Imagine that centuries ago a visionary had foreseen all of the following: Future people would live in modern high rise buildings. Interior high-rise apartments need elevators, mailboxes, forced air, piped water, and artificial light, to let residents exit, talk, breath, drink, and see.
What does "taking their air" even mean? Choking them? Sealing the building in plastic? Pumping in carbon dioxide? Putting the building in a huge vacuum or under water?
Yes, companies and landlords would love to enslave their "customers". A few examples stick out to me. Microsoft locking companies into live or die style contracts a la the movie, cigarette companies manipulating nicotine levels to reduce their customers' capacity to choose freely and virutally any end user agreement.
And I can totally see a landlord killing a tenant, very Dickensian.
How does being a landlord have a special ability to kill residents by taking away their air? A disgruntled building manager in a condo building (with no landlord) could do the same thing as a landord. As a tenant, I could kill my landlords "by taking away their air" or maybe just shooting them.
Banks have the ability to stack accounts with fees to increase profits at will, and yet no law is needed to stop them. They exercise self-restraint out of fear customers would immediately abandon them.
I don't know what you mean. Yes, we can imagine some bizarre contracts no one would ever agree to that let landlords push a vaporize button instead of eviction, just as we can imagine librarians stipulating that if you're late they have a right to beat you to death with the book you've borrowed. But no one would ever agree to those terms. Leasing, renting, and borrowing do not imply a special ability to kill.
This curiously misses the point completely, since all the things in that video are slight extensions/parodies of things that the software industry actually does right now, including "deleting memories" if it thinks you have installed them in illegally.
The level of control implied by being able to cut off your air and exit at will seems plenty high. And it should be obvious that control of enforceable legislation is sufficient to enslave people - you just pass a law saying they are slaves.
It is only market and legal forces that prevent landlords from killing residents by taking away their exit and air. They have the physical ability to so kill.
Fear of landlords seems to have been more common in the past when they were absentee owners of a territory (on which tenants might have built a shack) rather than providers of a building. Some in the left-libertarian (Spooner, Tucker, Proudhon) tradition make anti-landlord arguments. The conservative political theorist Willmoore Kendall denounced Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism as dictatorship of the landlords.
I think the video makes a point you neglect in that this technology, by directly accessing the brain/mental states allows for a much greater degree of control. Additionally, there are not simply market forces but hypothetical pieces of legislation being referenced. A landlord might not bother trying to intervene in their tenants lives in our world, but in this world their capacity to do so easily is obvious and legislation compels them to do so.
"Yes landlords can kill residents by cutting off their exit, talk, light, and air."
No, landlords can evict and cut off services, but they can't directly kill their residents. The owner of a server full of EM souls, however, could presumably delete/kill any of them.
Healthcare is the only industry where a private service provider might in some imaginable cases be able to simply kill the client--which is one of the reasons it's so heavily regulated. It's more the fear of the power to kill in general, not luddism, that makes people wary of future EM tech and ownership issues.
I'm not sure where the boundaries are on those forces, on a span of decades; but note that modern housing is e.g. *much* safer than workers' housing during the industrial revolution. I'd argue that higher salaries and status for workers has increased their legal protections.
Most people are already enslaved by their phones: http://andreasmoser.wordpre... When it rings, they jump and forget about everything else.
What is "cut off your air?"
The phrase "taking their air" just made me laugh.
What does "taking their air" even mean? Choking them? Sealing the building in plastic? Pumping in carbon dioxide? Putting the building in a huge vacuum or under water?
Yes, companies and landlords would love to enslave their "customers". A few examples stick out to me. Microsoft locking companies into live or die style contracts a la the movie, cigarette companies manipulating nicotine levels to reduce their customers' capacity to choose freely and virutally any end user agreement.
And I can totally see a landlord killing a tenant, very Dickensian.
How does being a landlord have a special ability to kill residents by taking away their air? A disgruntled building manager in a condo building (with no landlord) could do the same thing as a landord. As a tenant, I could kill my landlords "by taking away their air" or maybe just shooting them.
Banks have the ability to stack accounts with fees to increase profits at will, and yet no law is needed to stop them. They exercise self-restraint out of fear customers would immediately abandon them.
This is a more fine-grained kind of control.
We also fail to note, these science fiction fantasies extend life only to the Evil Rich - and not to the common monsters who cause Road Rage.
A better analogy is with nursing homes and not apartments buildings.
I don't know what you mean. Yes, we can imagine some bizarre contracts no one would ever agree to that let landlords push a vaporize button instead of eviction, just as we can imagine librarians stipulating that if you're late they have a right to beat you to death with the book you've borrowed. But no one would ever agree to those terms. Leasing, renting, and borrowing do not imply a special ability to kill.
This curiously misses the point completely, since all the things in that video are slight extensions/parodies of things that the software industry actually does right now, including "deleting memories" if it thinks you have installed them in illegally.
The level of control implied by being able to cut off your air and exit at will seems plenty high. And it should be obvious that control of enforceable legislation is sufficient to enslave people - you just pass a law saying they are slaves.
It is only market and legal forces that prevent landlords from killing residents by taking away their exit and air. They have the physical ability to so kill.
Fear of landlords seems to have been more common in the past when they were absentee owners of a territory (on which tenants might have built a shack) rather than providers of a building. Some in the left-libertarian (Spooner, Tucker, Proudhon) tradition make anti-landlord arguments. The conservative political theorist Willmoore Kendall denounced Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism as dictatorship of the landlords.
I think the video makes a point you neglect in that this technology, by directly accessing the brain/mental states allows for a much greater degree of control. Additionally, there are not simply market forces but hypothetical pieces of legislation being referenced. A landlord might not bother trying to intervene in their tenants lives in our world, but in this world their capacity to do so easily is obvious and legislation compels them to do so.
"Yes landlords can kill residents by cutting off their exit, talk, light, and air."
No, landlords can evict and cut off services, but they can't directly kill their residents. The owner of a server full of EM souls, however, could presumably delete/kill any of them.
Healthcare is the only industry where a private service provider might in some imaginable cases be able to simply kill the client--which is one of the reasons it's so heavily regulated. It's more the fear of the power to kill in general, not luddism, that makes people wary of future EM tech and ownership issues.
I'm not sure where the boundaries are on those forces, on a span of decades; but note that modern housing is e.g. *much* safer than workers' housing during the industrial revolution. I'd argue that higher salaries and status for workers has increased their legal protections.