outcompeted by scalable, specialized, formal-economy alternatives.
Also industrialization made many tasks possible to do alone. With washing machines, microwaves and TV dinners, people can live on their own indefinitely, while this simply wasn't possible before in a farming and manual labor context where you constantly had to ask for and to provide help getting things done. Like building a house, slaughtering a pig, doing field work etc.
Multi-generational, western (American) guy here: caring for the older generations is a core value to everyone I know and to me. We just don't _have_ to. My mom has money, can drive, owns a nicer house than I do. So, it's really only for 'values' that I check in on her and handyman for her whenever I can. In fact, for the latter, I cause her more problems than I fix.
we take care of our own. It's very much part of our core values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown
Observation: Sooner or later, all of our family's elders have wound up cared for by a mix of children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. Even those who didn't have children. We're an ornery bunch, so quite a few stubbornly insisted they didn't need anyone, yet eventually they did. Care often came at an inconvenience to those providing it, but one way or another, in one form or another, care was given. I can only think of one person from my extended family who wasn't cared for by the younger generations in his final years.
Speculation: The average number of children in my extended family hovers around three, and most of us are in a few geographic clusters (not the same city, but still a cluster). Perhaps if the average litter was between one and two, and/or we were more spread apart, we may have slipped into line with that stereotype?
To some extent, yes, it is unfortunate that Western culture has abandoned that cultural value.
However, it's also been incredibly liberating to a great many people.
When it's a cultural value to take care of your parents when they are elderly, to the point of shaming adult children who refuse to do so, it lends itself all too easily to abuse. And there are a lot of abusive parents out there. This is particularly true among queer people, who have only recently (generationally speaking) been able to be out in a widespread manner.
Furthermore, for the current generations of elderly and their children, the chances are higher than ever that the elderly parents have much, much more in the way of resources to take care of themselves than their children have.
The atomization of our society is a genuine problem, and we need to find some good society-level solutions for it. But socially demanding that children care for their parents, no matter how awful those parents were to the children (or still are!) is not something that we should bring back.
It’s a centralisation of wealth/greed thing.
Sure, not everyone would survive in the wild on their own, but some would, with ease. They would probably be happier too. The hard part is maintaining a family because this requires convincing other people; the psychological aspect of this is way harder than the survival aspect of foraging and hunting for food.
Of course, if you or a family member becomes seriously injured or sick with a critical illness, then you have to accept death as the outcome.
Also, people don't understand that civilization collapse is a distinct, much harder, survival challenge. If you live in a big city with millions of people, you are highly dependent on other people/civilization because there is nowhere near enough food or water natively accessible within your local area to support that many people without functioning infrastructure.
People who exist in these extreme high-dependency environments tend to develop beliefs and phobias which serve the collective, not themselves as individuals. The group selects individuals and manipulates the individuals within it to instill in them the fears and motivations which the group needs them to have to guarantee the survival of the group. Sometimes the group will sacrifice individuals to protect itself.
A large group of interdependent humans has a distinct intelligence which hijacks the subconscious minds of its members to support a singular goal: its own survival. This is what we call 'culture' but it's essentially a mind virus for the individual. The more dependent someone is on the group, the harder they will try to spread and maintain the collective mind virus within the group.
"Resistance is futile. You will be asimilated"