We should be mindful that HN doesn't have an unflag button. The post shouldn't be flagged, so flagging it acts on behalf of the status quo. Let the flagging stand as a testament to collaboration.

We already experienced a general strike during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than breaking billionaires and multinational corporations, it made them stronger. So withholding our labor is part of the equation, but not all of it.

We're moving into hypernormalization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

I only learned of this documentary this morning, so have yet to watch it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7T07WfIhM Hypernormalisation | Full Documentary | Adam Curtis

Within a corporation, one person at the top dictates all behavior in exchange for monetary compensation, meaning that it's the job of each subordinate to shield superiors from work or anything that's against the interests of the corporation. Yes-men are rewarded handsomely while objectors are laid off.

Over time, corporations become akin to feudal states, vying for control of the kingdom. The wealthiest/most powerful person performs the role of king and dictates each corporation's behavior in exchange for that corporation's right to exist.

What this means is that corporate strategies such as running government like a business are eroding democracy globally.

Where is this all going? Labor compensation diverged from productivity in the 1970s when global industrial capacity and energy production could no longer keep pace with the rising cost of the Cold War - aka the guns vs butter model. The Reagan administration began dismantling the US social safety net in the 1980s with the rise of neoliberalism, cemented by the George HW administration when it fell on its sword rather than dismantle trickle-down economics aka voodoo economics as named by Bush himself. The Clinton administration continued this trend in the 1990s by undermining welfare in exchange for support from Wall Street to gain the moderate vote, which ended the Democratic Party's committment to labor. The George W Bush administration brought The Big Lie and Truthiness mainstream, taking advantage of patriotism on the right to mire the US in the security theater of a quarter century Global War on Terror under false pretenses, which ended the Republican Party's commitment to shared prosperity. Obama, Trump and Biden so conflated government operations with corporate interests and packing the courts to minimize antitrust enforcement, that we've reached a point where we're staring the full regulatory capture of the US Federal Government in the face.

Without consequences for their actions, our elected officials act against our best interests with impunity. Which creates sentiment that the greatest clear and present danger to the US is the state itself. Or more precisely, the merger of the state with corporate interests, aka fascism.

Even if Trump is used as a patsy to dismantle the remaining government agencies that support workers' families and then is removed from office, JD Vance (much like George HW Bush) will do nothing to reinstate those agencies. The end of term limits as well as free and fair elections may finally end both parties' committment to the US Constitution and the American way of life.

Now with the rise of AI and unprecidented wealth inequality, it may not be possible to stop this process. We might have been able to transition to a tech utopia like Star Trek before the Dot Bomb and 9/11, but now will almost certainly fall into a wild west free-for-all of empire and rebel resistance like Star Wars.

This reads like a tragic LLM summary of the last 50 years. But it's the most concise analysis that I can come up with. After the optimism of the 1990s after the internet arrived, I can't believe it's come to this. Big tech has kept us under the yoke making rent for most of our lives, while the promise of the web to bring about full access to information and resources for all people has been gradually stripped away. What could have been a scalable distributed p2p information economy and automation paying for UBI end eventually UHI (Universal High Income) has been replaced with surveillance capitalism and wealth concentration.

It's hard to tell which corporate leaders are working under cover to slow the US decline into authoritarianism and which have drank the kool-aid to think they are our savior. But since none of them are promoting public education, health and welfare, medical research, UBI, etc etc etc, they are all suspect. It's curious that not even one of them has stepped forward to call out everything we're witnessing under hypernormalization.

So for all of these reasons, I don't think that a strike will be enough. We'll need more sophisticated tactics, such as using AI to direct all of our purchases away from the constituencies that fund empire. With real consequences presented to leaders, so that if they do X, then Y happens as a result. Taking away a human right or government agency here results in the bankruptcy of a corporation and its billionaire there.

Or we could all step back from this mutually assurred destruction and stop acting so hysterically. I looked at the poster's profile (ebcode) and it just says forgiveness.