alt Hacker News> The productivity gains we've seen above the capacity of human productivity would have been impossible without tech. It absolutely was caused by tech.
Would have been impossible without and being caused by are different things.
The sense of being “caused by” in a political context are the people who have the power to direct things. Which are not necessarily the people who implement something.
> The benefactor of those gains was also entirely decided by those who created the tech.
You assert that they were decided by. Based on what?
The vast majority of tech work was done in employment, either for some government or for private entities. The private entitites were controlled by Capital. The governments were controlled by democratic forces and Capital.
> We could have given use of that tech to everyone. In some cases we actually did (e.g. open source),
Again I reference the meme of Overworked Nebraska OSS Maintainer.
The impressive work done on OSS by tech workers directly have been done in their free time. The bulk of OSS work done by people as a living is probably through corporations like e.g. Intel working on the Linux Kernel.[1]
That impressive free time work has gotten the reputation as a treasure trove for the highly motivated and tech literate. In contrast to something that regular people can plug-and-play as an alternative to Big Tech dominance.
> , but in most cases we gained (at least partial) ownership of the capital so it was in our best personal economic interest to keep it for ourselves and our close friends.
Yes, well played. For those that got away with their financial-independence millions. For the rest, well, I guess they never managed to learn the moral lesson of Monopoly.
[1] Or am I wrong here? I could be off-base.
> in a political context
While you are right to recognize that there was some attempt to inject political context, it was not there originally, and is not the main discussion taking place. The fact that wages and productivity have become decoupled is not inherently political. It is but simple mathematics. Tech is the cause for the decoupling; it is why we have been able to become continually more productive and at an accelerating rate.
> The vast majority of tech work was done in employment
Yes, but generally even where employment is present tech workers also demand a share in ownership (e.g. stock). Tech doesn't invent itself. At least not yet. The workers have held the cards. Even those who haven't won the lottery are still in a pretty good economic position, relatively speaking.