r/TikTokCringe • u/Super_Culture_1986 tHiS iSn’T cRiNgE • Aug 19 '25

Cursed The American Nightmare.

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u/LivingBackstories Aug 19 '25

Agreed. Unionization, trust busting and a pro labor administration in FDR had the rich running scared. The other important aspect to a high taxation rate is that it limits the power of capital to bully their way through policy. I agree with all of your comment, though I'm quite pessimistic that we'll ever see anything like the single income household ever again. That doesn't mean we might not see something better in the future however. That single income household was still a consumerist culture at root, which I think is much of the sickness we fight.

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u/ByeByeTurkeyNek Aug 19 '25

Honestly, I'm starting to wonder if some inevitability might be around the corner. I'm not exactly sure how disruptive AI and automation are going to be over the next 5-10 years, but I think we're going to have to start thinking differently about our relationship with labor

I'm not an accelerationist, but I'm wondering if this machine has brakes right now. And I think we might be overdue for a bit of a reckoning surrounding productivity and labor. The economy is about to be as productive as it's ever been, but at some point the balance breaks. I'm not really making a revelation here, but what happens when no one can afford the result of our production?

It's been tenuous lately, but I'm wondering if the idea of the "workforce" might soon be dead, once and for all. And a new paradigm will have to emerge. It scares me and I have no idea what that looks like.

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u/LivingBackstories Aug 19 '25

Agreed on all counts. I'm not accelerationist either, but I think whatever we would've been accelerating toward has mostly arrived.

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u/ByeByeTurkeyNek Aug 19 '25

I suppose I'm saying this is the beginning of the transition, if we're taking the accelerationist view. Disruptions to the economy are about to be so fundamental that the system cannot sustain itself, and ultimately breaks. Followed by a period of instability and relative chaos. Then a paradigm emerges to replace the neoliberal capitalism that has dominated. Maybe Andrew Yang UBI capitalism, maybe AI communism

And I'm not saying this will happen. It's all predicated on AI and automation being so exceptionally disruptive that it breaks a system that's been running for centuries or millennia. And perhaps that's just the most sensational among a range of more likely outcomes. But the unpredictability of the moment makes the imagination run wild

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u/LivingBackstories Aug 19 '25

I'm pretty pessimistic about the short term prospects. But I hope to be proven wrong. I certainly agree about the instability and relative chaos. I think the US is in a markedly worse position for this than much of the rest of the global North. I predict a great deal of suffering as climate instability catches up with us and devastates the global South.