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by tirpen 440 days ago
"Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things."

-Terry Pratchett

2 comments

"If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing."

— John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider"

Companies have been doing that for a long time now. You're not a person, you're an ID number in the payroll database, that needs to produce more profit than you cost the company.

When you emigrate to another country, you're viewed much the same way as a non-citizen by the system.

Well, although this particular quote is from a book from 2010, Terry Pratchett had been writing about these kinds of problems for decades at that point too, so that fits. For example, in Reaper Man from 1991 shopping malls were invasive parasitical life-forms from another universe.
Even in your own country you’re viewed the same way, it’s just that your database entry has higher privileges. I mean this universally, no particular country in mind.