Capitalists will literally burn the planet to the ground instead of just paying their workers
They don’t even need to burn the planet to the ground to avoid that.
They’ll just burn it down because they think it’s funny. Humanity will die laughing.
It’s less that they think it’s funny (or even think about it), and much more that the universal oversaturation of markets and their avenues for surplus-as-capital to be made active and productive (a necessary law of capitalism in order to not collapse, a component of capitalism’s need for constant growth), which is further tightened by workers’ purchasing power being in freefall due to suppressed wages in order to maintain profits, has made it so any slight opening of a new market is utterly torn asunder by the explosive rail-gun jet-stream torrent of backed-up capital starved for movement, bubble or not — but due to said saturation and capital back-up, usually bubble or inevitably made into a bubble just by the volume of hyper-invested capital that has nowhere else to go grossly over-exceeding the capacity of said market and the profits that can be wrung out of it. Which then causes an extreme oversaturation of supply compared to demand, which causes prices, and so profits, to fall into a cascading collapse. This will lead to many things, including further suppression of wages (to try to salvage lost profit) and contraction of markets, which as previously mentioned, are necessary and require constant expansion for surplus-value-as-capital to continue being made active and productive to stave off economic crisis and collapse. Rinse and repeat in the natural and inherent cycle of capitalist contradiction and its inevitable crises. This problem of total market oversaturation and capital having nowhere to go is also in large part where the root of the neo-colonial system of cyclical loans, debt, austerity, then more loans, comes from.
And worth mentioning it’s not so much that they would “rather” engage in this than not pay the workers — but that capital needs to go anywhere it can be made active; and those who don’t thin their costs as much as possible to maintain the best profit margins possible in doing so to reinvest that surplus as capital, can not compete with those who do, and will be ruined and subsumed by their competitors (those that even remain anyway). It’s not a choice by the capitalist who has any other while still remaining a capitalist, because making any other choice means not being a capitalist anymore and being cannibalized by the capitalists who “won”. They will never make a choice that ends in their ruin, and would have no material reason to, hence why they need to be not given a choice by an organized working class.
If only someone could have foreseen these contradictions and problems. Perhaps by forming a concrete analysis of capitalist laws and relations and the roles played within it by its constituent classes, then providing the world with a methodology of unmatched predictive power to expose it and awaken others in the working class to the inherently inevitable need for its forcible overthrow to overcome these fundamental contradictions.
FLOODING BANGLADESH TO GIVE YOUR SHITTY SEARCH ENGINE A CHATBOT THAT NO ONE ASKED FOR THAT GIVES YOU THE SAME INFO THATS LITERALLY DIRECTLY UNDERNEATH IT IN THE RESULTS
The fact we live in a reality where we probably weren’t going to revert our greenhouse emissions, outside of some few but very notable exceptions, knew this was a problem though and spoke to our need to do something, and still came across a completely new and absolutely useless technology that will actually exponentially exacerbate the problem is such a profoundly cruel joke for this poor beleaguered planet.
The next time some bazinga accuses me of being “afraid” of treat printers because I don’t cheer on their proliferation or humanize them while they’re dehumanizing us, I may just say “yes, I am afraid of the worsening environmental devastation that you fail to see because of a fever dream of cyberpunkerinos waifu shit.”
Ulysses, I have to personally thank you for really opening my eyes to the tech rabbit hole. It really is the new fossil fuels. Especially as I’ve been listening to Tech Won’t Save Us for the past week.
The worst thing about this is we’re going to destroy the earth to make shitty pictures and stupid nonsense articles.
I can at least understand cars and industry as they’re kinda necessary for the vast improvements to quality of life but AI is just making things more shit.
I can at least understand cars and industry as they’re kinda necessary for the vast improvements to quality of life but AI is just making things more shit.
A few credulous rubes might beg to differ if the treat printer says “I love you senpai” just convincingly enough (gotta burn that many more acres of forest!).
They’re not the problem really. I empathize with those lonely enough to seek companionship in AI.
AI wouldn’t be getting 1/10th of the support if business owners weren’t planning on using it to replace entry-level jobs, that’s why we’re burning the forests down.
They’re not the problem really. I empathize with those lonely enough to seek companionship in AI.
I would be more sympathetic for that desire if it wasn’t so often presented in a contempt-for-living-beings format, as is often the case, including on this site sometimes. That misanthropic sentiment isnt new, but the treat printers have galvanized it.
Definitely, and take this from someone trying to escape the reserve army of labor.
You’d think America, where work is sacred, it would be an act of blasphemy for an employer to abolish work in certain levels. But no, it’s “innovation” and no one cares that entry-level jobs are a thing of a past.
