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i think a core beef that i have with a lot of this "automation is bad" sentiment lately is that there is no inherent moral good in laboring the story of humanity is one of invention, where we improve our conditions by building things that help us do more things more easily

sort of along my recent repost, the issue at hand has been the same since the dawn of capitalism: when automation increases productivity, who gets to capture the value of that productivity increase? the beef is not with the productivity. it's with the value capture

Degradation of quality matters, too. I see a lot of parallels to what happened with textiles. Yeah we got more "productive", but we went from a world where pieces of clothing routinely lasted an entire lifetime to fast fashion and disposable clothing that you're lucky to have last a year

On the flip side, I think programmers of the 2010s have been building too much “forever tech” that was really just a ship on top of a lower layer. Some tech can be disposable and while others need to be foundational. Making the disposable tech as easy to throw away as it was to create is important.

i think this romanticizes the past a bit. yes, there are issues with fast fashion, but clothing lasting a lifetime isn't inherently a good thing. clothing being more accessible does matter actually