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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • It’s like a restaurant selling granite rocks for dessert. Nobody will buy them or eat them—so the product fails miserably. But if a popular restaurant adds a dollar to the meal price, and gives every customer a rock with their bill—well, then they can say that:

    Every customer gets rocks for dessert.

    Every customer pays for it.

    Their business is more profitable because of the tasty granite rocks.

    I just wanted to spotlight this excellent metaphor tbh.





  • Okay but now I need to once again do a brief rant about the framing of that initial post.

    the silicon valley technofascists are the definition of good times breed weak men

    You’re not wrong about these guys being both morally reprehensible and also deeply pathetic. Please don’t take this as any kind of defense on their behalf.

    However, the whole ā€œgood times breed weak menā€ meme is itself fascist propaganda about decadence breeding degeneracy originally written by a mediocre science fiction author and has never been a serious theory of History. It’s rooted in the same kind of masculinity-through-violence-as-primary-virtue that leads to those dreams of conquest. I sympathize with the desire to show how pathetic these people are by their own standards but it’s also critical to not reify the standards themselves in the process.


  • I also absolutely hate this ā€œabundanceā€ narrative that these assholes keep trying to push. Like, outside of some parts of the housing market the problem isn’t that the stuff (or the productive capacity to make the stuff) doesn’t exist, it’s that we have an economic system focused on maximizing profit and you can’t make money selling things to people who can’t afford to buy them. Like, economic inequality is the primary obstacle to the kind of universal abundance that these people claim to want, but because it necessitates some kind of redistribution they can’t actually acknowledge that. But mark my words if we ever do get serious about our social safety nets and making sure that low-income people have enough money to buy the things they need for a good life we will start seeing the Saltmans (maybe not him specifically) start innovating to find ways to get those things to them.








  • There are so many different ways to unpack this, but I think my two favorites so far are:

    1. We’ve turned the party’s surveillance and thought crime punishment apparatus into a de facto God with the reminder that you could pray to it. Does that actually do anything? Almost certainly not, unless your prayers contain thought crimes in which case you will be reeducated for the good of the State, but hey, Big Brother works in mysterious ways.

    2. How does it never occur to these people that the reason why people with disproportionate amounts of power don’t use it to solve all the world’s problems is that they don’t want to? Like, every single billionaire is functionally that Spider-Man villain who doesn’t want to cure cancer but wants to turn people into dinosaurs. Only turning people into dinosaurs is at least more interesting than making a number go up forever.