@tante there's something i find incredibly frustrating about this. it never brings itself to an incredibly obvious argument. its SO close to, but never arrives.

if it wasn't for capitalist profit-seeking, automation and machines would be AMAZING NEWS. if every job replaced by a machine simply continued to get paid as if the human was still there, there'd be no need to be angry at automation; we'd welcome it! all those "utopian" visions where noone has to work anymore because everything is automated are not possible in capitalism because people need to work to survive, even when this work doesn't make sense for any human to be doing it.