Transcript

Title text: This is how you all fucking sound

[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]

Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]

Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]

Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]

Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.

Still Vreni on Bluesky

      • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        1 month ago

        There are more slaves than ever before, but they are a smaller proportion of the human race

        Of course if you’re going for absolute numbers, it’s hard to beat our 8B population, but it makes more sense to be speaking in percentages.

        https://inequality.org/facts/global-inequality/

        Doesn’t cover anything more than the past couple of decades. That’s not ‘any time in history’, just a very minute and cherry picked segment of it. Go back to the medieval era and before and see what wealth inequality looked like then.

        • Doomsider@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 month ago

          Yes absolutely absolute numbers. Furthermore, if you consider underemployed people as wage slaves this number is easily ten times the estimated 50 million modern day slaves.

          Wealth inequality has been increasingly dramatically for at least the last 8 decades.

          You harken back to a mythical era where we don’t have actual economic data operating in an entirely different economic system. Sorry, but that is about as convincing as a wet fart.

          What we do know is since we have been gathering statistical information on economies the wealth gap has continued to grow. With only a couple of eastern block countries in the post-soviet era that had a brief reprieve from an ever increasing wealth gap, which has long since gone away.

          • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            1 month ago

            You harken back to a mythical era where we don’t have actual economic data. Sorry, but that is about as convincing as a wet fart.

            Or perhaps you just didn’t bother looking.

            https://wid.world/document/inequality-in-history-a-long-run-view-wid-world-working-paper-2024-05/

            Yes absolutely absolute numbers.

            No disagreement there then, except for which metric is more important.

            if you consider underemployed people as wage slaves this number is easily ten times the estimated 50 million modern day slaves.

            You better start including serfs and peasants, 99% of the population historically, to those slave number comparisons then. Though there’s a good argument to be made they should be included anyway.

            Face it, compared to the entirety of human history, we’re in a golden age. Things ONLY look bleak when you’re looking at recent history. And even then, only in the western world. The rest of us from outside the Anglosphere have pretty much only seen things improving in the past century.