> It’s a weird experience to spend ten years becoming excellent at something only to watch a 22-year-old produce a suspiciously solid version of it in 14 minutes
> Which forces a much more uncomfortable question: if your identity was tied to being good at X, what happens when X gets automated?
I've been grappling with the same thing the last few weeks. It's easy to say "don't put your job at the center of your sense of self" but I've been writing software professionally for twelve years now and I like to think I've gotten pretty damn good at it. It's part of who I am. What happens when the value of the thing you're best at decreases sharply?
The answer is, in the Darwinian sense, adapt or die. Same as it ever was.
Wrong author. Darwin wrote about physiological changes in animal populations over generations. What you're describing is the alienation that the worker is subject to under a legal and political system built by capital owners. You want to read Marx about it, not Darwin.
I too am only a software engineer today because I wrote crappy games for the TI83 in middle school. The day I discovered you could download games from the web, the scales fell from my eyes.
Look up "On Fascism" by Umberto Eco, it's not that long and was written long enough ago that you can't say it was influenced by any of our current leaders.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Umberto Eco is a great writer, but whenever his list of ways to describe Blackshirts comes up, it fails.
First, it's very fuzzy. You don't have to have all aspects, but many aspects are present in many systems without it being outright fascist.
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Is 5 out of 14 enough to make something fascist? Are "Appeal to a frustrated middle class", "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as 'at the same time too strong and too weak'", "Newspeak" and "Obsession with a plot" enough?
I think it confuses rhetorical devices like "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as 'at the same time too strong and too weak'" and "Newspeak" as hallmarks of Fascism when they are just a tool.
George Orwell famously pointed that calling things "fascist" and "Nazi" is in itself an example of Newspeak, because it's not used to describe a government system that is far-right, authoritarian, and extremely xenophobic, but it's used as a label to say something is Bad™.
It also confuses its populist roots and enemies at the time. "The cult of action for action's sake," and especially anti-intellectualism.
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Like take Starship Troopers, an extremely fascistic society. Let's score it on Eco's scale. It definitely has "Rejection of Modernism", "Disagreement is treason", "Cult of action", "Fear of Difference", "Life is Warfare", "Everybody is a hero", and "Newspeak". So 7/14.
- Cult of tradition doesn't exist that much per se. Granted, I could have missed it.
- Appeal to the frustrated middle class; as far as we see, there isn't one
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- Obsession with plot isn't really a thing, because the Bugs aren't really a plot;
they are a clear and present danger. The internal enemies if any aren't mentioned.
- Casting enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." Bugs are shown more or less realistically, they are a difficult enemy that can be defeated.
- "Selective populism". It's not so much selective populism as state enforced labor to gain citizenship.
- "Contempt for the weak" there isn't much out-group to belong to. The Terran Federation covers the globe, and almost everyone is a citizen. There isn't any contempt for underlings, even if there are military cross branch out-groups. Like real world counterparts jarheads, squids and wingnut.
- If Machismo exists, it's mutated to cover both sexes.
Granted, I might have missed a few, but still, shouldn't Eco's 14 traits light up more for a more fascistic society?
I'll join the chorus of praise for Homeworld. It was a big part of that era for me. I must have spent hours just zooming the camera as close as I could get to all the different ships, or just watching the harvesters do their thing. Almost meditative, looking back. Thank you for casting your spells!
I see an em dash! Honestly, mixing cast members from different series might be exactly the kind of mistake that an LLM makes. But it made me smile, so score one for the robots.
As much as I love this post, I have to be the one to point out that Uhura and Spock are from a different Enterprise than Picard, Riker, and Troi. Great work, though, I can practically hear Leonard Nimoy reading this dialogue.
Wow, they just opened a brand new one in Philly less than two months ago. I've yet to shop there and I guess now I never will. It must have cost millions to clear that site and build a whole new building there. Just to abandon it. I wish I had money to waste like that.
Edit: it actually opened in August, so it was around for about six months instead of two.
Same! My dad worked in corporate HR and loved Dilbert (I guess it spoke to him), so we usually had a few of his books and/or a strip-a-day desk calendar around the house that I would read. I never considered it before, but maybe I'm the cynical software engineer I am today because of Scott Adams. The world is a funny place sometimes.
> Which forces a much more uncomfortable question: if your identity was tied to being good at X, what happens when X gets automated?
I've been grappling with the same thing the last few weeks. It's easy to say "don't put your job at the center of your sense of self" but I've been writing software professionally for twelve years now and I like to think I've gotten pretty damn good at it. It's part of who I am. What happens when the value of the thing you're best at decreases sharply?
The answer is, in the Darwinian sense, adapt or die. Same as it ever was.
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