| > requires a de-humanized constantly replenished underclass to provide us with the cheap good food we want You're going to get further convincing people to care about human suffering (the goal of the article) here by pointing out what a failure Soylent was. Why? First you'd have to anticipate that all people are going to talk about here is, "Economics. Costs. Pricing. What about if robots made the food instead? Then there is no underclass." Those people aren't even transhumanists i.e. inhabiting some far-off possibly impossible future. The kinds of foods you could conceive are harvested and processed entirely by robots, end to end, and thus involves no explicit human suffering, are actually really crappy, and no one wants, even when they were made by humans first. That's what Soylent was, it was one guy's algal flour product that probably, truthfully, could be totally automated. It sucked, let's be real. It's this sort of capitalistic argument, "if it fails in the marketplace it must be bad," that just gets through to people simpler, and clearer. That's the starting fact that gets people to listen. Not de-humanization. Not that there isn't a place for critical theory. But that you can just discuss facts, like yes, there is a dehumanized replenished underclass, and yet, here we are buying berries from Costco. Their brains turn off. And I wouldn't just brush that off as ignorance, or claim some conspiracy that people are conditioned to first ask if something does or does not make money, because capitalism. It's just tough to know which things to pay attention to, so if there's a simple framework that helps you, on average, pay attention to the right things and get through life, buying berries, you'll use it. Unless you're unfortunately born to pick berries instead. So personally, I believe the reason rich people actually frame regulators literally and John Rawls philosophically as the enemy, unequivocally, is that the veil of ignorance much more clearly threatens capitalism than perpetual human suffering through wage slavery (a factual thing!) ever did. |