[chmsky00]

Facebook is not the only organization that has mastered copying bits between users machines.

The technology matters. The brand does not.

Depressed dads can share bird pics with dozens of protocols.

When a technology forum conflates a brand and a technology, one can feel confident their society is a clueless joke.

Adam Smith was right to warn about the extreme division of labor creating humans dumber than the lowliest animal.

[iEchoic]

> When a technology forum conflates a brand and a technology, one can feel confident their society is a clueless joke.

This technology forum would benefit from recognizing how out-of-touch and comically alarmist this statement is. Most of the discussions about Facebook here are starting to sound like some bizarre form of group hysteria.

[chmsky00]

You sound like you’re alarmed the world might change without your permission.

A brand is a mind virus used by aristocrats to capture worker effort for aristocrats.

Go ahead and wave it off with a vague alarmist reaction yourself. I’ll let my real world experience with billionaires who goto Davos, and have plainly discussed with me their goal of leveraging technology to manage the agency of the masses for their gain, they’ll be dead before the environment is an issue or society decides its a problem because society is full of rubes…

Pretend hundreds who don’t know you exist care about your existence specifically.

Sit in your filter bubble and wag fingers at anything that might try to poke through.

Language changes meaning over time. Anchoring ourselves to past meaning is the opposite of disruptive.

[SamPatt]

I'm aware of Smith's discussion of specialization of labor from an economic perspective but not from a social one, where can I read more about this?

[prirai]

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/...

[dredmorbius]

Pointing vaguely at an eleven-hundred page book and saying "somewhere in there" is not in fact a useful mode of reference.

Book and chapter at least would be much preferred.

[dredmorbius]

E. G. West, "Adam Smith's Two Views on the Division of Labour", Economica, Vol. 31, No. 121 (Feb., 1964), pp. 23-32 (10 pages)

https://doi.org/10.2307/2550924

Division of labour is introduced in Book 1, Chapter I. However the division-of-labour argument is itself divided, the code occurring in the final part of Wealth of Nations.

Criticisms come in Book 5, Chapter I:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...

Note too that Smith puts the whole of expanded productivity on division of labour, whilst retrospective assessments strongly credit the role of steam power. Curious as one would be left with the impression that Smith was wholly unfamiliar with the concept, and not in fact the man singularly responsible for securing James Watt a position at the University of Edinburgh, for the purpose of improving the university's own steam engine, a decade before publication of Wealth and continuing past that date.