Post

Steve Klabnik
@steveklabnik.com

i think a core beef that i have with a lot of this "automation is bad" sentiment lately is that there is no inherent moral good in laboring the story of humanity is one of invention, where we improve our conditions by building things that help us do more things more easily

This post is unavailable.
eevee
@eev.ee

tbh i find it deeply irritating and disingenuous to call this "automation", as if we'd just invented the dishwasher. it's not a contraption that performs a rote task; it's a box that spits out Whatever

eevee
@eev.ee

the story of humanity is one of telling stories, and now i am constantly advertised the box as "What if you didn't have to tell stories. What if you could automate talking to your children. What if there were a TikTok nobody had to make. Just endless banal sludge, forever"

eevee
@eev.ee

What if we could automate humanity, so you had more time to labor

0 reposts14 likes

Steve Klabnik
@steveklabnik.com

that's this part: bsky.app/profile/stev...

Steve Klabnik@steveklabnik.com

sort of along my recent repost, the issue at hand has been the same since the dawn of capitalism: when automation increases productivity, who gets to capture the value of that productivity increase? the beef is not with the productivity. it's with the value capture

eevee
@eev.ee

not sure it is — "productivity" has not generally been used to describe the "spending time with people you care about" bit before

Steve Klabnik
@steveklabnik.com

"eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will" is a slogan about workers capturing the benefit of increased productivity of their labor