I share a similar origin story, and I have a somewhat simple update to this heuristic that hopefully kills the elitism part: “if consent is manufactured, why wouldn’t ‘taste’ be manufactured too?”

Especially when it’s something that is parroted in the media too much, that shit does not come for free.

Thanks for responding! Mind if I ask you if the realization in 2) made you look for a career change, e. G. open your own business or something of the sort? Asking b/c it’s something I’d like to do, but getting clients is hard.

Mind if I ask you a bit more context on your life circumstances when you read the piece about employees?

Asking because one of the things that brought me to communist thought was the realization that no matter where I go, I’ll be just as tied to the need to get money as I am now, but in different circumstances.

Perhaps that would not be the case if I fled to a self-sufficient commune or something of the sort, but there aren’t many of that left in the world.

So, my takeaway from that article is that, even if you are brilliant in making money like Taleb tells he was, the compulsion to make more is something no one will ever be free from (at least until the revolution).

(sorry if this is too rambly, but this piece also resonated with me)

For the techies in the audience, remember that time when it was microservices everywhere? Nothing convinces me that it wasn’t another demand gen scam for cloud compute, a baby version of the one in the article

Not trying to be the “sauce?” guy, but are you referring to a specific passage or chapter? Asking b/c I remember the counter to the “digging a hole in the middle of nowhere disproves the LTV” right at the beginning of Capital, but honestly don’t remember any passage specific to this argument.