Indeed! He specifically cites Yanis Varoufakiss, dubbing this technofeudalism. If I may quote Doctorow a bit:
>Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system designed to preference profit over rent.
[snip]
>The feudal era wasn't defined by the absence of profits--rather, what made feudalism "feudal" was the triumph of rent over profits. When the interest of rentiers conflicted with the aspirations of capitalists, the rentiers won. Likewise, the defining characteristic of the capitalist era was not the abolition of rents, but rather the triumph of profits. When capitalism's philosopher-theorists lionized "free markets," they didn't mean "markets that were free from regulation," they meant "markets that were free from rents."
[snip]
>This is Varoufakiss technofeudalism exemplified. It's an economic system in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff, at the expense of people who do stuff.... The fight between technofeudalism and technocapitalism is a fight over whether the landlord or the café owner takes the value that's created by the barista.
Which of the parts you mentioned are by definition more expensive? A modem? FaceID is 10 y/o now btw. You're just speculating and selling this as facts. Meanwhile actual material like aluminum, copper, lithium and others are genuinely expensive and the difference in weight of the precious metals and alloys used is obvious.
Well, the Library of Congress entry notes him as "Gugusse the clown" and the Wikipedia entry[2] has a few citations (to books, I can't verify) that support it, but more to the point, "Pierrot" is a classic[3] stock character in e.g. commedia dell'arte. It says clown but I think our modern meaning of that word is a bit removed, and perhaps "harlequin" (another character[4]) is more what we'd say these days.
For that in particular, I use delta (<https://github.com/dandavison/delta>) with `side-by-side = true` enabled. I find I use both icdiff and delta side-by-side on a regular basis.
This reminds me of one of my favorite YouTube series, Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong. They were short little videos where a guy had a toy dinosaur and he would explain why the toy was incorrect. Short, easy to understand, fun, and I learned a lot. Highly recommend to anyone of any age.
>Orwell's mistake lay in thinking there had to be actual war to keep the merry-go-round of the balance of power in being. In fact, in one of the more laughable parts of the book, he goes on and on concerning the necessity of permanent war as a means of consuming the world's production of resources and thus keeping the social stratification of upper, middle, and lower classes in being. (This sounds like a very Leftist explanation of war as the result of a conspiracy worked out with great difficulty.)
>In actual fact, the decades since 1945 have been remarkably war-free as compared with the decades before it. There have been local wars in profusion, but no general war. But then, war is not required as a desperate device to consume the world's resources. That can be done by such other devices as endless increase in population and in energy use, neither of which Orwell considers.
...
>He did not foresee the role of oil or its declining availability or its increasing price, or the escalating power of those nations who control it. I don't recall his mentioning the word 'oil'.
I feel like Asimov completely misses the point here. The fact that we didn't have the kind of "general war" Orwell wrote about doesn't mean this isn't meaningful or relevant, it just means we didn't do that then. Jump forward a few decades and it's not hard to imagine e.g. the Bush years of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan rhyming with Orwell a bit.
And, perhaps it's inevitable given this is from 1980, but Asimov is stuck in the overpopulation-as-demon narrative and peak-oil stuff. Neither of those have lasted the test of time.
The perpetual war is just a framework for Orwell's autocrats needing to direct the anger of the populace away from themselves. We have this today with government propaganda stirring up renewed hatred of brown people to deflect from their ineptitude. Conveniently blowing up in their faces when it turns out to be much easier to hate pedophile protectors.
Asimov was definitely stuck in the moment of 1980, energy insecurity from the oil crisis of the time.
We are now transitioning away from oil, world wide, and energy scarcity is more about preventing regulatory structures from getting in the way of new wind, solar, and battery resources.
Overpopulation was also a bugaboo of the time, but I thought that was mostly a leftist problem.
There was a discussion recently on the Wikimedia wikitech-l discussion list, and one participant had a comment I appreciated:
>I'm of the opinion if people can tell you are using an LLM you are using it
wrong.
They continued:
>It's still expected that you fully understand any patch you submit. I
think if you use an LLM to help you nobody would complain or really notice,
but if you blindly submit an LLM authored patch without understanding how
it works people will get frustrated with you very quickly.
I highly recommend the book of the same title—a collection of her essays. I read it year or two ago, and it's excellent: gorgeous writing, and definitely a touchstone of the time. "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not," from "On Keeping a Notebook," is something I think about a lot.
The essay itself is, of course, fantastic, but I find that, although she specifically tells us not to, it is impossible not to dwell on young children taking acid.
>although she specifically tells us not to, it is impossible not to dwell on young children taking acid.
well any of those young kids taking acid would be coming up on retirement age now, so I guess the reasonable thing would be to try to find out how it all went.
Other recommendations in other siblings, but Neptunes on macOS and Finale on iOS are excellent. I only got into it a couple years ago, but aside from a few quirks, using those two has been super smooth and easy.
>Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system designed to preference profit over rent.
[snip]
>The feudal era wasn't defined by the absence of profits--rather, what made feudalism "feudal" was the triumph of rent over profits. When the interest of rentiers conflicted with the aspirations of capitalists, the rentiers won. Likewise, the defining characteristic of the capitalist era was not the abolition of rents, but rather the triumph of profits. When capitalism's philosopher-theorists lionized "free markets," they didn't mean "markets that were free from regulation," they meant "markets that were free from rents."
[snip]
>This is Varoufakiss technofeudalism exemplified. It's an economic system in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff, at the expense of people who do stuff.... The fight between technofeudalism and technocapitalism is a fight over whether the landlord or the café owner takes the value that's created by the barista.
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