When I discuss things like sage advice, and that my forefathers have left tools around me for me to find. I'm talking about something abstract; I don't think I'll overturn a rock and find a parable that I'll need to think long and hard about. I don't mean someone buried some gold for me to find and live easier in our capitalist society. I think the only thing that frees us from some of the burdens in our modern capitalist cave, is continually making concerted efforts to see a better tomorrow when you don't like your yesterday.
Life is almost like a stream or a river and if you tread water, or are a weak swimmer; it's almost like you're moving backwards in some sense of the word. Regressive tendencies litter many corners around us, I often wonder if there's some unknown thing that could help us remedy this fact of reality? Was it capitalism? Maybe someone once thought capitalism might save us from the nature of reality? Maybe they didn't spend a few hours to do any thought exercises to see what end game looks like 🤷♂️? Maybe those who wanted such a system sold it as something novel, some means to quell a famine by hoarding grains? It gave western societies, and all adjacent societies a means to lift themselves up. We've had an unprecedented amount of progress, but all parties must come to an end. If you wanted to join and sell your labour, the capitalists would happily exploit your local economies to get to you and your cheap labour. How is 2024 any different than the times of past? How are the capitalists any different? Hint: they're not. Our labour has grown too expensive for them to keep their false ideal that growth can be sustained indefinitely, that their greed is their inherent value to our system of life.
If you need to spend your time and effort just meeting the basic necessities of life, it's impossible to understand what one can achieve. If you eat 2000 kcals today, but you burn 2100 kcals in the same period, that's 100 kcal deficit. If you go long enough with a similar pattern, you'll notice your waist will get smaller and your pants will need a belt. If you were to do the opposite of that, and end your days over a period in a surplus, then you'd find yourself needing to unbuckle your belt as you sit in your chair. The idea I'm trying to give you is that it just takes many small things to happen in succession (they shouldn't be dialectically opposed, that's masturbation 🤣), and you can make strides (forward or backwards, left or right) even if it doesn't feel that way, even if you're listlessly dreaming of something better. The stream runs and we get taken with it, if we fight it and put concerted effort we can grow our muscles. We won't be able to fight the current immediately, the water is fast. But given enough time and enough energy to sustain, we might grow our muscles to start swimming against this stream.
Isaac, wtf are you on about? Gimme some content.
Well what does this have to do with anything? I'll turn your attention to a discussion I had with Llama GPT 3.2 with 3 billion parameters on Saturday evening/ Sunday morning after a Christmas party I attended, 2024-12-08 llama3.2 3b.txt. In it you'll find content related to thoughts and patterns discussed on TWhbP. I think that if a logical AI agent can make a similar observation to me and my friends, it might be more than just delusions, it might be the nature of our cave we find ourselves in today. Maybe my mind has been trained to see the world as GPT? I have been writing software for a bit over a decade. I implore you to do anything for over a decade and not find yourself not noticing your abilities get better, and maybe flexing your muscles in the mirror? I've leveled up my logical reasoning and have fun going into patterns of imagination that makes my existential dread somewhat bearable. I'll reiterate what I link front an center on the homepage of this site: "I'm not a well of knowledge, I'm not looking to be encyclopedic in nature or make you smarter every day. I don't have ads or products to sell, but I do have a voice of a local technology inclined individual that has messaging that should be heard.", in Post Number 10. But this post is a bit different and breaks apart some of the wisdom I'll share, and why this is in fact a threat to us all.
In the chat with Llama GPT yesterday, GPT mentioned the person who coined the term "techno-feudalism". Techno-feudalism is something that I obviously am personally invested in. I don't have kids, but I'd still like the strength of my species to echo the ages. In technological, social and many other ways over the last 100 years we have lifted up our species to new heights under capitalism. AI isn't the only existential threat, we have nuclear bombs littering our planet. I might get you to look at how this old tool is faring in modern society, how is capitalism doing? What does it mean when wealth is horded in militia protected bunkers for the elite while the people go hungry in the streets? That coiner of "techno-feudalism", Nick Bostrom, might actually be a seer or at least been paying attention to the world as he learned of our history. He founded "Future of Humanity Institute" (FHI) at Oxford University in 2005. I guess shit is becoming too real because it seems they shuttered the experiment of FHI in this the year of our lord, 2024. Future of Humanity Institute dealt with such topics as Existential risk, Anthropic reasoning, and Human enhancement and rationality (list per Wikipedia, defined by me), which seems to be looking at topics right beside where I'm shining light on. Maybe the existential threats became too real, or there was incentive not to find the threats? Do birds experience existential dread? If not, I'll have what they're having. It's a big question mark to me why FHI closed down, it seems if someone at the top of our hierarchy of capital had a vested interest of the survival of the species, something like FHI would be around longer? I don't think you solve such problems as existential threats in a mere 2 decades, it's constant vigilance in-perpetuum. Danger lurks everywhere, but so far we've just been more resourceful as a species than all the dangers that lurk around each corner.
I'm really supposed to be focused on decentralized identity for all, or self-sovereign identity if you will. I think that could give us some even playing fields, people can decide to play the games they want or not. One where people don't need to maintain a fixed addresses to get a bank account. You shouldn't need government issued ID to be relied on to get credit from your friends. I should be trying to solve that problem, but I'm drawn to the darkness, so I'm drawn to our existential threats that I see around us today. I look at AI, and it's too interesting to ignore, I'd like to tell future generations that what they take for granted (utopia please?) was something that posed a real existential threat. I want to tell them that like-minded individuals met the capitalists and demanded more for our species. I'd like to say that concerned people saw the writing on the wall and enacted strong policy that would allow for us to equally share our work and output. I'm beating this drum every day, I can't beat it too hard all the time though because it could make me le tired.
Sure, it's sage advice to save a bit for a rainy day, and we need to squeeze every penny. But where did this sage advice come from? And why does that seem almost impossible for the average Canadian today? I feel we need to just have just and fair representation for all, not just half the voting population. All games we've created, democracy is not created equal. When you ignore this game, it goes off the rails and the power structures lean away from the masses. A dichotomy has created a rift. Our system of governance should have hard guard rails so people don't go hungry while the wealth gap is widened each day. This means that we need to shed some ideas that have helped us grow. It means you shouldn't be above someone else because some fancy fallacy of some labour being "unskilled" labour. It really takes a village, and I sure as shit don't want to do retail. I sure as shit don't want to do customer service either, I've had my day in those jobs. And anyone that has the privilege to rise above that path, will likely take it. It's not that it's a path that's below anyone inherently, I just think it can grate on ones mental health, myself included. Couple the shit pay, and the fact that sometimes customers are just shitty to their brother and sisters in labour. That's gonna be a no from me dawg, I'll be homeless before I work retail again. It's a fact of life, you can't live on that "unskilled" government mandated wage anymore, so I'd just give up. I'd rather not have someone frothing at the mouth for not having a perfectly stirred $2.00 coffee. Expecting that somehow their worth is more than me, because they don't don the corporate colours of their employer? Many "unskilled" labourers slave harder in their working hours than those above them, and for a fraction of the wages. Why play the capitalist's games, especially as it justs enriches their position and errodes our democracy? Especially when they won't take seriously the threat of existentialism.
There's a bunch of meandering thoughts with specks of philosophy littered here and there, I hope it finds you well. I'll leave with 2 hard facts to sum up this article and what I think I'm trying to describe. We have had a huge amount of efficiency with the advent of automation, we could potentially automate most of the least desirable jobs in our lifetimes. It has the potential to be freeing, or enslaving. Under the current rules of the system, it might be that many many people suffer. I hope you and I are not in that cohort. Automation has seen our labour produce more than any other period in history, and yet wages remain stagnant. This is widely accepted, the labour of yesterday made only fractions of what we produce now. There's so much to go around where does it all go? There's malfeasance in some people taking more than their fair share. This is causing downwards pressure on an already stressed out rungs of us labourers, the lower and middle class.
Canadian’s standard of living, as measured by real GDP per person, was lower in 2023 than in 2014. Without improved productivity growth, workers will face stagnating wages and government revenues will not keep pace with spending commitments, requiring higher taxes or reduced public services. - TD Canada Trust
So in my opinion we're on a trajectory of a downward spiral, it takes a lot of effort to pull up a plane that is nose-diving from my understanding. An economy is a big beast, and I don't think there's one yoke to control this global beast. I don't think we're nose-diving yet, but maybe I'm an optimist? I'm just posturing on watching the yoke, and trying to grab onto it as best I can. No one told me to do this, I'm just concerned that if I don't take a stand, then no one will. I'm sure there's similar voices that I could connect with online, but I'm really looking at Waterloo Region, Ontario and finding people who can help ease the transition to understanding what it means to be a person in a post-scarcity society. We need to figure out how to trust one another so that we can keep order in our house. We need to level the playing fields to one where your job does not equate your social status, one where all are welcome and those who live by the hierarchy and endless pursuits of the capitalist hallucination of infinite growth should become the newly found fringe of society, instead of those who are living on the streets, symptoms of a failed system.
"They've lost their humanity!", "What sort of people search for 'capital'? "It's a made up word that means nothing except a flimsy power structure to feel like a strongman.", "They exert powers over someone who has no choice." - This is the type of rhetoric I'd like to be a part of. This is the type of people I want to hang out with, and it's the level of shade I'd like to provide for future generations. We're being pilfered, pickpocketed by a group of individuals that has a lineage of capital. They throw their capital around like it's nothing, they've made this game of capitalism and corrupted our sacred institutions like democracy. If you want to experience modern niceties, you have to play. We still have choice not to play, we have agency and our own ideas. If you want to freeze your ass off in the streets, there are those who do that. Maybe you want to commit to the daily grind to become a wage slave? No, how about we find you a nice prison cell? Be fortunate in our prisons that we're not in the grand ol' USA, where they produce actual slaves. Actual slaves to private industry that owns many PRIVATE prisons in the states. "Well it's not a lot of them" you might think, trying to make that seem okay. There are more slaves alive today than at any other point in history (there's more people but I think we should've figured out sometime in the last 100k years of human history on how to not be such an asshole and literally enslave someone). But if a free and open society has a caveat, that if your municipality wants you to do hard labour for free... well sucks to suck. This is not tenable under any form of democracy, all are meant to be equal. Orwell's ideas in Animal Farm and 1986 were not meant to become a reality, but something to learn from. Let's start the hard conversation now, the best time was decades ago but we're here today to ensure the enshitification of everything can be paused or comes to a stop.
Our modern lives are very complex. They've become a very convoluted plate of spaghetti, one that feels like it will be tangled forever. Well, I just happen to know spaghetti code 😎 is something I need to prevent as a professional software developer. If there's no standards or rules, entropy becomes the name of the game. If you don't like this convoluted plate of spaghetti, I think I can help to clean it up. If you don't want this spaghetti gone, maybe you wanna eat your spaghetti a bit off to the side because some of us are just vibing over here, and this spaghetti has potential to harsh one's vibe, ya dig? There's a fine line we must walk, if we notice someone took too much from the communal stew yesterday; If we find ourselves less hungry today, then maybe we should keep some back for tomorrow? It'll be another day after the next, we'll be hungry again, so let's not take more than needed so future days will be easier. Let's create a vision of something that will be more prosperous than capitalism. What is capital? Outside our capitalist system I fail to find meaning from from the word. If you're happy, if you're safe, if you have friends, and you can do something you love today... Well you're not self-made, it took a village. You're privileged, your privilege is showing, so much, that you didn't have to walk kilometers to get to drinking water. Your privilege is showing that you didn't need to ask anyone around you for what you wanted or needed, there's infrastructure in place that you can jump in your car or on a bus and get almost anything at any hour of the day. Our forefathers brought that tech to us of capitalism, and made us have incredible progress. But I think pretty much everything has a useful life, it's just whether you'll be around to observe it or not.
I don't want much from the readers of this blog. I just want a few minutes a day, send my messages to your loved ones and to maybe try to see what privilege you have from your own perspective. Gratitude is something that should be expressed as much as you can, sometimes we can get cynical as we age. There's very few things I'll say with certainty. I have said we operate in cycles as society, empires rise and fall. I'll try to give you something else that I believe to be fact. To take someone else's privileges away, that's a bit regressive. To punch down to those below is untenable. When one within our fold lose their privilege, especially one below us, we all suffer. We all suffer because as the crab bucket goes... It's only a brief window at the top, before another crab climbs over you to get their fresh breath and you might find the pressure at the bottom might not be so enviable. I've not enjoyed my time spent at the bottom of the crab bucket, but I'm doing well now (despite my disdain for the system) so I want to provide respite and a voice that will give people hope. Maybe my nonsensical ramblings will be a voice of reason when I see very little of that around from our wanna be leaders.
Isaac