Thoughts on capitalism
Posted on December 31, 2025
Many in the tech sphere self-identify as libertarians, or pro-capitalism. I want to make an argument on why capitalism is not the optime system
to benefit us as a species, without falling into the typical socialists points. First off, the only motive, or "loss-function" of capitalism is pure
profit. I don't think many of us have meditate long enough on this point. The problem with profit is that is something that benefits from mass utility,
that is, it is a form of democracy, which many techbros are growing to be skeptic of. Thus you get a system where things are produced to cater to the vast
masses, with no regards to any qualitative properties, only quantitative. You can see the effects in how everything looks the same now, wether in UX design,
consumer electronics, cars, fashion, etc, all products converge to the same, consumers get anonimazed into a grey blob.
So what's the alternative? We can see the roots of it are beginning to sprout. Status is starting to be no longer about who has the new shiny and expensive thing but
about exclusivity and originality. People are gatekeeping niche brands, modding old iPods and posting your political opinions gets more engagement than your vacations
in Bali. Companies that sacrifice cold profit in exchange of making something product of love and passion will be more longeve.
Thoughts on post-scarcity
Posted on January 15, 2023
Mercancy is produced through work leveraged by capital and resources. As automatization increases, work
gets cheapers. It will get to a point where there are no operational costs and only capital. This can go
different ways. One, the only way to get money is through having capital, be it land or automated
machinery, and the proletary class turns into an UBI one. Two, you can leverage a small amount of
capital to a bigger one, if you have access to resources you can extract. Resources on Earth are finite,
but the Universe should be big enough. So sovereign humans would colonize other planets and form
societies through pure will.
Thoughts on science fiction
Posted on February 20, 2023
I'm dissapointed by how stagnated is the scifi-genre. There seem to be three subgenres: space opera,
post-apocalypsis and cyberpunk. The latter has been the most prevalent for a while, producing hundreds
of Blade Runner clones. Now, there is a subset of cyberpunk I find interesting, which I call "clean
dystopia", in which a dystopian place looks utopic at first glance. Some examples that I can think of
are Gattaca and Mirror's Edge. While these fictional societies aren't desirable, at least they offer a
nice aesthetic experience, which can be inspiring. But at the end, all offer pessimistic views about
technology and the future. In contrast with this, there is this new subgenre, solarpunk, which I find
extremely boring. Take a contemporary asian metropolis and spam trees and windmills and you get the
whole thing. Add some sense of "community" for some feels-good moralism. It's corporate trash. But I
think there is a room for a new utopian aesthetic, and we already have the building blocks. Recently I
played Final Fantasy VIII, and in particular I loved Balamb's Garden and the city of Esthar.