There's the "underclass" of "darker-skinned fellow humans [that] work in their factories, pick their crops, look after their children and tend their gardens." The virtual class isn't just materially reliant on the underclass; it actively seeks to automate away the need for all this "wet-ware." Though that first part of their analysis is still as relevant as when it was written, now that the tech industry has further developed, we can directly observe the class structure, which I argue is different, or has at least drifted away, from the one described in the essay.

Though once "promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur," the virtual class now starts companies hoping to be acqui-hired, barring them from truly entering the upper class. The venture capitalists that have come to dominate the industry continue their obsession with automating wet-ware — that much hasn't changed — but they've increasingly turned their attention to automating the work of the virtual class, which once, perhaps naively, felt secure. Whether or not they'll succeed, projects like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Code Llama, and Google's Gemini, combined with the decreased upwards mobility, show that, from techno-capitalists' perspectives, there are only two classes, the owners and the workers, defined by their relationships to the firm. Owners make their money from owning things, and workers earn wages from working. This is the standard leftist class distinction.

.....

But techno-capitalists also have a novel relationship to workers. Now that the digital world dominates so much of our lives, techno-capitalists, who own said digital world, also extract unprecedented amounts of wealth from our leisure time, mining it for data, cluttering it with advertisements, and so on. To understand what this means for the role that they imagine for the underclass, we'll examine an instructive though disturbing internet subculture (consider yourself warned).

Gooning allows two people to actually connect, not through mere physical contact, but in an enlightened spiritual state that can only be achieved by masturbating together. In other words, pablito's gooner philosophy claims that the best form of sexual collaboration is, counterintuitively, not collaborating, but instead focusing entirely on the self. Im an r-slur but they are "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention," except the hand is quite visible.2

Gooning is neoliberalism for s*x, or, at the very least, it is to s*x as neoliberalism is to society. If, as economists claim, human beings make rational choices with the information available to them, and more and more of that information is porn, then the rational choice is probably to masturbate.

And herein lies the problem. I have absolutely no problem with people who prefer to spend their time masturbating, but many gooners view the rejection of connections with real people, especially women, as well as the rejection of reality itself, as self-evidently rational.

For Marc (who is notoriously sensitive to disrespect, so I will refer to him by his first name), the "plebs" in the underclass have nothing to do, and, reading between the lines only a little, deserve no say in what is done. He imagines a future in which all menial labor is automated, and the now-obsolete wet-ware of the underclass ought to be satisfied consuming what is on offer, on the platforms that he and his buddies own. The underclass is given a digital simulacra of a meaningful life, so immersed in the technology owned by people like him that even theological pursuits, like those of pablito, become confined to the meaningless solipsism of content consumption. They are forced to live in and make sense of both a digital and material world entirely outside their control. They're relegated to be consumers of the content created within this milieu, developing hyper-specific tastes, the inevitable result of the highly personalized advertising-driven content delivery systems that power the web.

Basically me and @sandkwinn

Entire thread is like “omg anything more than once a month and I'm done ahaha I just can't do it”.

Anyone employed by an insurance company should automatically be sentenced for eternity to the Greek Fields of Punishment, Tartarus is a playground in comparison.

!biofoids

I have another question.

I'm going to stop tomorrow at Walgreens to get some more foundation and concealer which better shades. How do you tell one shade from another shade since they all look the same so I don't use the wrong shade of makeup?

I'm actually trying to take steps to improve my apperenace.

I'd nationalize all insurance companies and tax them 100% on all bonuses, and call it a vampire tax.

Grow more public crown corporations, and immediately legislate a province wide $26/hour minimum wage and a land value tax to be implemented by every municipality and county in Alberta.

Lori "Beetlejuice" Lightfoot is the former mayor of Chicago, some sort of subterranean gollumlike creature, and totally insane.

Despite losing her seat in Chicago in a landslide loss she has now become a crimefighter, investigating the absurdly corrupt "Supermayorrrr" Tiffany Henyard, meaning we may have to see her utterly bizarre goblinoid face in the news more, justifying the need for a Marsey

I'll probably pay 5000DC or whatever I feel like at the time

Here's a Yelp review and an unhinged email from her, for fun

!marseyartists

I was reading up on the secret rituals of foids and part of the reason why I want to become a foid and pass as one is so I can understand a question I've always wondered about. Moon worship.

My theory is that foids perform secret rituals to the moon and they worship the moon. Because of the energy they bring down from the moon is from the sphere of Yesod, it explains why they are often emotional a lot of the time and have powerful emotions because of the influence of the planetary energy of the moon on their own psyche.

This actually makes a lot of sense.

im making this like uber late after I finished myXML HW lol im so fricking eepy i can barely think

A reminder that just because someone didnt put you on their list of good dramanauts, that absolutely means that they don't like you. They didnt "forget to add you", they just dont like you, and its 100% your fault. Do better

Idk why everyone is alright with those fat fricks abusing their power like this. Either way I am willing to pay to have this resolved.