Karu 🐲

I take issue with all the comments suggesting that the movement should be rebranding into “work reform”, because reforming is absolutely not the point. Speaking as someone who subscribes to the anti-work movement, my problem is not that much with current laboral laws and, in fact, I’d go as far as saying that all jobs I have had so far have been reasonably respectful with me except for maybe one.

My problem with that is that we consider normal that, in order to deserve leading a meaningful life, we must be working for someone richer or for the economy. Our life must be dedicated to constantly providing products and services so that we deserve to enjoy what little is left of it. In more concrete terms, I don’t like that we must get into wage labor in order to have access to fundamental goods such as food, water, housing, amenities or even free time. I believe all human beings living in a society capable of providing these are entitled to them, I also believe that our current society is perfectly capable of that, and that the only reason why the working class only gets conditional access or no access at all to fundamental goods are bullshit “number go up” reasons. I don’t buy for a second that homeless people deserve their status because “they didn’t work hard enough”. Wage labor being such a central axis of our current way of life is what I’m strongly opposed to.

Furthermore, I regard the power balance between employer and worker to be fundamentally broken, and no reform can do away with that. When you sign a contract and accept the terms of a job, are you really accepting them or just avoiding the alternative, the threat of homelessness? For a lot of people who can’t find jobs easily, not signing might mean starving or losing their home. How is that not coercion? Sure, if you don’t accept the terms of your current job, you can just look for another (even though this is not a reasonable posibility for a lot of people), but any job will offer as little pay with as many working hours as possible because, due to the lack of meaningful consent, all employers can get away with that. And we accept it as normal and reasonable.

I also don’t believe that abolishing wage labor will make people spend their whole lives not adding anything to society. If given enough free time, people will get bored of not doing anything and engage in work that they actually enjoy, of their own actual volition. I know I get involved into a lot of things given long enough vacations or subsidized unemployement. Now imagine if we just could get organized to find out what tasks need to be done, and each picked the tasks that they geniunely want to do, without being coerced. Without rich assholes and investors getting involved and often forcing us to work long hours on tasks that won’t add anything to the world, but they make money.

“Reforming” laboral laws is absolutely not enough for this. Sure, I’d appreciate a reduction in my working hours, an increase in my salary, more vacations, etc but even if those goals were met, I’d still be out there protesting for the reasons I’ve just stated. Work, as we understand it today, is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed without it being abolished first.

You may not agree with me, mind you, and have a more moderate position stating that work must not be abolished as it can be meaningfully reformed. But then you are subscribing to a different ideology altogether. Which is legitimate and can be argued for, but it does not match the ideology of the anti-work movement. Sure, under late capitalism, some short term goals may match, but the long term goals are entirely different. My point being, “work reform” would be a terrible rebranding for the movement because it stands for a different ideology entirely.

Just chiming in to say that this is the kind of thing on Lemmy where you just know that OP is from the US, even if they don’t state it directly. Most electoral democracies have a lot more than two options.

In my country, the current Parliament formation is representing 11 distinct parties, including those that only get like one seat. The electoral race always feature like 5 major parties and then some, and they are definitely not the same 5 parties from 40 years ago. It always baffles to think about how the US has only ever been governed by either one of the same two parties, and I find kinda sad that third parties aren’t viable there.

I find kind of funny when a Lemmy user from the US attempts to be generic but their assumptions that the US is the norm are very telling. I don’t think it’s ill-intended or evil or anything, but it’s still funny, and I see it often in here.

I mean, he did recreate a cataclysmic event in the process, and the projected crisis was bound to happen in 1000 years… One can never be too prepared I guess.

What is that even trying to say? That there is such thing as going too far when fighting the energy crisis? lol

For me, it changes every few days.

Right now, it’s “Like Chimeras” from the Cassette Beasts soundtrack. Well, to be honest, I’ve got a bunch of songs from the game stuck in my head, but my brain keeps ending up on that one always.

And all I can say is this:

It’s possible that it eventually ends capitalism, or at the very least forces it to reform significantly.

Consider that the most basic way a company can obtain profit is by extracting as much surplus value as they possibly can, i.e spending less and earning more. Extracting high surplus value from human workers is easy, because a salary doesn’t really depend on the intrinsic value of the service a worker is providing, but rather it’s tied to the price of that job position in the market. Theoretically, employers can all agree and offer lower salaries for the same jobs if the situation demands it. You can always “negotiate” a lower salary with a human worker, and they will accept because any amount of money is better than no money. Machines are different. They don’t need a salary, but they do carry a maintenance cost, and you cannot negotiate with that. If you don’t cover the maintenance costs, the machine will outright not do its job, and no amount of threats will change that. You can always optimize a machine, replace it with a better one, etc. but the rate at which machines get optimized is slower than the rate at which salaries can decrease or even become stagnant in the face of inflation. So it’s a lot harder to extract surplus value from machines than it is from human workers.

Historically, machines helped cement a wealth gap. If there was a job that required some specialization and therefore had a somewhat solid salary, machines would split it into a “lesser” job that many more people can do (i.e just ensuring the machine is doing its job), driving down salaries and therefore their purchasing power, and a specialized job (i.e creating or maintaining the machine), which much less people can access, whose salaries have remained high.

So far, machines haven’t really replaced human workforce, but they have helped cement an underclass with little purchasing power. This time, the whole schtick with AI is that it will be able to, supposedly, eventually replace specialist jobs. If AI does deliver on that promise, we’ll get stuck with a wealth distribution where a majority of the working class has little purchasing power to do anything. Since working class is also the majority of the population, companies won’t really be able to sell anything because no one will be able to buy anything. You cannot sustain an economic model that impoverishes the same demography it leeches off of.

But there is a catch: All companies have an incentive to pursue that perfect AI which can replace specialist jobs. Having those would give them a huge advantage for them in the market. AI doesn’t demand good working conditions, they don’t undermine other employees’ loyalty by unionizing, they are generally cheaper and more reliable than human workers, etc. which sounds all fine and dandy until you realize that it’s also those human workers the ones buying your products and services. AI has, by definition, a null purchasing power. So, companies individually have an incentive to pursue that perfect AI, but when all companies have access to it… no company will be sustainable anymore.

Of course, it’s all contingent on AI ever getting that far, which at the moment I’m not sure it’s even possible, but tech nerds sure love to promise it is. Personally, I’m hopeful that we will eventually organize society in a way where machines are doing the dirty work while I get to lead a meaningful life and engage in jobs I’m actively interested in, rather than just to get by. This is one of the possible paths to that society. Unfortunately, it also means that, for the working class, it will get worse before it gets better.

I didn’t know about Nostr, and honestly, thank you for letting me know. I find the idea behind the protocol to be pretty interesting, but wouldn’t use it myself. I’m not keen on the idea of removing moderation altogether.

However, I do think that it’s about time we rethink how moderation works on the Internet, and the fediverse should be a good place to start doing so. Perhaps my biggest gripe with the fediverse is that moderation works exactly the same as in corporate social media. Right now, moderators are picked under discretion of whatever the criteria of the admin are, and they are not subject to “the will of the people” so to speak. If a mod or admin acts in bad faith, the only recourse for the rest of the users is to leave, and maybe setup your own instance if you have the technical know-how. And while corporate media admins are somewhat constrained by investors, fediverse admins don’t have to respond to anyone. Which is better than being bound by investors, but here, admins can and do take harsh decisions on a whim without having to justify anything to anyone. Which is honestly not a good thing.

So, while I imagined the fediverse as some network of interconnected small, self-managed communes, what we actually have is a network of petty fiefdoms, some of which do listen to their users even though they are under no obligation to do so, and others outright don’t. I don’t mean to say that centralized services are better at this, but in the end I’m having some of the same problems regarding arbitrariness of moderation and admin decisions here that I had on Reddit and Twitter.

I see the fediverse as the future of social media, but not in its current form. The way it currently works keeps us bound to drama and petty feuds between admins of instances, and that is unavoidable while large fedi platforms are hosted by single people or very small groups of people. Perhaps the way that this could be avoided would be by using a protocol that enforces decentralization of hosting, like Nostr does. I imagine it would work sort of like a torrent, where we are all sharing and hosting the instance or the communities we use, whether completely or only partially. Or perhaps an instance is made out of multiple relays which are hosted separately. This way, we wouldn’t have issues such as admins unilaterally defederating instances because of a disagreement or stuff like that, since we’d all be admins in a way.

I wouldn’t want to do away with moderation, but decisions such as who gets to be moderator, who gets to keep being moderator, and who we ban, fed with or defed from, is consulted via democratic process enforced by design. Otherwise, it’s not going to be meaningfully different from centralized media once the big instances become big enough.

I’m missing r/vexillologycriclejerk. Sure, it always was the same joke for like a month, but it used to be one of the highlights of my daily Reddit experience.

You pull animal-like creatures from their natural habitats to make them fight each other in a way that they somehow consent, in a franchise that systematically weeds out the good ideas from each game while retaining the bad ones.

Yeah, I agree. I just think the decision to defederate should not be taken unilaterally & on a whim by admins. I don’t know why it took them so long with exploding heads, but if it was because they were consulting the userbase, I can see a justification for it taking so long. Defederating from Hexbear on the other hand, before telling anyone and even before they have the chance to federate back, is unacceptable IMO

Same, ever since I joined lemmy.world I had a feeling that they were way too trigger-happy with the defederation button, but I was trying to not pay a lot of mind to it and just assume good faith in the admins. But the Hexvear fiasco was absolute bullshit that made that assumption impossible for me. And I don’t even particularly care about Hexbear lol

So I have been visiting other instances and made an alt account on lemmygrad just in case.

I admit I wasn’t intending to leave Reddit. Sure, I absolutely wasn’t going to install the damn official app, but I browse Reddit way more on desktop that on my phone. But it turns out my time spent on Reddit absolutely tanked without me doing much. Lemmy turned out to be a better replacement for me than I expected, I could find a lot of interesting activity here unlike, say, Mastodon where I had to dig further.

That does not mean I left Reddit entirely lol, but I sure enter way less now.

If you don’t disable the feature where it plays the videos directly in the thumbnail by hovering over it, it also counts as viewed if you let the thumbnail play for like 3 seconds. I hate it.

Yeah VSCode is the GOAT. I reached a point where I basically only ever use any other IDE if I’m explicitly told to, or if I don’t have a desktop environment to work with. Or if I have to work with Java, because sadly I found the Java support on VSCode to be rather lacking.