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   clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 28-May-2026 03:49:40 JST clarity flowers

   ppl like to say that we're heading towards "feudalism", but I think there's a key difference. The "lord" of my "land" no longer needs to live anywhere near that land, nor even be a person at all. The violence is delegated to the state. Everything is wrapped in protective buffers of abstraction.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 28-May-2026 03:49:49 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     A feudal lord, for all their power, implicitly understands the pressure of the mob: there's a long history of peasant revolts across the world. And they exploit & abuse their own land at their peril, because they can't just sell it off and buy a new estate. The capitalist has no such limitations.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 28-May-2026 03:50:09 JST clarity flowers

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     The invention of the "corporation" and "private ownership" (and, much later, the "supply chain") was a necessary step in bringing us to where we are. We aren't moving backwards, but forwards, into something we don't have precedents to understand. Uber doesn't have to own any cars to run a taxi business, yknow. Shits weird.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 28-May-2026 15:46:30 JST clarity flowers

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     • Job

     @vanderZwan yeah pretty much

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     Job (vanderzwan@vis.social)'s status on Thursday, 28-May-2026 15:46:31 JST Job

     in reply to

     @clarity I remember reading once somewhere that the more layers of indirection, the worse people are at feeling responsible for something (or assigning responsibility to others, e.g. shareholders), and that the reason is that we intuitively think in terms of "cause" and "effect" and every extra step in a causal chain measurably reduces how much we feel someone had "agencency" in causing something.

     We're (well, it's not really "we", is it?) are basically structuring our society to optimize that.