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bitwizeyesterday at 10:49 PM1 replyview on HN

I had a friend who believed that large cities should be abolished and society should be made agrarian by law. She believed that that way we would have more free time to pursue our intellectual curiosities, unburdened by our dependence on and duty to urban society. I was like... I'm descended from farm folk. My mom grew up in a farmhouse that had no television and not even indoor plumbing for the first few years of her life. Have you no idea how grueling agrarian life actually is? Sunup to sundown, backbreaking labor, even for kids and women. (Especially women.) You wouldn't have time to write your stories and essays and play RPGs. The animals would need feeding, the cows milking, the eggs gathering, the crops planting or harvesting. And now that there are no cities and hence no economies of scale, there's no industrially produced farm equipment to help you with your labor, nor industrially produced clothing. You'd have to make those yourself, or source them from local small-scale craftspeople. You'd have to mend or repair them yourself.

As miserable as cities can get, there's a reason why people sang "How can you keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" And as oppressive as today's rat race can be, it's paradise compared to even the cities of the past. You mean I only have to work for eight hours a day, five days a week? In an office where there's always adequate light and the air is constantly freshened and temperature controlled? And the company, by law, has to take reasonable measures to protect my safety and compensate me in case I do get hurt doing my job? Sign me the fuck up!

The first thing I thought of when I read the headline was "so, TFA wants us to become the Yautja?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_(fictional_species)

(btw, RIP to the OG Yautja voice... Peter Cullen)


Replies

t098i3today at 1:26 AM

Brett Devereaux's series of articles "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant" is a must read for anyone who benefits from modern technology, IMO: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...

Pre-industrial life was dominated by labor, struggle and death. There was virtually no social, intellectual or economic mobility. It sucked!

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