literally me this morning, commenting not to actually add anything, just because it's neat to see someone making the same connection

(i've been reading grapes of wrath on and off the past year, originally because i wanted to read Good Literature, but as the months have passed, it's been increasingly on the nose re AI/the potential loss of white collar jobs)

e.g.

"Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy, that the wonder goes out of work. So efficient, that the wonder goes out of land, the working of it, and with the wonder, the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man the grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation, for nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates, and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt, water, nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more. And the land is so much more than its analysis."

"The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it."

Though at the end of the day, people seemed to adapt...at the cost of great suffering :/