HN is more about obedience to investors than disobedience. This place is all about corporations, money and warmed-over "tech". It's telling many here are afraid (or unable) to name anyone but a dead man.
Those who engage in more serious activism can name many offhand.
Why would you hear about it? Do all of them share each email with you, which you read daily and investigate? Do you confidentially interview their employees? Would they brag about "that harassment case"?
It is not like this reaches 50% of their time. (I would hope.)
A common privatization tactic is to defund public services so they're indeed incompetent. Then point at their incompetence as reason for privatization.
I believe them when they say it! Something makes people refuse to look through Galileo's telescope. (Spent his life under house arrest.) Pushed Turing to suicide for homosexuality. To aggressively deny global warming.
And that's ok, they're not the audience. They'll tell you that you won't convince anyone; hopefully that discourages you from success.
Yes, or they legalize it (so you pay fees for expedited passports, people get frequently fined, when corporations commit fraud they give just a cut to the government as a "fine", etc).
Couldn't put it better myself. Universal Basic Income, with generous policies like universal healthcare and housing, is a major step towards an advanced civilization.
I would say that the problem is social, not technological. But using tech to directly support hardworking militant activists helps. Because slaves imply slaveowners, and the slaveowners won't willingly let go of their slave armies.
Here's one where he discusses education... training for stupidity and conformity, the contradictory need for creative independent innovators, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFf6_0T2ZoI
"an extreme individualism has stepped in as the alternative—a go-it-alone perspective narrowly focused on getting an education and becoming successful on one’s own merit."
It's ironic. Corporations are anything but individualist. They're collectives. Almost always top-down authoritarian structures that resemble fascism closer than most fascist governments. And full of bureaucracies that have nothing to do with making products, like marketing & finance depts.
And in this article, "education" is a euphemism synonymous with college. Not talking about self-learning. Some administration that gives people certificates.
> But even here on HN, with the high quality of debate
Maybe the debate here on other topics, from technical to political, is also of low quality? Just with the flavor of "quality", like carefully argued (but absurd) mini-essays? Much like politicians and the media which use carefully-manicured gravitas to give the flavor of truth without the nutrients?
Being irrational enough to destroy yourself isn't all that compartmentalized. It's not just about climate change, it's about economics and national ideology. Which certainly includes what we do all day in our jobs.
I like to say hyperindividualism, not individualism. Individualism and collectivism are naturally related: cooperation can bring out our individual potentials. From David Graeber's “The Democracy Project”, about Native Americans:
> Others (John Locke, for example, or many of the other English political philosophers so beloved by the Founding Fathers) became fascinated by the discovery of societies in North America that appeared to be simultaneously far more egalitarian, and far more individualistic, than anything Europeans had previously imagined possible.
In a European settler society like the US, people are still propagandized to believe the two are at odds: individual vs collective. But a moment's thought shows this to be ridiculous.
> What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments.
It's "startup news": computing for capitalism. We work on social media without knowing anything about sociology. We work on advertising, which is corporate propaganda. We have no vision of the future, unlike technologists in a sane world, so we build a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare where I'm literally filling out a form right now.