GenZedong

This video dropped into my feed and I listened to it doing some chores. Halfway through, it reminded me of a post about alienation and how a communist society would handle it from a few days back, don't remember if it was here or on Reddit.

The theory of Alienation is usually accompanied by images of factories with the assembly line look and for good reason, they're seemingly the first clear instance of processes being split into tasks so far removed from the whole thing that a labourer can easily forget their contribution is indeed part of a whole, let alone imagine themselves doing the whole thing and thereby attribute the final product to their own labour. So called white collar work into the exact same issue, as the video well demonstrates. A supposedly creative work starts with an all clear from done executive with fuck all to do with the actual production, leading to a process cut into so many little parts that no single person nor team can take credit for a very minor addition to a massive whole.

Specialisation is a pretty cornerstone part of developing civilization, and I'm deleting the entire paragraph I've written going into that. But a lot of these jobs aren't orthogonal masteries, in fact many could be done with relative ease by other ones performing adjacent work. Looking at the state of the industry, this can't be particularly efficient either, if nothing else because people aren't functions to be tailored for singular tasks. We're left with an inconsistency anyone equipped with more than a few liberal truisms can see through.

The sad part is, liberals can see through this sort of thing, but they just can't apply a wider perspective. They reach answers like "it's to steal devs' credit" and find it satisfactory. They don't stop to ask why a system, an entire industry would function in a manner contradictory to their stated goals.