Industry 4.0 is legitimately cool as fuck. It’s very early phases, but things like the smart grid where power plants are just automatically turned on and rerouted to massively improved efficiency of the overall system is just straight up cool. Think also like, fully automated supply chains, it’s shit like this where you just really want to nationalize Amazon to make it actually accelerate forward faster.
This shit is not going to be used to benefit humanity in any way though. It’s going to be used to crush the working class even more and make labor organization impossible.
Nah smart grids are actually good for everyone. Lowers energy cost and means substantially less burned natural gas.
Cool tech but increasing efficiency =/= meeting the end goal of leaving the vast majority of fossil fuels in the ground
There is a lot more to the whole 4th industrial revolution thing than smart grids though
all my homies hate nordea
Productivity has collapsed in the last 10 years
Don’t make me tap the sign
This “fourth industrial revolution” is the alternative liberals want instead of an ecosocialist green new deal: some sort of “green/sustainable capitalism” initiative founded on a Solovian “steady-state” growth model and/or more Keynesian/social-democratic measures like UBI to keep the unemployed lumpen from rioting and underpaid workers from striking, managed by a technocratic central planning and mass surveillance infrastructure similar to what’s kept the PRC stable except coordinated by government “partnerships” with private monopolies like Amazon and Wal-Mart instead of SEOs and with fewer of the upsides.
If it seems weird that WaPo, Bloomberg, and other billionaire-owned news outlets are increasingly writing hagiographies about Chinese efficiency, this is the kind of shit they’ve been trying to do in the west to slow capitalist decay and prevent future revolutions since 2008 and would be further along if not for the more openly reactionary Trumpian protofascist and neoliberal tendencies - represented by the exurban natural-resource capitalists (dirty energy, agriculture, etc.) in opposition to the urban technocratic wing of the capitalist class - actively working against these measures.
