Chomsky has a similar take about student loans:

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a “disciplinary technique,” and, by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the “disciplinarian culture.” This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.

Feel this in my bones. When people started getting cut at my previous job, it was invariably the ones who brought joy to the workplace. The ones who made a difference between a job and a career. Apparently joy doesn’t bring in any revenue, so…

I believe there’s actually an example of the reverse of this, in which the massive post-war welfare state of the UK factored largely into its art boom including all those British bands that became globally popular.

We’ve also seen something similar in the US during the COVID-19 lockdown, the furlough of the workforce and the following Great Resignation, in which a lot of people managed to monetize their lockdown hobbies and didn’t have to return to their prior (odious) jobs. (Resulting in a worker shortage, an increase in bottom-rung wages and benefits and the old No one wants to work anymore excuse.)

It seems to me that this sums up pretty much exactly what today’s billionaire-driven cutthroat capitalism has indeed produced: a bleak world of repetitive sequels whose sole purpose is to make the rich ever richer. From the countless Spin-offs to once-beloved franchises like Star Wars and the like to remakes of every film and series from the past that was even remotely successful, to the same old days in the never-ending grind of work, all the way to the predictable end of most creativity caused by LLMs feeding off each other with the same old remixes.

Here you can truly see the devastating influence that U.S. ideology has worldwide: In other countries, there is even free education, but the logic of maintaining the status quo—in which innovation is only welcomed if it cements the existing order—has nonetheless become the inescapable system of the world order.

It’s almost like a return to the Dark Ages, when the elites brought the development of civilization to a standstill for centuries through their monopoly on knowledge, education, and even leisure—which is a prerequisite for idleness needed for being creative.

Given the way technology is being co-opted by the super-rich, LLMs seem to me to be the central tool for bringing progress to a standstill: They rob young people of any prospect for a professional future, creative individuals of their already precarious livelihoods, and inventors and volunteers of their ideas and their work—while the credit is falsely attributed to the “genius” of those billionaires who operate these systems and claim they somehow came up with it all on their own — when in fact they’re merely regurgitating what already exists, what they stole to lock it up behind their paywalled LLMs.

And perhaps the most disastrous aspect of all: Cloud-based LLMs create a knowledge monopoly in the hands of those corporations—numbering fewer than ten—which are the only ones capable of offering this technology because of the massive cost, thereby shifting the power of interpretation even further to the few unscrupulous owners of these giant corporations that know nothing but boundless greed on their own.

Overall, it seems to me that humanity is regressing, and absurdly, this is in large parts attributable to supposedly disruptive technology—except that the disruption largely consists of the world appearing more hopelessly lost than it has in decades.

I think, overall, this is also reflected in the fact that most people have lost the hope—which was widespread just twenty years ago—that technology could change the world for the better.

I feel bad for being so pessimistic, especially since that’s exactly what the super-rich want: for the situation to seem so hopelessly inevitable that it seems it could never be changed. But with all that going on, it’s really hard to see even a glimmer of hope anywhere.

Sorry since when did “interesting, the creative and the eccentric people” become important to for profit capitalism?

Meanwhile the corporate funded government: CONFORM OR STARVE

Thank you for sharing this. Seriously.

Hey that’s not fair, without that college debt, you totally would end up being a wage slave anyway. So you know, there is no escape.

Question for OP, which book are you referring to? The dawn of everything?