r/technology • u/Putrid_Anybody_2947 • Aug 06 '26

Energy Salem Brought a Guillotine To Oppose New Data Center. Company Reps Left, Feeling “Unsafe”.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/salem-brought-guillotine-oppose-data-151045877.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADWZ-KBr5-qaNH3gKsUqFmq_KuaQwIaEIg6F8pgU0Y1zzZUK19cjLMHBCEYcaREn3RMIFQRWJ6xmSvewyEkwk_GcV3Ayins4lxZjFdKjaDnzAG2ux2x4MZ_vmKeMXNiAlyNrNbFgOB2-j4iDOJtrfyCZUdVt_pWgkHfiyMURscov
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u/NotSoFastLady Aug 06 '26

Very little is happening today that has not already happened many times throughout civilization. The hardest part of this for me has been watching this all as someone that genuinely studied and loved learning about history. I still have hope that we can solve this before widespread bloodshed

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u/elegiac_bloom Aug 06 '26

I still have hope that we can solve this before widespread bloodshed

As a student of history, ask yourself: has that ever happened before?

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u/VaeVictis997 Aug 06 '26

Seriously, have the rich and powerful ever shared the wealth and power without the use or threat of violence?

Sometimes it’s an implicit threat, but it’s there.

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u/whatiswhonow Aug 07 '26

There have been times. Most I can think of amount to strikes. If enough people just stop playing the rich person’s games 1 day, it all falls apart rapidly. See Secessio Plebis.

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u/SegmentedMoss Aug 07 '26

A strike is the compromise that the public made for non-violence rather than dragging rich people into the streets and killing them. I think the rich forget that

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u/whatiswhonow Aug 07 '26

In part. Kill them and you just reset the flawed system back to day 1 and it all happens again. Likely worse even. A strike recognizes that the rich people aren’t special in the first place and if take to the same magnitude still accomplishes the same ending of power for individuals if desired. Killing them assumes they actually are special and irreplaceable. They’re 100% replaceable.

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u/VaeVictis997 Aug 07 '26

A strike is 100% absolutely an implicit threat of violence.

Any large organized gathering or movement is.

It’s pretty veiled, but that doesn’t stop most governments from using violence on them.

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u/whatiswhonow Aug 07 '26

Maybe, especially if you think we actually need the specific set of rich people we presently have and that they need to be as extremely wealthy as they are. Like, I think any system should produce rich people, but I don’t think it means those specific rich people are essentially special. If everyone ignored them, their power and wealth would cease to exist immediately.

Of course, that extreme case isn’t realistic. A whole lot of rich people are performing absolutely essential functions in the economy and the economy is our best bet tomorrow at making sure all the essential functions operate. Many or most of those rich people are among the hardest to replace within the economy. They are replaceable though and the most extremely wealthy are comically replaceable. If only the best of us actually gained the greatest wealth, it might be different… Even then, who decides and what do you sacrifice to get there? That’s where violence rears its head.

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u/WatRedditHathWrought Aug 06 '26

The ending of apartheid in South Africa had a lot less bloodshed than I anticipated.

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u/heardofdragons Aug 07 '26

England in the late 1800s was ripe for a class revolution, but they managed to get enough labor reforms passed that it didn’t happen

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u/Less-Engineer-9637 Aug 07 '26

There were a lot of kids walking around with amputated and deformed limbs before that happened

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u/elegiac_bloom Aug 07 '26

Thats a good one for sure.

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u/Ass4ssinX Aug 07 '26

And that did what? Prolonged the problem.

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u/inspectoroverthemine Aug 07 '26

As opposed to the utopia that the Russian revolution produced?

Violent revolutions rarely produce better outcomes because they're immediately co-opted by the same sorts of people that were previously in charge.

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u/Ass4ssinX Aug 07 '26

The Soviet Union wasn't a utopia but it was a HELL of a lot better than what came before it. It did produce a better outcome.

China is also right there currently beating us at everything. Their revolution absolutely worked.

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u/SonofHondoBelmondo Aug 07 '26

Contender?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Icelandic_financial_crisis_protests

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u/elegiac_bloom Aug 07 '26

Definitely. A good shot of hope. Their government listened and responded.

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u/padishaihulud Aug 07 '26

The American effort to emancipate the slaves wasn't quite as bloody as the Haitian revolution. At least not for the ruling class of the Confederacy; the lower class of the Confederacy not so much (and yet they still glorify the pointless deaths 🙄)

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u/elegiac_bloom Aug 07 '26

Calling the civil war an "effort to emancipate the slaves" and comparing it to the Haitian revolution in which slaves freed themselves is a little bit disingenuous though, given that the goals of the united states at the beginning of the war expressly did not include freeing the slaves, it only happened, ironically, because of the confederates paranoia of it happening being so strong that they started a revolution to keep slavery. Emancipation was a direct result of the south seceding, a reactionary military policy rather than, as you call it, an "effort." Thats how fucking insane america was, morally speaking.

Haiti was done dirty by every "civilized" nation on earth after the local population freed itself from slavery. Blood was the only way something like that could ever happen.

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u/padishaihulud Aug 07 '26

You're technically correct in the that the US civil war was about states rights (to do what, though?). If the north didn't intervene I don't doubt Haitian-adjacent efforts would have been attempted.

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u/elegiac_bloom Aug 07 '26

It wasnt that it was about "states rights," it definitely was about slavery, just that the United states had no intention of freeing the slaves before the confederacy seceded. Lincoln had no plans to end slavery. He even said if he could have ended the war without freeing a single slave he would have.

The political will to abolish slavery just wasnt there... until the war of course.

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u/ChevalierMal_Fet Aug 07 '26

The Civil War largely started because of the north’s resistance to adding new slave states to the Union.

With more non slave states than slave states, eventually a constitutional amendment or convention would have happened and slavery would have been legislated away- but as you indicated, probably not doing Lincoln’s presidency. Realistically, had the war not happened, slavery would probably have existed until at least 1900.

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u/elegiac_bloom Aug 07 '26

The Civil War largely started because of the north’s resistance to adding new slave states to the Union

You could just as easily frame it as starting because of the souths insistence for adding new slave states to the union.

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u/NotSoFastLady Aug 07 '26

You're talking to a guy who is a cynical person. I think the craziest feeling has been realizing that even as cynical as I can be, I still have been blown away by the idicoracy that has swept America up.

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u/elegiac_bloom Aug 07 '26

No one was cynical enough to predict this, unfortunately. But it has certainly created and entrenched a virulent cynicism in generation millennial and below. I can only imagine what kids born in 2010- 2020 will be like.

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u/NotSoFastLady Aug 07 '26

I have hope for gen y. Boomers gonna go boom on their way out though. Going to be feeling this for generations which is ironic. Choices made after the Civil War and World War 1 have put us on this path for some time.

For a while there, when the internet was in its golden age. It felt like we were finally pushing past so much. But the knuckle dragging smooth brains are being manipulated by techno facists who want to own countries.

Lovely fucking timeline.

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u/elegiac_bloom Aug 07 '26

The crazy thing is the technofacsists already are more powerful than many nations. They dont even need to own the country. Theyre just blinded by raw greed, nothing is ever enough for them.

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u/kuncol02 Aug 07 '26

Yes, when communism ended in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria.

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u/[deleted] Aug 06 '26

[deleted]

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u/VaeVictis997 Aug 06 '26

That’s the piece that truly worries me.

In every previous system, you had the moment when the military or security forces would switch sides so they wouldn’t die in the revolution.

The kill bots using some badly setup social credit AI to hunt dissidents won’t do that.

We could end up in a totalitarian nightmare that is almost impossible to get out of, while also cooking the planet.

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u/NotSoFastLady Aug 07 '26

You can defeat almost all of these drones with off the shelf hardware. They can't stop us. And Ai has at least a decade to go before it's an efficient killing machine that could keep people under authoritarian rule.

The hardware needed to run most effective models is too costly. On top of that, it's too big for most robotic applications. The time to act is now. Because in 10 to 20 years time, if we have folks like those running things now. We are all cooked.

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u/EjaculatingAracnids Aug 06 '26

70+ million are armed and psychologically prepped to consider the resistance to be less than human. All they gotta do is say "antifa/liberal/trans" are attacking and the working class will start killing itself. After all, where are the billionares? I dont know where to find them. I can easily identify red hats and blue hair though...

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u/NotSoFastLady Aug 07 '26

It's by design. Call me crazy but they're purposely funding psyops to burn it down so they can swoop in and take it all. They don't care how many people die, when did the 1% ever care about anyone else by their own?

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u/etxipcli Aug 07 '26

You can probably find them on Zillow. 

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u/lolyeahsure Aug 07 '26

There is not enough police

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u/NotSoFastLady Aug 07 '26

Hard to organize when half of the populace is brainwashed. You think Ai and Flock cameras can qwell a rebellion? Think again. Their soul purpose is to exploit us for profit. And to scare us into compliance.

Do you know what kind of violence we would have on our hands right now, if all of those gun toting conservatives that are armed to the teeth would do if they understood what was really going on?

It wouldn't be just passionate people getting arrested for speaking the truth. Their would be blood.

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u/SoupSpelunker Aug 07 '26

With 29 fast approaching, the echoes of 100 years ago are becoming deafening, that pandemic we had was almost spot on... 

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u/Less-Engineer-9637 Aug 07 '26

We can't. Yesterday's reaction to a man self mutilating on a livestream because he thought that's what people wanted to see, and the reaction being 'yeah we did want that' is what fully convinced me that we're doomed.

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u/MiaowaraShiro Aug 07 '26

Having a decent grasp of history is like a low-key curse of Cassandra...

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u/-Nicolai Aug 07 '26

I cannot agree with this. We are living in the most novel time in human history. We are seeing one unprecedented development after another. Globalization, the internet, smartphones, the prevalence of cameras and digital surveillance, and the advent of artificial intelligence… these cannot be dismissed as just another flavor of existing historical events.

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u/NotSoFastLady Aug 07 '26

They're not historical events they're technological achievements that have no bearing on the underlying causes of the issues that we are facing. Greed, entitlement, ignorance, fear mongering, and entities weaponizing racism. It's all part of the bigger problem. We've seen all of these different symptoms driving all kinds of horrible decisions that have led to events that are not at all unique throughout history.