TheFriar

Yeah, but we do sacrifice our bodies for labor. We just have better medicine these days. Sitting for 8-12hrs a day, lifting/bending for 8-12hrs, etc. It’s all sacrificing our bodies, causing physical pain. We have different kinds of pain now, because there were never really jobs back then where people sat for so long. Since the Industrial Revolution, we still sacrifice our bodies for capitalism. We’re just not bending over in fields as much (though, the most exploited among us still do, I.e. immigrants), we instead bend over machines and hunch over computers.

You definitely hit on something that I didn’t: our shackles are now invisible. We have powerful computers in our pockets, where we misspend our “leisure” time—still in service of capitalism. And there are all of these “amenities” that the ownership class points to so they can say, “please, you don’t have it that bad with your starbuckses and iPhones!” The means with which they extract more value from us have become a literal science. They addict us in order to suck up all of our attention and free time we have away from injecting value with our labor, so we can continue to inject value into their system with our consumption (and more recently, with our data profiles they are always building). They have made our chains invisible, where once, yes, we were sometimes literally shackled to our jobs and the property of the landed gentry, aristocracy, and church, but now even our injected value is nearly invisible. Literally everything about us as people has been monetized. And thus we have greater wealth inequality than the gilded age.

It’s not that we didn’t learn anything from history, it’s just that the wrong people learned how to avoid the wrong repercussions for recreating the same history.

Well…serfs in the Middle Ages actually did work less than we do today. Which was the church’s idea in order to keep rebellions from happening.

Now, that was indentured servitude, so it’s not a 1:1 comparison. But if we’re talking about output, exploitation, and profit, we are working more, creating far more value, and we are still working to afford the ability to consume and live with necessities.

Now, I’m staunchly anti-capitalist. But as a logical anti-capitalist anarchist in modern times, I can still look back at history and say that capitalism is inextricably tied to some human progress…but only because it was the dominant system while humanity progressed. So, the progress that led to better, healthier lives cannot be separated from the outcomes of capitalism. Fine, capitalism has walked hand in hand with humanity through progress.

But. First off, “hand in hand” is a generous way of putting it. We work for a system, we sacrifice lives for a system, as opposed to bending or altering the system to better serve human lives. We squeezed people into an order that served capitalism.

My point is that as we’ve progressed, we held humanity back for the sake of capitalism. We had to fight capitalists/the ruling class for the most basic of human rights, and those were bloody, bloody battles. Capitalism and its proponents gleefully slaughtered people in service of a system that favors those with the money and power. And the “worker rights” we have today are the most basic imaginable. We fought for an 8 hour day, to keep kids from dying in mines, to keep harmful products away from money making ventures, to have days off at all…and after all of that, we still work more than middle age peasants.

And maybe “indentured servitude” isn’t exactly in practice today (in most of the world, but it’s definitely not completely eradicated), I don’t know exactly on a granular level, how those of us that survive by the skin of our teeth on incredibly low wage jobs really differs all that much from indentured servitude. People work to keep their houses and to keep from starving. And the majority of houses are still owned by the higher classes! And we have entire markets that thrive off of the suffering thatcomes with poverty. Credit card and credit reporting, payday loans, the entire system of rent, foods affordable for lower income people being addictive and deadly…we’ve built a system that pushes people down, and then wrings them dry. And we still work more than peasants in the Middle Ages.

That doesn’t make sense. Some technologies are bad. One that actively and systematically dismantles rights, for example. Nearly every capitalist technological advancement has helped capitalists exploit workers for more profit—and we are nearing the endgame there. None of these things should “just be adapted to.” Passive consumerism isn’t exactly a heroic position lol

No, my baby loooved heroin.

Big horse killed my baby

Interesting. When you really dive into conversations he has with gang members, you do start finding out more about him. He was thrust into the life of crime, manipulated by Dutch for his own ends, and disposed of by him. Dutch tried to turn him into a soulless killing machine, but you find out more about how Arthur sees the world the more you do engage with people.

Yeah, he is a vessel for the conflict between the bullshit about “living free” that Dutch preaches and the actual evil they do, but he has depth of his own as the story goes on.

I get it, he does seem to be unthinking, but as an engine for the story, he embodies the conflict. Maybe you see that as being an empty character, I see it as an interesting storytelling device.

He’s an antihero archetype through and through

lol what an insanely combative position to take. It’s a breakdown in due diligence, for sure. No argument there.

But an “extreme lack?” No, not really. It’s easy for them to overlook something like this. I’m not a corporate investigative person at all, so I don’t know the proper procedures. But checking into executive holdings and business history seems, I dunno, like something that probably isn’t done very often—if at all. Especially when that CEO is a foreign national.

Yeah, they shouldve—but that’s easy to say now that something like this has happened. The company the guy worked for was the one to uncover it—so the company that put him in charge didn’t catch it before giving him the position. So, really, it’s a breakdown on the cybersecurity outfit’s protocol, and Mozilla got dragged into this while being twice removed from it.

Look, I’m not a huge Mozilla stan or anything. I hadn’t been using Firefox for a long time, I’d been a DDG browser user, before that Brave. But, brave runs on chromium not to mention all their nonsense with crypto, so I bailed on them and went to DDG. And then recently only switched back to Firefox. So you’re barking up the wrong tree on your stupid crusade to try to paint me as someone with my head up Mozilla’s ass.

From where I stand, they happen to be one of the best browsers these days, especially for privacy. I used to have speed issues with it, which is why I bailed on it so long ago. If this information came out and they decided to stick with this company after the company failed to properly vet their CEO? Yeah, I’d be pissed. But they’re taking an extra step in cutting ties with a company they’d been doing business with for a month, after they are rectifying their own mistake.

Use Firefox, don’t use Firefox, I couldn’t give one shit less. But it just seemed like you misunderstood what happened, took a strong stance, and now are just digging your heels in. It just seems…dumb. But like I said, do whatever the fuck you want. You just kinda seem like an asshole. No offense.

Right? I’m STILL replaying rdr2 campaign. The story is just…mwah

Well their site is dogshit too. I opened it up this morning searching for an answer on a game I was playing, and literally the entire screen was taken up by three separate ads, with one line of text visible. Fuck their site.

I mean…the will smith name doesn’t exactly carry with it a lot of support these days.

This was the craziest quote to me:

"I hope someday being anti-AI is seen as ableist," another mused.

WHAT.

Just…FUCKIN WHAT.