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by breve 54 days ago
> What If They Could?

Then they'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

3 comments

They’re already at the front of the queue. Attempts to live forever will only further inflame the general population.
I was just reading about the French revolution. Not sure we should be hoping for anything like that.
I don't think OP is pointing to what he "hopes" is happening. He's pointing to what he thinks the rich and powerful are steering society towards.
I suspect that OP may have advanced knowledge of their fate thanks to the copy of a certain encyclopaedia which fell through a rift in the space-time continuum from 1,000 years in the future.

Share and Enjoy.

To know our future, sometimes it helps to look at our past. And then extrapolate.
People don’t want revolutions because they are pleasant. Edit: they want revolutions because they are peasant...
You might belong to the group that is benefitting from the status quo.
Why? Would you rather be a starving peasant with less rights that you currently have?
Class based 'revolutions' are made up of a bunch of idiots who would happily destroy everything while being lead by somebody even worse who is qualitatively identical to the people they despise. They have proven that repeatedly.
I don’t know. I kind of like a social safety net, unemployment insurance, limits to the work week, free education for all future adults, paid holidays, mass voting, multiethnic democracy, product liability laws, etc. Our modern society owes a lot to the hundreds of years of struggle to empower hard work and education over inherited wealth.
and you would be ok with an immortal class of tech overlords? history ending with one of the worst sets of ppl of our generation?
Mmmm. Not just the worst from a moral perspective - which is still bad! - but also some of the dumbest.

Ours are not the Masters of Industry from the Industrial Age[1], or the fission-missile-kings of the Nuclear Age. They're not ready to teach a Physics unit at a community college.

The tippity top of the uber-wealthy today are remarkably short on actual formal knowledge. This makes sense in their ideological system: scientific acumen as more of a commodity than a value.

In this view, everything should look like the stock market. But this is a profoundly stupid view. It requires not just ideology, but willfully not looking at the universe.

I'm probably steering afoul of about 90% of ycombinator here, so I'll just pull the throttles back and stop there.

[1] "Isambard Kingdom Brunel . . But Got-DAMN did men used to have some proper-ass names" - Achewood

90% seems high. I think there’s a solid chunk of the HN population that is very aware that this industry is run by morons. I, for example, only came to this realization a few years ago. But I believe it’s a growing sentiment. Late stage capitalism / techno feudalism really is a trip.