[thomasmeeks]

So I agree with Tim, and in a way he’d probably find too radical.

But for the hacker news crowd, I’d point to this: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa...

TL;DR the income growth of the 0.1% is having a chilling effect on mid-level executives at Amazon and Google, too.

[082349872349872]

Interesting breakdown:

     1% eponymous class
     9% professional elite
    90% working class

That's actually more skewed than the society described in 1984[1]:

     2% inner party
    13% outer party
    85% proletariat

Note that the 2% keeps the 13% toeing the party line (they don't have to amongst themselves, and proles are explicitly said to be free) to avoid any sort of Manor Farm pigs[2] getting funny ideas. IngSoc only had one party, but if one allows two outer parties, nominally opposed to each other, one may discover they each spontaneously self-police their own thought criminals.

[1] I've always thought of 1984 as being a very anglophone sort of dystopia, but now I believe Orwell was writing therapeutically, cathartically imagining a world in which the social constructs of his second-rate english boarding school applied to the whole of society.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457

[2] if Orwell had channelled PG, his labels would be:

      dogs     pigs    aggressive
      sheep   donkeys  passive
    orthodox heterodox