For the love of God, please craft hobbies and an appreciation for life beyond abstract “utility” maximization. These freaks are so hyperalienated from their own existence that they can’t conceive of themselves as anything other than an input. Sorry nerds, you won’t find self-actualization by designing a marginally more addictive ad-software or another tulip bubble. Please stop eating the bugs and look at some art for a fucking change.
Sleeping in a $700/month coffin so I can invent technology that makes the world more callous and unlivable. Love me I’m a techbro!
Could give these to unhoused people for free but noooo let techbro douchebags rent them out.
This is even too undignified to give away for free, much less rent out.
Call it pregentrification
I’m not fundamentally opposed to sleeping pods, but they have to be combined with maximum communitization.
Public kitchens, public baths, public crafting spaces, public theaters, public arcades, literally every thing that you could have privately in your home should be shared with everyone else in the pod-hive. Rather than a utilitarian nightmare, it’s a collectivist hive for bug people like me!
A large surplus of housing, so one could change their surroundings on a whim, would be an ideal socialist future. Hostels are a type of communal pod system you are talking about.
I’m skeptical of abundance on a finite world nearing the limits of growth and being destroyed by climate change.
That said, pod hives could be easily established in any location. Want to live near a beach? Near a skiing slope? Near dense forest? Near downtown? There’s pods for that!
Endlessly modular, extremely efficient, and using far fewer resources than fully private housing in all of these disparate locations.
Join us. Become a bug. Never be alone again!
A shitton of land is suburban wasteland and all the infrastructure to support it. Turf grass alone takes up 2% of all land in the US (from a quick search) and I imagine the stroads, strip malls, and single family homes with 3+ car garages take up another 3-5%. The problem has always been wasteful and destructive land use rather than scarcity. Imagine all the current suburbs as parks, farmland, or rewilded areas instead of ugly tract homes. I don’t think infinite growth is possible or anything but cities should be looking to Shanghai and Tokyo as a blueprint.
It’s also hilarious to me that NIMBYs are so opposed to any form of urbanization because “muh property value” when the highest property values are in the most urbanized, walkable places.
Bulldoze the suburbs, absolutely.
What NIMBYs are opposed to is their property values going down. They don’t care that the value of a walkable urban forest is vastly higher than their 3bed 2bath 2car suburban box, because they won’t be the owners of that urban property. They’ll be re-proletarianized like the rest of us and rendered without property or investments - a fate worse than death!
I’m skeptical of abundance on a finite world nearing the limits of growth and being destroyed by climate change.
What if I told you that we already have abundant housing, right now, as I type this out. And I’m not talking about our hotels, prisons, or “camp grounds”, but actual livable units1. Enough to solve Homelessness in the US multiple times over2.
It simply is not evenly distributed yet
That said, pod hives could be easily established in any location. Want to live near a beach? Near a skiing slope? Near dense forest? Near downtown? There’s pods for that!
Oh I believe in seizing hotels for exactly this purpose.
1 Census on housing, table 3, Vacant Year Round - Held off Market: 6,812,000 units. This is nearly 5% of the entire US housing stock, and almost half of the Vacant year-round units.
2 Department of Housing and Urban Development homeless count in 2022: 582,462 people
What if I told you that we already have abundant housing, right now, as I type this out. And I’m not talking about our hotels, prisons, or “camp grounds”, but actual livable units1. Enough to solve Homelessness in the US multiple times over2.
It simply is not evenly distributed yet
We’re also already destroying our biosphere and the tank of natural resources is running dry. This abundance is artificial, created by stealing from the future. It can not be sustained. We can’t just seize the already existing infrastructure, a lot of this shit has to be torn down. Especially the 🤢 suburbs 🤮
Oh I believe in seizing hotels for exactly this purpose.
A good compromise. I still favor actual hives, but yes, public hotel rooms would be a good halfway point between full apartments and bug pods.
It looks like you’re talking past one another here. OF COURSE suburbs, golf courses, yachts, and other rich people bullshit needs to be bulldozed. Fuck that shit.
In a GOOD world—where everybody gets a nice apartment, all their basic needs met, and we’ve transitioned entirely to renewable energy—we’ll be living lives of abundance, rather than scarcity.
Maybe I’m talking out my ass here, but in a world where the profit motive is gone, I cannot imagine we’d run into any hard limits on Earth for a long, long time.
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If you set these pods on fire, you could probably prevent the creation of some kind of driverless car software that will run over millions of children.
It’s the only morally correct thing to do according to Utilitarians.
This looks like a job for Utilitarianism Man! (cw: gore and death references)
Those children’s gruesome deaths are
acceptablenecessary sacrifices if they help us get rich people to Elysium sooner, according to Longtermists.
:is-this: effective altruism?
$700/mo for a cot in a plywood box.
What a scam.
energies in me are rising.SROs for the poor are more expensive even and the conditions are usually much worse. esp in this part of the city I bet the target market for pods is pretty much only people who already have a nice office they can shower and exercise and hang out in and only need a space to lie down, so really they’re probably doing fine.
sorry I’m a little skittish around this discourse bc a lot of the time it’s cast as “gross why would you live this way instead of like a human being” which can really catch housing-precarious ppl in the blast radius
For sure. I think the issue is really that people think it’s okay to pay $700/month for a tiny box to sleep in at all. As if it were a good thing for society.
We should really just fucking house everyone and get rid of bloodsucking landlords.
It’s weird because the vast majority of these people aren’t actually doing algorithmic work. They’re using libraries where the algorithms are already written and optimized and the “problems” they’re “solving” are problems of funding, organization, logistics, and novelty. Venture capital is the epitome of financialization as a hammer in search of a nail.
When pressed for “innovation,” 9 times out of 10 what’s pushed out of the financial Rube Goldberg machine is “what if thing that already exists, but with more surveillance” “what if thing that already exists, but on the blockchain” or “what if thing that already exists, but with a subscription.”
Okay hear me out, Uber but for policing.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.
Honestly, “what if [thing that already exists], but incorporating [new technology or concept]” is the essence of the vast majority of creativity. Imo the problem lies one step up with the fact that the new things capitalism incentivizes are almost always some dystopian bullshit like you mentioned.
“AI founder” = fed Stable Diffusion a million dick pics and runs a startup that guarantees more positive interactions when you send unsolicited, AI-enhanced dick pics
“Just close enough to the real thing to be only mildly disappointing.”
This is just a hackathon for people who are old enough to know better
I like eating bugs
bad! they’ll put you off your appetite for dinner. I made beans again.
Guessing that “founders” is a verb and not a noun here
The only people that advocate for this lifestyle are people with no friends, no families, and no ambitions for either. The odd part is that they have very little consciousness of just how differently they live to normal people. It’s a huge chunk of why they’re so fundamentally out of touch with the average person.
I know some people I used to go to college with that started joining “pods” or “colonies” or other buzzwords that blend together as soon as they got their cerifications. To this day, as far as I know, they’re still “preparing” for the lives ahead of them, while being in their late 30s and early 40s. No actual steps taken into having non-work friends or relationships, just a “any moment now everything will pay off and they will be gods among men” confidence.
What’s actually around doesn’t matter. The next tech hype thing will surely be superior to it and surpass it. It’s endless preparing while running in place and it’s sad to watch happen to another person.
An odd contradiction is that they advocate this lifestyle while also advocating technology like VR, which is completely incompatible with people living in this kind of space.
It goes to show just how little their consciousness is of the living space and daily life compared to the technology they advocate.
An odd contradiction is that they advocate this lifestyle while also advocating technology like VR, which is completely incompatible with people living in this kind of space.
I’ve argued about that exact contradiction with one of the exact people I mentioned before.
His answer was NeuraLink™®. Just like in the Cyberpunkerinos.
I will become techbro-only Saw in my old age if this is the future they build.
$700/month for THAT
okay i was really unhyped about how much higher the rent is in my new city than out in my old village, but for some reason i suddenly feel a lot better about my own financial decisions
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less space than a prisonerIt’s a cult.
It’s a fucking cult with a death drive.
I would love a sailor’s berth in a communal dorm tipe living arrangement. That sounds nice. I’ve lived in a barrack setting before. It was nice enough. Especially if it could be cheap it would be a good part of fixing several problems in society at once.
It is wild how they take a fraction of comunism’s power and then enshitify it
