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cucumber

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Some Marxists believe that the wage system is doomed to collapse because automation will eventually replace more jobs than new kinds of jobs can be found in the service sector. Then large scale employment will be replaced with I guess UBI or weird gig work or the complete collapse of capitalism. And certainly capitalism incentivizes repeatedly trying to increase automation, but I remain unconvinced automation can actually replace all that much more. What seems to actually be happening is mechanical turks like the cashierless Amazon stores and then AI's unsolvable hallucinations and incredible costs limiting its potential for growth. It seems odd to assume technology will inevitably advance no matter what. Am I missing something?

I've found your posts really educational and appreciate you sharing your knowledge.

This is basically an idea stemming from the Occupy era when people were still pretty optimistic about technology not only undermining the objective conditions of capitalism but molding a subjective consciousness that would be able to overcome capital. This really came from the internet utopianism that was popular during the millennium. People expected the internet to unleash this cosmopolitan stateless sense of citizenship based on a digital commons which would give people the tools to critique everyday capitalist life and reject it.

Instead the rise of platform capitalism unleashed a new era in advertising and helped rapidly increase the velocity of the circulation of commodities. Platform capitalism posed new theoretical problems for the idea that technology inevitably progresses and that the progress of technology is always “good” for the prospect of socialism. Most of what we’ve gotten that’s “new” since the mass production of smartphones amounts to scams taking advantage of users’ naïveté. Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, the Metaverse. None of these have succeeded at creating new fundamental needs for society, no one wants that shit. It just exists on the margin feeding on society’s inefficiencies and irrationalities, which appears subjectively in the fantasy of get rich quick schemes.

I think the rise of the newer forms of automation should be seen in a similar light to the older ones, as forms of class struggle and maintaining capital. Of course, they’re also bound to the older fantasies of capital that it can overcome its existence’s dependency on labor and create a world of circulation liberated from it (today expressed in the fantasy of AI transcending humanity). But this is just a fantasy, and one specifically expressing a deep hubris from a stance of nearly totally unchallenged victory in the class struggle for the past few decades. Western capital has become lazy, complacent, and pretty delusional after a few generations of being able to depend on the monopoly power-reinforced state to maintain its power.

What we have now is a situation where both the workers and the capitalists have been rendered dependent, which favors the outsized power of advertisement and the state as institutions which actively and consciously reinforce the existing relations of production. The problems of automation have been catastrophic for a long time now. People forget that full employment used to be a common stated promise in capitalist societies, and after generations the capitalists have eroded the expectations of the workers and redirected them to consumption. But now that consumption standard is collapsing in the U.S. and other parts of the West. So the question now is very subjective, because it is whether the workers will try to recapture whatever they can of a dying past or take the risk of trying for a different world

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Elka the bass player!

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internet connection wizard

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2025 let's let our swag blossom everyone

A whole field of swag flowers taking over the earth. Join me

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回転パピ子

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womb tattoo

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Lisa Yuskavage (American, b. 1962, lives and works in New York City), Studio, 2009. Oil on linen, 70 x 74 1⁄2 in. | 177.8 x 189.2 cm. (Source: David Zwirner Gallery, New York)

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my coworker gave me chilaquiles con crema after a really long night shift. i set some aside for you, thang. <3

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