this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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That's the thing, you correctly see the difference in available time after work. That difference stacks over time. Having read this or that makes you understand terminology, patterns, builds confidence and over time that marginal extra time I have had has made it possible for me to grok a manual in 15 minutes but my father who hasn't had that time takes 45 minutes from his shorter available time. Then there's all the modifying details around kids or no kids, how much more hours the lower parts of the working class have to do to pay rent today vs earlier and so on and so forth. Everyone really but it's just much worse for the lower sections.
And then there's the problem of availability of products without extensive research. There's few brands owned by few large corpos that spend a lot pushing them left front and center on their digital platforms. That increases significanty the amount of work anyone has to do to avoid surveillance in this case. And as you understand, increasing the amount of work, increases the amount of time, and there's hard cutoffs which lead to the work not being done, which leads to the marketing campaigns succeeding in getting dad to buy a Ring. These people study, research and know well how to get people who seemingly have choices to choose their product 8 out of 10 times. Especially when transacting via their digital platform.
Which is why we're fighting a losing game if we rely on the individual when they're standing against the corporation which acts as a large collective with collective resources aligned to achieve their goals. This is why individualism is profitable and therefore encouraged. Consumers, employees have to also act as a collective which pools their resources like time, expertise to counteract this. E.g. by having people, supported by the normies, digest, analyse and spit out the results in trivial form (when posaible) that also takes very little time for everyone else to grok, so they make the right decision. Example that come to mind is Consumer Reports.
Your arguments are all valid and fine, wouldn't argue with them. BUT understanding the underlying reasons doesn't really change the fact and my point.
I can empathise with speeders, murderers, scammers and whatever. But know why someone does something, or even truly empathizing with it, doesn't change the fact that it's bad. I could understand a society of murderers and their reasons for murdering. But they'd still destroy their society.
And sadly I really see no way for the government (any gov anywhere) to really pull the rudder. Capitalism just won. And, as you already stated, their goals align excellently with the average Joe/Jane having no clue about the stuff that's thrown in their faces and are worked to death so that'll never change.
Yes. :D
And in capitalism right now there's no obvious way to reverse the trend. That said, if the critical theory of capitalism (and history) holds any water, the victory is very likely to be temporary, followed by mass unrest and significant change. What kind of change is not so clear but we may have a say if we're educated enough and organized, so at least we know who to support when the time comes.
Not today anymore. Social-media and the state-of-stupid of the web inhibit that. The masses don't even know what to protest for or against. And without MASSIVE numbers you'd achieve nothing. Someone just needs to throw enough moneyz at the problem (or pay thousands to flood the net with "I love our overlords because XYZ") until it's gone.
It was hard to topple a king some 100yrs ago, but today? We don't even know our kings anymore. Besides those few media-clown-babies that so desperately crave attention to fill a bottomless void of darkness inside them.
Yeah we're definitely playing on hardcore mode. There are some reasons for optimism though. A lot of people who wouldn't think about these things a few years ago are talking about class. I'm talking regular peope I know. These issues were just not on our horizon until recently. They see things very differently than they used to. That's the hopium I'm huffing. 😄
I'd sniff a line of that hopium too. I just don't see it being available in the foreseeable future. At least not for an affordable price 😁