Comment by palmotea
4 hours ago
> bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Capitalism is "fixing the glitch" of workers having space energy. I hope soon we'll achieve the ideal bimodal distribution of labor: work intensified to the point where workers that have the energy for nothing but work, and the impoverished totally unemployed that we can just corral and forget about.
This is one of those very common ideas that cannot survive a ten second encounter with the facts: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
How does this viewpoint account for the times when "capitalism" was, by all objective measures, worse for laborers? I.E. the early industrialization period when laborers worked 14-16 hour days alongside children in factories and mines, risking life and limb?
The brief nightmare where workers had enough power to demand better conditions is thankfully ending, and we can return the happy days where workers would slave away for just enough compensation to sustain themselves, and they'd be happy to do it because they had no better options.
We're even bringing child labor back https://fortune.com/2023/05/25/labor-shortage-child-teenage-...