There’s a clear argument to be made that the end of USSR really let capital off the leash so to speak. So if you imagine the theft of surplus value being a spectrum, after the USSR was no longer a counterweight, capital no longer had any reason to stay on the nicer end of the spectrum.
So in the terms of tech, this means that tech is no longer developed to just be useful/practical unless there’s an exploitive monetization scheme attached or in the works. This is basically the enshittification cycle. Cool new functional thing that’s cheap/free. But really it’s just a ploy for market/platform capture via market share etc. So within short order, that useful tech gets bled of it’s value proposition as it approaches monetization/enshittification. The profit motive has recuperated the development of tech completely. It’s almost impossible to create something useful if it doesn’t already have some profit/rent seeking mechanism embedded. And if you try to do a startup to challenge some market giant, they most likely just buy it out and bury it before it becomes a serious threat. Maybe if your lucky, some aspects will get ported into the existing product in some half-assed manner to appease the user base.
Sorry for the rambling rant, I had a few beers earlier.
Yeah, I know there’s been a lot written on the USSR opening the floodgates for Capital, but I think it’s time to abstract that out to “anti-enshittification anchors” that capital need to have to function, but that it is inherently hostile to and will seek to kill or co opt by any means necessary.
I don’t mean like regulatory capture, I mean bodies that actively threaten capital’s existence and by doing so force the concessions that ironically keep capitalism ticking over.
“anti-enshittification anchors” that capital need to have to function, but that it is inherently hostile to and will seek to kill or co opt by any means necessary
This just sounds like the mask-on progressive liberalism to me, but I’d appreciate more info if you can provide some readings or additional info.
There’s a clear argument to be made that the end of USSR really let capital off the leash so to speak. So if you imagine the theft of surplus value being a spectrum, after the USSR was no longer a counterweight
I think collapse of the USSR was a symptom and not a cause
Average heights in the west started falling from 1970 onwards. Not just the US but all of europe too, so it had nothing to do with immigration
US wages have also been stagnant since 1973. IDK what the wage timeline is for europe
I agree, didn’t mean to say it was the only thing that caused this shift. More so that capital no longer had as much resistance to its dominance globally as the USSRs influence in global consciousness waned. It’s partly what leads into the neoliberal turn, end of history, irrational exuberance, believing their own propaganda, etc. There’s no longer any real counter-narrative, only the marketplace of capitalist competition where the truth is up for bid. There’s also other factors too. Global financialization and free trade agreements pushed via IMF and World Bank etc have aided the consolidation of capital to a point of concentration that’s unprecedented to my knowledge. But this is still interrelated to ‘no other option’ ideology that propagated directly from the fall of the Berlin Wall etc.
I don’t know enough about geopolitics in the 70s to point to more direct events or such. But it’s pretty clear that once 68 failed to realize actual socialism, most labor power blocs start to decline in the face of cold war propaganda. The window of discourse in the west gets pulled further right until the ‘greed is good’ 80s anchors it on the right.
The top 1% consumer in the world is basically comfortable at this point. There isnt really a consumerist way of making their lives better. Like you can sell more high quality stuff beyond the top 1% by making it cheaper through process improvements, but its not necessarily tech advancement.
That’s never what held back capitalist expansion, the direction of economic surplus towards the luxury of a tiny minority is a defining trait of feudal production that capitalism substantially reduced. It only played a role in technological progress back at a point when meaningful advancement was still achievable by kind of resources and directed effort of the eccentric and idle rich pursuing experimentation.
The stagnation we have isn’t a result of a lack of possible gadgets for the 1%, it’s us pressing more and more often against the boundary of what research can be incentivized by the profit motive. Capitalist technological innovation has always been primarily about process improvements and expansion to/creation of new markets, with resources only directed where capital returns are reasonably expected; any scientific discovery is purely incidental. There’s also the fact that most scientific advancement within capitalism has been state-backed, and neoliberalism has eroded the institutions involved.
There’s also less incentive to do process improvements when there’s cheap labor available. So the current arc of “development” is casting more and more people into greater and greater poverty.
Without the ballast of a proletarian state that prevents or fights capitalist expansion into new labor markets, the capitalist solution is to create death, destruction, and poverty to force people’s surplus value out of them.
yeah but it also relies on paid labour to design it and they don’t stay relevant that long. I’m not saying it isn’t exploitative I’m saying it will never be cheaper than this other form of exploitation
Not because we’ve reached any sort of technological apex, but because we’ve perhaps reached a point where the capitalist mechanisms for innovation are sputtering.
It’s the neoliberal mechanisms. The machine was doing OKAY for tech progress under Keynesian policy. Not better than socialism but it wasn’t the crawl we’re currently seeing.
The top 1% consumer in the world is basically comfortable at this point. There isnt really a consumerist way of making their lives better. Like you can sell more high quality stuff beyond the top 1% by making it cheaper through process improvements, but its not necessarily tech advancement.
(The following is the perspective of an outsider enthusiast, please disregard or correct me where needed)
Physics has plateaued somewhat, as well. Part of it is just the scale. It’s difficult to learn things about particles that are smaller than the equipment you’re using to measure things. It’s also hard to justify the funding, too. “Hey, give us blempty hundred thousand dollars to disprove a hypothesis.” Not quite as sexy or thrilling as the venture capitalists’ pie in the sky.
…but… I also wonder if maybe… maybe we’ve gotten into a bit of a rut with established physics. Like for example, I don’t understand wave-particle duality. The bit I specifically don’t understand is the particle. Waves make sense, we can see interference patterns, light ever-so-slightly bends round corners, different wavelengths translate to different amounts of energy. But. The fuck is a particle. It really seams like it’s just a neat trick to make the sums easier.
It really seams like it’s just a neat trick to make the sums easier.
Part of what’s weird about fundamental physics is that it is, in a sense, all just tricks to make the math easier. When you get below the level of non-relativistic QM (and even, arguably, at that level), the distinction between the mathematics of the theory and the theory itself starts to collapse. Some of this is probably just due to the fact that events and patterns at that scale are just so unfamiliar to us and our everyday experience: we can make intuitive sense of things like forces, acceleration, mass, and other stuff that’s in the ontology of classical mechanics because we live in that world. Fields, Lie groups, fiber bundles, and other essential bits of the formalism at the QFT level are much harder for us to understand, because they can only roughly be mapped onto things that are familiar from our lived experience. This is part of why things like QFT, QED, and other candidate “fundamental” theories just seem like bags of mathematical tricks: in a very literal sense, those theories are telling us that the world just is a set of formal relationships and interdependent patterns. When you ask something like “well what is the theory really telling us, beyond the math?” for classical mechanics, I can give you a story–a narrative–about the world that maps the mathematics onto familiar concepts. When you ask the same question about QFT, there’s no easily accessible metaphor or story: it’s structure all the way down. Statements like “light sometimes behaves like a particle” means nothing more or less than “it’s useful to think of light as being quantized in some contexts, because the mathematics seems to work that way.”
I’m also an outsider and I find it helpful to see things in a similar way.
Everything can be divided up in different ways: relations of production, forces of production, social relations, means of production, mental conceptions, etc, etc. Science/technology is another one. They’re all interconnected. Each one can develop even if the others stagnate. But there’s a limit to how much anything can develop on its own. They either all develop or you reach a wall.
The hard sciences are near the wall. There’s room for a little bit of development but nothing can flourish. Google ‘[discipline/science] funding’ and have a look at what’s required to secure research funding (or don’t—it won’t be fun lol). There is zero percent chance that any funder will knowingly pay a research team to conclude, ‘capitalism must end’. There are research questions you’re just not allowed to ask.
Not to mention that scientists are hemmed in on all sides by IP. Good luck advancing knowledge if you’re not allowed to start at the most advanced point because some imperialist items the IP and keeps it locked away because reasons.
Researchers of all kinds know the system is terrible but without organisation none of them can do anything about it. And they’re mostly labour aristocrats if they work in western research institutions, which means they are unwilling to even accept what the problem is beyond the surface detail of restrictive gatekeeping.
There’s only so much even the best scientist can achieve in this system.
I feel like unless we figure out an extremely clever trick, we need just gigantic particle accelerators or quantum computers orders of magnitude better than we can currently conceive of to make substantial steps forward in physics anymore. Like, we’re not even talking “Well, the USSR/China could do it because they weren’t/aren’t as beholden to the profit motive”, we’re talking particle accelerators the size of fucking countries, and helium liquid cooling on large scales to maintain quantum coherence unless we figure out more room-temperature shit.
String theory is a neat idea and I do genuinely find it interesting and have read books on it, but at the end of the day it’s just a giant “so what” to me. Not “what’s the point of making physics advancements” obviously, but “what’s the point of creating these massive, complicated theories if we need a particle accelerator the size of the solar system to prove them right or wrong”.
deleted by creator
There’s a clear argument to be made that the end of USSR really let capital off the leash so to speak. So if you imagine the theft of surplus value being a spectrum, after the USSR was no longer a counterweight, capital no longer had any reason to stay on the nicer end of the spectrum.
So in the terms of tech, this means that tech is no longer developed to just be useful/practical unless there’s an exploitive monetization scheme attached or in the works. This is basically the enshittification cycle. Cool new functional thing that’s cheap/free. But really it’s just a ploy for market/platform capture via market share etc. So within short order, that useful tech gets bled of it’s value proposition as it approaches monetization/enshittification. The profit motive has recuperated the development of tech completely. It’s almost impossible to create something useful if it doesn’t already have some profit/rent seeking mechanism embedded. And if you try to do a startup to challenge some market giant, they most likely just buy it out and bury it before it becomes a serious threat. Maybe if your lucky, some aspects will get ported into the existing product in some half-assed manner to appease the user base.
Sorry for the rambling rant, I had a few beers earlier.
Yeah, I know there’s been a lot written on the USSR opening the floodgates for Capital, but I think it’s time to abstract that out to “anti-enshittification anchors” that capital need to have to function, but that it is inherently hostile to and will seek to kill or co opt by any means necessary.
I don’t mean like regulatory capture, I mean bodies that actively threaten capital’s existence and by doing so force the concessions that ironically keep capitalism ticking over.
This just sounds like the mask-on progressive liberalism to me, but I’d appreciate more info if you can provide some readings or additional info.
I think collapse of the USSR was a symptom and not a cause
Average heights in the west started falling from 1970 onwards. Not just the US but all of europe too, so it had nothing to do with immigration
US wages have also been stagnant since 1973. IDK what the wage timeline is for europe
I agree, didn’t mean to say it was the only thing that caused this shift. More so that capital no longer had as much resistance to its dominance globally as the USSRs influence in global consciousness waned. It’s partly what leads into the neoliberal turn, end of history, irrational exuberance, believing their own propaganda, etc. There’s no longer any real counter-narrative, only the marketplace of capitalist competition where the truth is up for bid. There’s also other factors too. Global financialization and free trade agreements pushed via IMF and World Bank etc have aided the consolidation of capital to a point of concentration that’s unprecedented to my knowledge. But this is still interrelated to ‘no other option’ ideology that propagated directly from the fall of the Berlin Wall etc.
I don’t know enough about geopolitics in the 70s to point to more direct events or such. But it’s pretty clear that once 68 failed to realize actual socialism, most labor power blocs start to decline in the face of cold war propaganda. The window of discourse in the west gets pulled further right until the ‘greed is good’ 80s anchors it on the right.
That’s never what held back capitalist expansion, the direction of economic surplus towards the luxury of a tiny minority is a defining trait of feudal production that capitalism substantially reduced. It only played a role in technological progress back at a point when meaningful advancement was still achievable by kind of resources and directed effort of the eccentric and idle rich pursuing experimentation.
The stagnation we have isn’t a result of a lack of possible gadgets for the 1%, it’s us pressing more and more often against the boundary of what research can be incentivized by the profit motive. Capitalist technological innovation has always been primarily about process improvements and expansion to/creation of new markets, with resources only directed where capital returns are reasonably expected; any scientific discovery is purely incidental. There’s also the fact that most scientific advancement within capitalism has been state-backed, and neoliberalism has eroded the institutions involved.
There’s also less incentive to do process improvements when there’s cheap labor available. So the current arc of “development” is casting more and more people into greater and greater poverty.
Without the ballast of a proletarian state that prevents or fights capitalist expansion into new labor markets, the capitalist solution is to create death, destruction, and poverty to force people’s surplus value out of them.
the real reason that AI will never catch on is that child labour is just cheaper
AI is catching on because it relies exclusively on unpaid (captcha) or underpaid (tagging) labor.
yeah but it also relies on paid labour to design it and they don’t stay relevant that long. I’m not saying it isn’t exploitative I’m saying it will never be cheaper than this other form of exploitation
Yeah, but the bulk of the labor involved in machine learning systems is training and tagging.
It’s profitable right now because the average wage of someone doing the “data mining” required for training are making like $1 a day.
yea i think you nailed what i was reaching for much more succinctly here
Out of curiosity how old are you roughly
I’m asking because you have good sentence structure
early 30s
It’s the neoliberal mechanisms. The machine was doing OKAY for tech progress under Keynesian policy. Not better than socialism but it wasn’t the crawl we’re currently seeing.
They do want immortality.
there has been no fundamental progress aside from like, better smaller transisters and better materials science and technique, but nothing fundamental
(The following is the perspective of an outsider enthusiast, please disregard or correct me where needed)
Physics has plateaued somewhat, as well. Part of it is just the scale. It’s difficult to learn things about particles that are smaller than the equipment you’re using to measure things. It’s also hard to justify the funding, too. “Hey, give us blempty hundred thousand dollars to disprove a hypothesis.” Not quite as sexy or thrilling as the venture capitalists’ pie in the sky.
…but… I also wonder if maybe… maybe we’ve gotten into a bit of a rut with established physics. Like for example, I don’t understand wave-particle duality. The bit I specifically don’t understand is the particle. Waves make sense, we can see interference patterns, light ever-so-slightly bends round corners, different wavelengths translate to different amounts of energy. But. The fuck is a particle. It really seams like it’s just a neat trick to make the sums easier.
Part of what’s weird about fundamental physics is that it is, in a sense, all just tricks to make the math easier. When you get below the level of non-relativistic QM (and even, arguably, at that level), the distinction between the mathematics of the theory and the theory itself starts to collapse. Some of this is probably just due to the fact that events and patterns at that scale are just so unfamiliar to us and our everyday experience: we can make intuitive sense of things like forces, acceleration, mass, and other stuff that’s in the ontology of classical mechanics because we live in that world. Fields, Lie groups, fiber bundles, and other essential bits of the formalism at the QFT level are much harder for us to understand, because they can only roughly be mapped onto things that are familiar from our lived experience. This is part of why things like QFT, QED, and other candidate “fundamental” theories just seem like bags of mathematical tricks: in a very literal sense, those theories are telling us that the world just is a set of formal relationships and interdependent patterns. When you ask something like “well what is the theory really telling us, beyond the math?” for classical mechanics, I can give you a story–a narrative–about the world that maps the mathematics onto familiar concepts. When you ask the same question about QFT, there’s no easily accessible metaphor or story: it’s structure all the way down. Statements like “light sometimes behaves like a particle” means nothing more or less than “it’s useful to think of light as being quantized in some contexts, because the mathematics seems to work that way.”
I’m also an outsider and I find it helpful to see things in a similar way.
Everything can be divided up in different ways: relations of production, forces of production, social relations, means of production, mental conceptions, etc, etc. Science/technology is another one. They’re all interconnected. Each one can develop even if the others stagnate. But there’s a limit to how much anything can develop on its own. They either all develop or you reach a wall.
The hard sciences are near the wall. There’s room for a little bit of development but nothing can flourish. Google ‘[discipline/science] funding’ and have a look at what’s required to secure research funding (or don’t—it won’t be fun lol). There is zero percent chance that any funder will knowingly pay a research team to conclude, ‘capitalism must end’. There are research questions you’re just not allowed to ask.
Not to mention that scientists are hemmed in on all sides by IP. Good luck advancing knowledge if you’re not allowed to start at the most advanced point because some imperialist items the IP and keeps it locked away because reasons.
Researchers of all kinds know the system is terrible but without organisation none of them can do anything about it. And they’re mostly labour aristocrats if they work in western research institutions, which means they are unwilling to even accept what the problem is beyond the surface detail of restrictive gatekeeping.
There’s only so much even the best scientist can achieve in this system.
I feel like unless we figure out an extremely clever trick, we need just gigantic particle accelerators or quantum computers orders of magnitude better than we can currently conceive of to make substantial steps forward in physics anymore. Like, we’re not even talking “Well, the USSR/China could do it because they weren’t/aren’t as beholden to the profit motive”, we’re talking particle accelerators the size of fucking countries, and helium liquid cooling on large scales to maintain quantum coherence unless we figure out more room-temperature shit.
String theory is a neat idea and I do genuinely find it interesting and have read books on it, but at the end of the day it’s just a giant “so what” to me. Not “what’s the point of making physics advancements” obviously, but “what’s the point of creating these massive, complicated theories if we need a particle accelerator the size of the solar system to prove them right or wrong”.
particle accelerators the size of countries would be trivial under international communism tho