In Marshall Brain’s prophetic story Mana, American society as we recognize it fully collapses as automation takes over. The top few percent come up with a way to manage the surplus population.
They realize that the same automation that’s put everyone out of work also allows you to house vast numbers of people very cheaply. Out on cheap land in rural areas in the central US, they build vast government dorms meant to simply warehouse the surplus population. Then they revived the old vagrancy laws. Anyone who didn’t have the money to support themselves independently or wasn’t employed was sent to live in one of these dorms.
Imagine a single windowless concrete building capable of housing hundreds of thousands of people inside. It was basically an involuntary permanent dorm situation. You share a tiny room with roommates. You have access to plenty of free electronic entertainment. You get food and medical care in the automated facilities. But you are ultimately a prisoner. Hundreds of millions of people, the vast majority of the US population, was herded into these facilities and forgotten. And they added contraceptives to the water supply to provide a long-term solution to the surplus population problem.
I think of this when I hear of their plans for ICE to house detainees in former warehouses. Sure, mass murder is an option. But that’s a kind of thing that’s hard to hide, and it’s the kind of thing that makes people start taking up arms. If you know that getting brought in will get you sent to a death camp, then you have every incentive to resist violently.
Think of a facility like El Salvador’s CECOT.
Warehouses are pretty cheap. And when you house people at those densities, few guards are needed. Imagine tens of millions of people shoved into facilities like this, and then simply forgotten. No mass murder. No mass graves. Just tens of millions of people forced to live out the rest of their lives in horrible conditions until they die of disease or old age. Oh, and in sex-segregated facilities to ensure the next generation of ethnic minorities is never born.
I’m honestly surprised they haven’t built a factory city like China has, but where the “employees” are all the immigrants and the conditions are more like you describe.
OK. I have a new take on The Matrix. A reverse Matrix. Because of [sci fi mathobable reason], a kind of hyper-efficient form of LLM computation can be done via humans drawing random patterns. Or have some other mechanism where humans have to tangibly create the very computational foundations of AIs. We finally achieve universal employment. There’s always some meager wage to be made grinding away in the AI mill. The masses draw squiggles all day so that the wealthy can have a robot butler.
It’s remarkably easy for the average person to believe all of America is collectively just like Trump, without realizing there’s a large swath of the American population who are vehemently against it who are being ignored.
At that scale, they’ll start “deporting” people into the ground with a bullet in the back of their heads in no time.
The Holocaust was initiated because of the logistical challenges of merely displacing the number of people they wanted gone.
The smart ones pushing this probably know this, the others will realize it and fall in line when the time comes.
“Evacuate” was the term they used in Wannsee.
The Jewish storage problem.
It won’t be long now.
Hopefully America speed runs its way to the final days of the reich.
Oh, I don’t actually see death camps.
In Marshall Brain’s prophetic story Mana, American society as we recognize it fully collapses as automation takes over. The top few percent come up with a way to manage the surplus population.
They realize that the same automation that’s put everyone out of work also allows you to house vast numbers of people very cheaply. Out on cheap land in rural areas in the central US, they build vast government dorms meant to simply warehouse the surplus population. Then they revived the old vagrancy laws. Anyone who didn’t have the money to support themselves independently or wasn’t employed was sent to live in one of these dorms.
Imagine a single windowless concrete building capable of housing hundreds of thousands of people inside. It was basically an involuntary permanent dorm situation. You share a tiny room with roommates. You have access to plenty of free electronic entertainment. You get food and medical care in the automated facilities. But you are ultimately a prisoner. Hundreds of millions of people, the vast majority of the US population, was herded into these facilities and forgotten. And they added contraceptives to the water supply to provide a long-term solution to the surplus population problem.
I think of this when I hear of their plans for ICE to house detainees in former warehouses. Sure, mass murder is an option. But that’s a kind of thing that’s hard to hide, and it’s the kind of thing that makes people start taking up arms. If you know that getting brought in will get you sent to a death camp, then you have every incentive to resist violently.
Think of a facility like El Salvador’s CECOT.
Warehouses are pretty cheap. And when you house people at those densities, few guards are needed. Imagine tens of millions of people shoved into facilities like this, and then simply forgotten. No mass murder. No mass graves. Just tens of millions of people forced to live out the rest of their lives in horrible conditions until they die of disease or old age. Oh, and in sex-segregated facilities to ensure the next generation of ethnic minorities is never born.
I’m honestly surprised they haven’t built a factory city like China has, but where the “employees” are all the immigrants and the conditions are more like you describe.
OK. I have a new take on The Matrix. A reverse Matrix. Because of [sci fi mathobable reason], a kind of hyper-efficient form of LLM computation can be done via humans drawing random patterns. Or have some other mechanism where humans have to tangibly create the very computational foundations of AIs. We finally achieve universal employment. There’s always some meager wage to be made grinding away in the AI mill. The masses draw squiggles all day so that the wealthy can have a robot butler.
A million slaves replying to messages, looking up the answers on Google.
How? Germany was stopped by outside military forces, and there’s no opposing great power that’s gonna come and conquer/liberate us.
Do not pretend there’s any way out of this without you, personally helping to make it happen.
It’s remarkably easy for the average person to believe all of America is collectively just like Trump, without realizing there’s a large swath of the American population who are vehemently against it who are being ignored.