Refusing to question the notion that the overclass exists because their productivity and cultural contribution makes them a necessity so hard that I reinvent the premise of the Pixar movie Wall-E from first principles and pitch it to people as an ontology

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Morromist 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah. This guy didn't read hacker news a few weeks ago when that article about the Samuri came up.

There are a lot of premises this article takes for granted besides that one too, but yeah, I get it, its fun to make up what the future is going to be like on a super-grand scale where everything is a simple absolute. People were doing the same thing 100 years ago.

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zetalyrae 14 hours ago | parent [-]

If you mean: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/samurai-city/

Doesn't this prove my point? In feudal Japanese society, wealthy merchants were lower status than poor samurai, i.e., they rich could not buy political power. "The wealthy" and "the ruling class" are not always the same group of people.

	▲	Morromist 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I guess I was thinking of the samurai as being part of the permanant overclass. You mentioned that of old aristocracy provided officers for the military, so I thought that was analogious to the samurai. Perhaps I misread what you're trying to say. My reading was that the Samurai were part of the overclass but were pretty useless, albiet still potentially dangerous, and just sat around devouring resources for hundreds of years, so perhaps the overclass of the future could do the same. The samuri weren't all rich, but they didn't dishonor themselves with labor, which is a similar thing and they certainly held power over the state. The end of the samuri was, perhaps, an example of the state getting what it wants despite the desires of the permanant overclass, supporting what you said, but it took a long time to get there. I suppose you are thinking of the Samuri as an arm of the state and not "the rich".
	▲	NoGravitas 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You're making a mistake by confusing "wealth" and "ownership of the means of production". Under feudalism, the means of production are land rights. Merchants don't have those; warrior-nobles do. The ruling class is the class that controls the means of production. I will say that a feudal society where you have merchants/factors/etc becoming richer than the feudal nobles is a society in transition. The Japanese example is no different from Renaissance and early modern Europe when capitalism was in its earliest stages.
	▲	jrflowers 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Is your point that the AI industry would have wrecked Edo period Japan Or that we live in a shogunate