Comment by eries
4 hours ago
Ah! Your point about Claude Code is very funny. At a minimum, you can find links to many of the interviews I've done. If it comes across as too promotional, you can always use the "official" website incorruptible.co which is more staid.
Your skepticism is well earned, and all I can really say is that I hope you'll read the book and judge for yourself. I tried really hard to lay out the evidence for two things that are necessary to address this skepticism:
1. We have to see that these structures are changeable. The economy that our grandparents inhabited is almost unrecognizably different than the one we inhabit today. So too, we can imagine that the economy that our grandchildren will work in may be unrecognizably different to us. Why does that necessarily have to be in a negative direction? What was once changed by human hands can be changed again.
2. I know this is hard to believe, but there's actually a lot of evidence that mission-driven, purpose-driven, trustworthy organizations outperform their conventional counterparts. The fact that this is so gives us a lot of tools we can use to drive the change we want to see.
On top of all that, we are living through a massive generational shift. The new generations have lived their whole lives under this maligned structure, and they are sick and tired of it. If you think they are going to sit quietly by and allow those structures to persist, I think that is very unlikely. Which means we're going to have change one way or the other; the only question is how violent and difficult is that revolution going to be? We'd be much better served to change proactively because we know what the right thing is.
Thanks for being a good sport about my joke! And also thanks for answering a gazillion questions here on HN with care, patience, and curiosity.
I have to say, to your first point, that exploitation (of humans, labor, resources, consumers, etc.) has always been the primary driver of accumulating large wealth under capitalism. Sure, "innovation" sometimes has a role in softening the blow, but let's be real.
That was true in our grandparents' time... and their grandparents' time... and their grandparents' time. While their economies looked very different, the same structural incentives were in place and certainly did not curb unethical behavior one bit.
It has taken a long time for the piper to come for his full payment, but we can all see now that the world is burning, poisoned, and suffering as a result. We can no longer eat freshwater fish due to the massive amounts of PFAS in our lakes and rivers. The billionaires are trying to pretend they can escape the disaster by building their bunkers on remote islands or trying to colonize Mars.
I want to have some optimism in the newer generations to create positive change here, but I can't help but look at what happened to the idealism of the 1960s. The counter culture was right about the societal benefits of renewable energy, organic food, vegetarian diets, ecology, egalitarianism, civil rights, and more. But somewhere around Reagan many in that generation sold out and those great ideas were simply appropriated and fed back into the profit-machine that rewards exploitation. Today we have "certified organic" labels on food products, but that term has been watered down to almost nothing by the marketing departments, politicians, and lobbyists.
Anyhow, I obviously need to keep my pessimism at bay. LOL You have convinced me to give it a read!