Why are people boosting reactionary "medieval peasants actually were freer than modern office workers" shit into my feed? And why is it from kolektiva.social of all places? No, people, peasants who owed a heritable debt and had to give their best animal to the lord when the head of the household died and couldn't leave the farm were not actually free. Stop acting like your boredom at meetings is oppression and stop doing reactionary socialism.
Special demerits go to the line about how taxes then were lower than today. Taxes in absolutist regimes are lower than in democracies, because democracies first of all have rule of law making it possible to charge taxes without turning that into threat of extralegal extraction, and second because they have redistribution. Taxes in Hong Kong are much lower than in Sweden; where are workers freer?
The point Debin Ma makes in his papers is that in Qing China, taxes were low as a strategy to permit magistrates to take money from the commoners extralegally, for example by demanding bribes. This way, the magistrates got paid in a way that the emperor could not know in enough detail, guaranteeing them a measure of security since the emperor could otherwise expropriate them at will. Manorialism worked the same way; the exploitation is just invisible to people who don't care to look into it.
@Alon Though didn’t (in at least part of the middle Ages) peasants spend half the calendar year at various religious holidays, i.e., getting convivially drunk?
@acb The gap between this and "medieval peasants had more leisure time than modern workers" is roughly as big as the gap between reading David Graeber and mass labor action. (Notably, by the 19th century, factory workers already had a week of actual leisure time, called Wakes Week.)
@DiegoBeghin@Alon I actually think that's probably true, not even just plausible. But some of the anarchist types seem to think that they were freer than in modern societies
There are still hunter gather tribes today, while they have been pushed to marginal lands we can't farm, and don't represent the wealth of different cultures possible in that lifestyle, we can study them and draw conclusions .
@bluGill@jackharman@DiegoBeghin Yeah, it's tribes that are specifically hulks. It's like trying to study modern Haredi Jews to draw conclusions about premodern Jewish life.
@jackharman@DiegoBeghin The reactionary socialists assume it's all just improvements in medicine, which have nothing to do with the scientific revolution, industrialization, urbanization, or democratization. (It's not as if they ever interact with premodern societies except as tourists.)
@jackharman@DiegoBeghin A neoreactionary commenter on @bretdevereaux's blog kept insisting to me that the loss of 10% of France's population in two famines in 1693-4 and 1709 was coincidence rather than a result of the absolutist regime taxing the peasants into starvation to keep fighting the cabinet wars. But, okay, this is an alt-right shithead who hangs on to fantasies of absolute monarchy to own the libs. Why am I seeing the same shit go viral on Fedi, via kolektiva.social of all places?
@Alon@jackharman@bretdevereaux Ages ago on twitter I had trads argue with me that serfs weren't oppressed because they got a valuable service out of their overlords (security, apparently). They got angry when I mentioned Dithmarschen.
@Alon@DiegoBeghin@bretdevereaux I'm lucky enough not to have seen that kind of shit on here. But there is a weird strain of reactionary socialism going around at the moment
@DiegoBeghin@jackharman Yeah, we're all agreed the concept of enshittification just boils down to tech-literate early adopters complaining that the Internet is used by the masses, right?
Of note: when Facebook was about to roll out Hebrew support, some of the existing Israeli user base started a group, "Don't do Facebook in Hebrew, all the Arsim would show up": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_(slang)
@Alon@jackharman Twitter did get shitty, but that's Musk being an idiot, it doesn't make any business sense.
As for Windows, as much as I'm annoyed that they mix up file search with Internet search, and that they're constantly trying to sell you stuff while you just want to use your computer, I have to admit that the software is a lot more stable than back in the days of Windows XP.
@bklyngap@jackharman@DiegoBeghin I wouldn't know, I last used MS Word and Excel 20 years ago (let me trigger you by reminding you that Clippy used to exist); Google Docs and Google Sheets are fine. The deterioration of Google Search is real but it's not enshittification - the issue is that Google is losing the fight with SEO trolls, not that it's demanding payola.
@bklyngap@jackharman@DiegoBeghin The SEO trolls can power through even without sponsorship, is the point. Google the name of a business partner of my father, with an ad blocker, and the second result will be an extortion site run by a neo-Nazi that posts fake news about people (mostly Israeli businesspeople) and demands payment to take them down.
@DiegoBeghin@Alon@jackharman right and they stopped investing in fighting them, since selling sponsored results to the big companies is what they want to be able to do anyway.
@bklyngap@DiegoBeghin@jackharman Not quite; the issue is that automated tools are not good enough right now, so they need to manually tag sites as SEO scams, and they really don't want to do this. Part of it is the ideology that manual is bad; part of it is the "if we let one scam victim demand a takedown, everyone will want more" problem, and thus when said business partner went to court they fought it.
@bklyngap@DiegoBeghin@jackharman It's the belief that manual can't scale. (I suspect it's also fear of being dragged in front of Congress in the likely case that the political load of the scam sites is imbalanced.)
@jackharman@Alon@DiegoBeghin manual can’t scale at the historical profit margins. They do it for YouTube though (and their algorithm has totally also gone downhill).
@bklyngap@jackharman@DiegoBeghin I mean, Camille Paglia was hating on the YouTube algorithm in the late 2000s already. Apparently the reason she hates Lady Gaga so much is that she used YouTube for some really obscure videos, and because they had very few views, the algo recced her the most popular videos, i.e. Lady Gaga clips; her response was to write an op-ed calling Lady Gaga ugly.
@DiegoBeghin@jackharman Yeah, Twitter specifically was slowly getting better after the Nazi incursion of 2016-7. The one thing that was genuinely getting worse was homophobic harassment after 2021, but that's not enshittification, that's rising homophobia.
@bklyngap@jackharman@DiegoBeghin Yeah, and note also that the inability of Facebook to launch anything good - cf. the Metaverse and now Threads - comes from the exact opposite of what the theory of enshittification says. It's not corporate pressure to show profit, because Mark Zuckerberg has a majority of the voting shares. He just does what he wants, and it turns out to kinda suck.
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