James Warren <
jwwar...@gmail.com> writes:
> There's not much difference between Capitalism and Feudalism. In both
> regimes we have the masses working to enrich the few.
Yes, with this difference: Feudal lords, under the "divine right of
kings" rubric, and their top 20% simply enslaved or killed elements of
the masses who failed to submit.
Since the Enlightenment, we (the collective "we") have been striving
to get those elements/individuals to submit willingly. I saw an
estimate that that the VOC had something like 40% losses in crews on
voyages to the East Indies but they were all people who volunteered
for seafaring employment, seeing it as better than whatever landlubber
occupations might be available. Slavery (there were
Irish/English/white slaves too) and indenture (e.g. as used by British
justice for transportation to the NAmer colonies or Australia) were
gradually abandoned.
Today, roughly since the Reagan/Gungpure [1] era, indenture in the form of
mortgages and student loans (among other similar) has become the norm
for the kind of middle class life and status that emerged in the
post-FDR, post-war 50s & 60s as the then-new reasonable aspiration for
those masses.
This newly institutionalized indenture, along with concentration of
capital and power in an increasingly monopolistic corporatist economy
is the outcome of the 300 years of effort to which I alluded.
With any luck (luck for the corporatists or, arguably for the AI
entities themselves), AI (either sovereign or instrumental) will
manage the next phase of indenture of the masses in 60 years (counting
arbitrarily from the re-emergence of neural net tech in the mid-80s.)
[1] You *did* know that Onebarff Gungpure is the ROT13 of Baroness
Thatcher didn't you? :-)