Pradyun Gedam
Daniël Franke 
When exactly did we start to think that the point of humans was to be productive, instead of thinking that the point of productivity was to take care of humans?
JuneSim63 💚@ainmosni When elites started taking any surplus for themselves.
ɗ𐐩ʃƕρʋ@junesim63 @ainmosni Sooo, that would be when the first humans appeared on the planet?
Reg
John Carlos Baez@ReggieHere @deshipu @junesim63 @ainmosni - some say it started with raising grain: the elites get slaves or paid laborers to grow grain, store the surplus, use it to feed armies, etc.
Interestingly the storage of grain is also when cats started hanging out with humans. So it's not all bad.
Yes, the advent of agriculture and stored surpluses seems to be the consensus here. Prior to that people would have lived more nomadic lives and it would have been unlikely that anyone could 'farm' anyone else's production.
@ReggieHere @johncarlosbaez @junesim63 @ainmosni I have been reading "Against Grain" and "Dawn of Everything" and I can't help thinking that it must have went the other way around. People have been dabbling in agriculture for ages before, but it never really was that much better. Only when it became possible to force other people to work for you and take all their stuff (because it became harder for them to just run away from you), agriculture came into fashion.
@ReggieHere @johncarlosbaez @junesim63 @ainmosni By the way, ore mining and metal smelting might be two other industries, apart from agriculture, where you can't easily run and hide.
Absolutely. Society gradually coalesced as occasional societies became more permanent, but anthropologists place the earliest settlements at around 25000 BC while humans have been around for several hundred thousand years (give a millennia or two either way).
Whether those early societies operated according to a system of theft, slavery and forced labour, social credit, or a combination of them all is anyone's guess.
@ReggieHere @johncarlosbaez @junesim63 @ainmosni I'm willing to bet that theft, slavery, and forced labor were not invented overnight, and different societies at least dabbled with them for a very long time, possibly before anatomically modern humans even. But as you say, there is no proof, and it's unlikely we will ever find any.
It's hard to believe that those things didn't exist, or that tribes wouldn't subjugate others when they had the chance, but if the global human population in 10000BC was roughly half of the population of modern day London, it might have been tricky to find people to subjugate.
Tusknode@junesim63 @ainmosni for me is since ever, just last periods that is more noticeable cause of the development of tech. Higher technology-more power for single individuals. Its going to getting worse, and that scares me.
Jax UK
Ejner Borgbjerg@ainmosni when "productivity" was thought to be the software category of office suites, perhaps...
João Santos@ainmosni just before someone built the first proto-palace in one of the first cities.
epicdemiologist@ainmosni As soon as one human controlled the result of other humans' productivity.
sotolf
Kit Rhett Aultman@ainmosni I reckon the big inflection point in that came when most of us stopped farming for survival.
rascal
seism0saurusWhen was capitalism established as the only "valid" system?
Violet MadderWhen they enclosed the commons and made it all but impossible for people to survive outside their control. That's when.
JackieIt took a while. It took things like the enclosure acts and the displacement of the agricultural peasantry for it really to take root in the British context
acb
Resuna
Pilum::🌞
Жафстелце
Nina Cried PowerIt's more about security, whether that be food or energy security, or security from a neighbour seeking those for themselves.
The nation that neglects its own security in order to be kind tends to be one that is colonised by a nation which doesn't.
ChookMother 🇦🇺🦘@ainmosni Around Henry Ford's time.
Jason Pettus 
@ainmosni Right around 20,000 BC.
Sonja Schulte@ainmosni I love this dually: as a rhetorical question, but also how Mastodon gives various serious and probable answers
Jeff Bronks
Jake in the desert@ainmosni capitalism, etc, the fertile crescent, colonizers, Henry Ford, just all of it. Garbage. hahaha
Grey Pilgrim@ainmosni
Depends on your country I think - here it was roughly the start of this century, give or take a decade, when economic growth became goal instead of means for providing for people.
Depends on your country I think - here it was roughly the start of this century, give or take a decade, when economic growth became goal instead of means for providing for people.
Moss Wizard@ainmosni sometime around the building of the pyramids.
Frans Super 🇺🇦🇵🇸🍋 FKNZS🔻@ainmosni It started when someone said 'I am more important than you, so you do as I say and that is work the field and hand in your crops to me'.
SkyNebula
Molenaar@ainmosni Well, that's an easy one. First, the Guild system had to collapse, so the "productivity to take care of humans" part is no longer looked after.
Then the steam engine had to be developed enough, so that it is more wasteful to stop the engine than to produce a surplus. It takes an enormous amount of time and fuel to start a steam engine, while mills can be stopped at any time. So since the steam engine was used for the productivity, we started to produce first, and then tried to sell our products, which was enormously stupid when al the work was still craftsmanship by hand or driven with wind or water.
Our whole economy still runs on the ideas of the steam age, even if all power is electric or diesel these days, and can be started and stopped without penalty.
Dan Lyke
Carolyn
Nick
draNgNon
Pierre-Yves Comtois@ainmosni at the time of the Industrial Revolution. 1760–1840.
VHG 🇪🇺🇺🇦
Doug Wade@ainmosni if you’re sincerely asking for a date, rather than making a rhetorical point, the earliest I could concretely cite would be Cotton Mather’s 1701 sermon “A Christian At His Calling.”
Jonne Arjoranta@dougwade @ainmosni I would think that he was influenced by the Reformation. Most factions – but especially Calvinists – started emphasizing labour as a way to prove one's worth in the eyes of God (See e.g. Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).
So to answer your rhetorical question: roughly 16th century.
David W. Jones@ainmosni
"At the end of the day, we are human *beings*, not human *doings*" a quote from a rabbi that I read somewhere in a newspaper.
"At the end of the day, we are human *beings*, not human *doings*" a quote from a rabbi that I read somewhere in a newspaper.
Ulrich RummelWhen the ‘Protestant sects’ (in Max Weber's sense) appeared on the scene.
(Thanks for nothing.)
Korma Chameleon@ainmosni the protestant reformation
Infrapink (he/his/him)@ainmosni I'm going to say when John Calvin took over Geneva. Early Calvinism had the idea that God would bless and reward the righteous while still alive, and one of those blessings was wealth. Since work can, in some instances, lead to wealth, this gave rise ot the idea that work itself is inherently righteous, rather than a means to an end. The heresy that wealth == righteousness appeals to wealthy people who get to impose that idea on everybody.
Solar🌄Garden@ainmosni "point of productivity...to take care of humans"
humans ... while everything else beautiful and self-sustaining by way of its complexity and frugality is obliterated
before interjecting I just did a page search for any terms relevant to anything living other than the [default] rape-ape species. Not in this thread... but elsewhere in the followed timeline, this from @jackofalltrades, 2nd para of which fits: https://mas.to/@jackofalltrades/116125048598041523
Jack of all tradesIt is the anthropocentric perspective:
CodeByJeff@ainmosni it can actually be traced back to early biblical times, and the story of Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve | The Ancients
Technomancer Star, Alpha@ainmosni When money became more important than human lives. Amazing how it works.
CassandraVertI don't know, but it's at least since WWII.
Raphael
radar man from the moon@ainmosni
I saw a sticker on someone's car that said "busy is not your purpose" which struck me as funny...then horrifying when I thought about just how brain-hacked we are, our own existential confusion used against us by the those that benefit from us believing our jobs are the center of our identity and success is measured in dollars instead of happiness.
I saw a sticker on someone's car that said "busy is not your purpose" which struck me as funny...then horrifying when I thought about just how brain-hacked we are, our own existential confusion used against us by the those that benefit from us believing our jobs are the center of our identity and success is measured in dollars instead of happiness.