AlteredEgo comments on sigh

[–] AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The only problem is really consent and the propaganda against these goals. E.g. Air conditioning or cooking is rather nitpicking, those are not real issues, technological advances and passive house design would easily solve that. With Kite Power you already have unlimited energy.

And you could build a huge apartment block surrounded by nature, growing food directly around you and sharing infrastructure. Everyone could get a luxurious apartment with high ceilings and a killer view for everyone. If drastically less people need to commute to work, we wouldn't need to live in a city. You could also have communal kitchens or diners or cafeteria.

The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time. To enjoy life, to study and learn for free, to raise your children in peace. Not consumerism. Let the masses produce VR games if they have too much free time.

I also disagree that it requires full on communism, a UBI or expanded bill of rights for the human necessities to reach a decent living standard (DLS) could work too. You'd just heavily regulate, ban industrial meat production, bad advertising to avoid consumerism etc.

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[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

Air conditioning or cooking is rather nitpicking, those are not real issues, technological advances and passive house design would easily solve that.

The entire world doesn't have the climate of Japan where it's possible to live in an apartment without AC and heat. No amount of design can ameliorate 38C high humidity.

growing food directly around you

Only a subset of food can be grown locally and that local food is only available seasonally. It's the system we already have.

You could also have communal kitchens or diners or cafeteria.

That's not a technological solution to cooking. That's social which is far harder if not impossible to overcome.

The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time.

That doesn't follow. The same work needs to be done, if not more because reducing energy means reducing automation so people have to work to make up the difference.

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[–] AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

Only a subset of food can be grown locally and that local food is only available seasonally. It’s the system we already have.

We're probably talking about different things, like "you can't grow almonds or citrus fruit locally". But humans can clearly survive on a local diet pretty much everywhere, it's just a question of population density. Your food staple would simply be what kind of calorie crop grows locally, plus vegetables and greenhouses for exotic fruit.

And yeah, all of this is a social solution through and though. Like you'd want to encourage people to help plant and harvest. But this might differ from of community to community. Some might want to use more automation with robotics. You really don't want a uniform regime. One man's utopia is another man's gulag.

People already love to eat or order out. You could have a cafeteria for each apartment block and robots delivering inside the building like a hotel. This would still be drastic reduction, even compared to shopping by car. Going shopping by foot or bike in your local city neighborhood is probably still more, because you don't have to transport the harvested food using trucks but process it locally.

The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time.

That doesn’t follow. The same work needs to be done

No it doesn't! We can drastically reduce the amount of work that needs to be done! That is the whole point! You can look at it as capitalism being incredibly inefficient. Or incredibly efficient at creating unequal conditions benefiting those with capital (and vastly inefficient conditions for those without).

A major driver of this is advertising or "brainwashing" people to buy garbage they don't need. Or the advertising industry itself - think of the stock value of all the social and TV media, it is completely financed by advertising, and all the downstream industry that is fed by it. All that is waste!

Or planned obsolescence, purposefully producing goods and appliances that break within one or two year.

Or things like a byzantine tax code, or complicated laws. Or regulations or land ownership preventing efficient reorganization of cities or infrastructure.

PS: And yeah the obvious impossibility is that those who own and profit from all these inefficiency would never allow this. But we shouldn't forget or deny it's possible.

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[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

But humans can clearly survive on a local diet pretty much everywhere

That's subsistence living. No one wants to go back to that. Nor is anyone stopping you from living that way. Land is cheap in the middle of nowhere. Communes exist everywhere.

People already love to eat or order out. You could have a cafeteria

A communal cafeteria isn't what people do when "going out". If it was what people wanted, there would be more cafeterias and fewer restaurants.

A major driver of this is advertising or "brainwashing" people to buy garbage they don't need.

It's easy to think that everyone is sheep except for yourself. I've now come to believe that consumerism is fundamental to human nature, not advertising changing humans. The proof is thousands of years of pre capitalism artifacts from archeology sites. People have always liked unnecessary "stuff". People have always liked fashion and trends. People are going to be rampant consumers even if advertising and marketing were stopped tomorrow. It's their nature.

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[–] AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago*

consumerism is fundamental to human nature

I don't disagree. Like Nietche said: "I shop, therefor I am" haha. Also:

Any argument you make that increases the risk of genocide is wrong.

I agree that hedonism is a fundamental part of human nature, but not exclusively or in this extreme. Lets agree "Extreme Consumerism" on the current level is destructive, genocidal and not healthy for us. People also need a planet to live on, and want a world where their children can grow up without being consumed by advertising, self-marketing or endlessly distracted by tasty nonsense.

Advertising is the primary "infection vector" that makes people think that what they shop is their identity. It also doesn't require full on socialism to prevent the genocidal effects of unbridled consumerism.

I do believe we can achieve a modest level of hedonism where this "DLS" becomes something more luxurious than our current living standards. Working only 20 hours a week, having a luxury apartment with an awesome look on nature or on a green city. With the current technology, the "one mobile phone and one laptop per person on earth" isn't more sustainable than a gaming PC.

There are many destructive or abhorrent things that are part of human nature that we as rational individuals want to control in a society. I believe video games or virtual worlds with full "deep dive VR" is where we could explore and satisfy our less savory natures. But we can't let it influence us like the toxic male teenage gamer culture has by now. The "sheepism" is real, unless you think MAGA is fine. But it's mostly driven by dire outlook on material conditions.

Fundamentally, we can't keep going as we have. It doesn't matter if nobody "wants" the party to stop. It has to. And the study in OP gives us strong evidence that it is possible to achieve at least a decent living standard without exterminating ourselves.

Humans only really need 7 or so fundamental: Food / water, shelter / housing, safety, community, healthcare, communication, education / news. If we can get those with working only very little, living mostly a life of leisure, that's already luxury. Everything on top of that advanced technology can give us is gravy.

Like building tons of greenhouses to grow food beyond "subsistence farming" locally and using simple farming robots that are not harder to assemble than 3D printers, or genetically engineering food.

What technology can't give us is a culture where greed and politics doesn't lead to irrational, undesirable and unequal outcomes. Or maybe our new savior ChatGPT can haha.

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