I know, I know. I almost feel like I should apologize to my kids — when we started having them we had no idea their prospects would be so diminished. And mine are relatively fortunate. *sigh*
Absolute truth here. The defining revolution was the internet, and going from analogue to digital, and it has happened. Many so-called innovations we see today are at best tweaks, some of them comical – the WeWork guy, after crashing and burning, is “innovating” by becoming a landlord – and some of them tragic – self-driving cars that kill people: oops, still a few bugs to work out.
Obviously, new and better tech developments will come down the pike but the seismic shift that propelled people into new and better careers and improved existing careers has already occurred. There is simply not the societal mobility possible under late capitalism that existed even a couple of decades ago.
(Sort of off topic but every time I see "WeWork" my brain converts it to "wetwork" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetwork because at least to me it's the same thing.)
I don't know if I've already said this here, but it's worth repeating: A friend of mine had, at Penn between 1968 and 1972, a professor in film studies named Bob Rosen, who said, "Every American movie is about upward mobility." More true than not!
Eh. I'm not sure tech can be blamed out of context for much. About the only thing unique to it's a bunch of learning curves.
That is to say, you can't take it's downside out of the context of an ever more extractive economy and the corrupted state that allows and empowers that.
For example, crypto is tied more to an enfeebled state and decadent society than it is to "tech".
Radical as the iPhone is, it's essentially just a tool. If there's a problem with it, it's how it's used by people, not what it is.
TBH, it wasn’t you, but I was having problem fully grokking the post — a worst night’s sleep than usual kept the synapses from firing well — but have an issue generally about blaming the tech but not users, society, etc., which, you know, would be more beneficial and all that.
If you misunderstand me, maybe it's me! I'll think about it and maybe approach the subject again sometime because I think it's a rich field. I do believe the earlier applications of digital infotech went one way and later ones went another. How and why remain at issue.
Hopefully by the time it comes around again on the guitar, as they say, I'll have actual thoughts. Because it's a subject I find incredibly fascinating, but also brainfog so the only thoughts I can identify today involve cats.
Which, you know, the internet has probably saved my marriage and my life by providing me with endless cat pics and endless people who are... really pretty okay with cats being the only thing you're interested in talking about.
Tech is not to blame. I took Edroso to be referring to the Gold Rush+transformational nature of how Tech As We Know It was implemented. I invoke Fudd's First Law, if there is a System someone will try to game it. Tech was monitized, like everything in a loosely regulated capitalist culture is monitized. Your cell phone is a black box that runs apps that wake themselves up to phone home for updates and send whatever interesting data they have back to the mothership, all out of your control and sort-of spelled out in the EULA you agreed to by installing the app, or by buying the phone with the apps (that you can't delete) on it. The unprecedented interactive nature of computers + Internet is the Mother of all Systems, and it has been gamed to within an inch of our lives. It didn't have to be this way, but given who we are it almost had to turn out this way.
My point was that it’s not inanimate objects that are bad but the people behind the objects and the societal dysfunction that lets them get away with a lot of abusive behavior.
Unless my streak of misunderstanding is continuing — likely!! — you, too, maybe misunderstood Roy’s thrust.
What I remember is what was heralded as the potential of tech, freeing people from drudgery. Though I'm a fogey it now appears to me the drudgery has been built into the system. Even the hope of changing the system may not eliminate the drudgery. But we could do some things to ameliorate some of the drudgery if it weren't for attitudes held in spite of evidence.
Well I guess I could have edited or expanded the above, but the following sentiment sits or stands on its own:
Coulda written "virtual" instead of "digital" up there. But non-existent higher being strike me down if I ever accede to that crapified term. Why on earth have we succumbed to "virtuality" when "actuality" (previously known as "reality") served the planet for 4 billion years? Remember, the Deepfolx with their Deepfakes gonna make it practically (see what I did there?) impossible to tell actual people and events from purely-made-up ones by the time you finish reading this screed.
And if you would be so kind as to stay virtually off my imaginary lawn it would be appreciated. Thank you for your kind attention.
Well, that's progress, innit? Instead of a whole room of customer service staff, we've got Marge, who has to handle all of the angry-as-fuck survivors who successfully fought their way through "press 3 for billing" and the AI voice-recognition "Please state your problem" to get to the ONE human still working. It's tech that turned a simple "please cancel my service" call into a Quest from Legend of Zelda, but are we grateful? We are not.
You can sell access to a virtual world, and you can sell an idealized Self in a virtual world. Zuck is attempting to buy first mover advantage with his 8-bit Eden.
The Onion once had a brilliant article (but I repeat myself) about a guy finally realizing his dream of owning a bookstore/coffeehouse - in Second Life.
I got in on the (FAR more localized) software dev boom in the 1980s. (Charlottesville, VA. Yeah, them days ain’t coming back.) Now I have to do two tech jobs to keep up. For once I am not being snide
I can’t speak to most of the occupations you’re discussing, but in the medical area, starting in the 1930s and advancing rapidly in the later 20th and early 21st centuries, it became increasingly possible to successfully treat illness and injury. The contrast between what my doctor dad had to work with when he started out, what was available to me in the 70’s and what we have now is astounding. I readily admit that sanitation and immunizations had the biggest impact - refrigerators, toilets and vaccines save lives! But the frustration of having only sympathy to offer patients with infections, cancer or heart disease has morphed into more procedures and medications than anyone (at least me) can keep track of. And the despised electronic medical record has made it possible for front line practitioners to review much if not all of a new patient’s medical history - no one misses the days when you had to request a medical record and wait hours if not days to get your hands on it. There’s a lot fucked up about the American medical nonsystem, from insurance to hierarchy, but technology is not one. I close by pointing out that all this technology has made it hard, if not neglectful, to practice in the little solo office of yore, much less from home.
Excellent point! I should have been clear that I was talking about information technology generally. Medtech is fantastic and if anything the problem there is the government refusing to do what it could to mandate tech standards (though they're getting better about info blocking).
Hear hear. My mom's 92, we've had plenty of encounters with the medical-industrial complex lately, and I'm blown away by the improvements in medicine that make abdominal surgery on a 92 year old not just possible, but *almost* routine. A lot of this, I think, is much better infection control, and even things like the use of surgical glue instead of sutures, and plenty more I don't even know about. And every hospital stay is followed up by home visits, sometimes for a month or two, just to make sure she's doing OK because we've figured out it doesn't make much sense to spend $40k on an operation for an elderly person only to have them die a couple of days later in a slip and fall accident. Some of these improvements may have been inspired by a fear of lawsuits, but I'll just take that as evidence that we humans can actually learn from our mistakes, something I'm in need of reminding about right now.
Remember how tech was always going to eliminate drudgery and give us all more free time (see the many starry-eyed MST3K shorts from the 1950s and ‘60s, like the one about the Seattle World’s Fair)? Weird how the free time and benefits of productivity never came. The profits just flowed upwards while wages stagnated, and to compensate we got Amazon, Über, and DoorDash with which we could exploit our fellow workers.
In my own little bubble of higher ed, tech has greatly increased the workload for the teacher, while also greatly improving the student experience (I think.) There's an expectation now that anything you make available to your students in class - including your own class notes - should be freely available to students, and that's great, but it also means spending at least two weeks before the semester starts building out your Blackboard site. Gone are the days when I could run off copies of my syllabus the day before and walk into class with a set of handwritten notes and feel adequately prepared. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, my students have it much better than I did in terms of resources available and that's a GREAT thing, but the magic that makes information freely available to you means someone, somewhere is doing a ton of work.
I should add that part-time instructors don't get paid til the semester starts, so shifting to a system that requires lots of advance set-up screws them even more than they had been screwed in the past. Progress!
I mean, the obvious solution here is to have hybrid learning models on all levels going forward and for the government to provide funds to *hire people to make that happen* rather than dumping it all on teachers who are already overworked and underpaid.
During the pandemic, teachers here had to craft both online and in-person curriculums and manage both as students were in class for a while, then out sick, then back, etc. it sounded like an administrative and workload nightmare.
I would’ve been a much worse student having to do as much work online as current students have to. I just don’t learn that way. Maybe I would’ve if I were born now, but…
All I know is math, but most math courses today, even in high school use some kind of online homework system. The advantage for teachers is NO GRADING, and the advantage for students is instant feedback. The disadvantage for students is no partial credit, and the system can sometimes be picky about formatting so a correct answer is marked wrong. But compared with the days when I would assign homework but not collect and grade it, I'd say it's an improvement. compared with checking the answers to the odd-numbered questions in the back of the book.
See I would have hated this. I also hate VAR, Hawkeye, and Instant Replay in football. They promise much but generally fail to deliver.
I teach science/engineering particularly to graduate students. I could probably write homework, and tests and quizzes that could be graded by a grading software, but for that level they would be pretty sucky for the student learning and understanding. But then my tests typically take 24-48 hours of work for the students to finish
Yes. OK, I just woke up too... <rant>The cynical gatekeepers of NewTech c. 2022 are keeping innovation, roll-out and distribution of anything that could be people-powered as you pointed out during the first tech boom(s) firmly in their grasp so no newbs can get a piece of that juicy pie anymore. It's much like before moving type/the Gutenberg press all over again, the 'elites' have it on lockdown and unless you're part of that gang all any tech-addicts can do is twiddle their thumbs and wait for this week's built-in obsolescence to frustrate and complicate life for 'us down here.' It really is a race to the bottom; when you said 'Tech is not making new opportunities; it’s making doordashers' I said PREACH out loud like a good Gen Xer. All anyone can really do now to get ahead on those platforms is try to get monetized... and the cycle continues. The entire concept of a people-powered high-tech democracy is six feet under. </rant>
Oh Gott In Himmel New Tech 2022 aka Web 3.0 is the plot of a badly written YA dystopia trilogy. It is a con disguised as a solution to a problem that not only doesn't exist, the "problem" is really the solution to old issues of trust and reliability in economic transactions that their solution would replace with a marketplace made of straw and wet farts.
I'd been working in warehousing and physical distribution for nearly 25 years when the Y2K crisis allowed me to turn a hobbyist's interest in computers and networks into a 2nd career in IT. They were so desperate for bodies that anyone who didn't run screaming at the sight of a command prompt could get hired, and luckily for me, my experience went back to the days when Windows was essentially a menu system running on top of DOS.
So I just can't understand why kids today can't simply invent a time machine and go back to when that sort of opportunity still existed. No initiative, I guess.
I don't really have any strong opinions about this today . Everyone seems to be making valid points . Of course, especially Roy. I'll probably feel differently tomorrow but by then the moving finger, having writ, will have moved on.As it were.
I did have a conversation with a co-worker the other day that might be pertinent. She was complaining about the hours - one week there's hardly any work and the next 3 weeks they expect everyone to work 12-hour days. I said" well Karen,"( her name really is Karen)" That's just agriculture. 6000 years ago we'd probably be squatting along the banks of the Nile, planting rice in the muddy water hoping the crocodiles didn't get us, bitching to one another about how we were going to "learn to carve hieroglyphics and then by Isis, we'd be farting through silk"
I guess it's like Bob Dylan said
" we always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view."
What's different/gone is the system where a high school grad can get job to support a family. An information/service economy pushes the entry bar for that job higher, supplying "gigs" as a replacement. Ask a musician about gigs and a gig economy.
My first thought on reading this was Ezra Klein (and "Ezra Klein" is usually NOT my first thought on ANYTHING). Made a name for himself in the early days when blogging was a free-for-all and anyone who could reliably produce content on a daily basis could rise to the top, parlayed that into a big following on Twitter, now bringing in the big bucks on Substack.
How would that work for a youngster wanting to break into the biz now? It's an attention-based economy, and a couple of billion people are screaming for your attention. It probably helps to be really hot, other than that, youngster, I got nothin'.
Matt Yglesias too, and look how he turned out, LOL. Today with TikTok everybody is a star. I recently heard Zoomers get most of their news from TikTok.
First mover advantage, plus the insight that regular fresh content is 90% of the formula. Now, you need notoriety just to get your foot in the door that's been nailed shut. You might as well try selling Pet Rocks.
There was a story recently about a guy who rented a plane, jumped out of it with a parachute, and then filmed the crash, claiming "the engine cut out, what else could I do?" The FAA investigation showed that was bullshit, he was just looking for clicks. And that's where we are today.
The Luddites get a bad name: they broke into factories & destroyed machinery not because they were scared of technological innovation, but because they knew those machines meant the end of their jobs & their livelihoods, their claim to societal regard (however puny that claim). In Capital Vol. I, Marx shows how these machines drastically reduced the cost of their labor-power to the capitalist, & so would impoverish the working class.
Information tech was no different, even if it transformed the commodity into abstract data. The sort of tech-gaming, gee-whizz-get-rich schemery that our Host observes above was just a distraction from the widescale alienation to come. Those fucked-up chickens have come home to roost at last — & here we are ready to lose all the benefits the labor movement earned for us: minimum wage, 40-hour work weeks, weekends, medical benefits, safe working conditions, & yes upward social mobility.
"Those fucked-up chickens have come home to roost at last — & here we are ready to lose all the benefits the labor movement earned for us: minimum wage, 40-hour work weeks, weekends, medical benefits, safe working conditions, & yes upward social mobility."
This. One of the big impacts of tech was to streamline and accelerate the decline of unions. Heck, gig economy workers aren't even employees, no less unionized. That and the increasing influence of the financial pig sector -- private equity, hedge funds, etc. -- has practically eliminated the -power- of workers of any sort over hours, pay, anything. I'm glad to see that unions are more favorably seen in opinion polls, and that being in one is recognized more and more as a necessity these days.
I know, I know. I almost feel like I should apologize to my kids — when we started having them we had no idea their prospects would be so diminished. And mine are relatively fortunate. *sigh*
Ours are still living with us. It will likely stay that way
On the other hand, things are looking GREAT for Elon Musk's 10 kids, so, you know, it all balances out somehow.
Absolute truth here. The defining revolution was the internet, and going from analogue to digital, and it has happened. Many so-called innovations we see today are at best tweaks, some of them comical – the WeWork guy, after crashing and burning, is “innovating” by becoming a landlord – and some of them tragic – self-driving cars that kill people: oops, still a few bugs to work out.
Obviously, new and better tech developments will come down the pike but the seismic shift that propelled people into new and better careers and improved existing careers has already occurred. There is simply not the societal mobility possible under late capitalism that existed even a couple of decades ago.
Hearted for the societal mobility deal...
(Sort of off topic but every time I see "WeWork" my brain converts it to "wetwork" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetwork because at least to me it's the same thing.)
Almost *too* painfully true to be funny, but I laughed out loud anyway.
I don't know if I've already said this here, but it's worth repeating: A friend of mine had, at Penn between 1968 and 1972, a professor in film studies named Bob Rosen, who said, "Every American movie is about upward mobility." More true than not!
Eh. I'm not sure tech can be blamed out of context for much. About the only thing unique to it's a bunch of learning curves.
That is to say, you can't take it's downside out of the context of an ever more extractive economy and the corrupted state that allows and empowers that.
For example, crypto is tied more to an enfeebled state and decadent society than it is to "tech".
Radical as the iPhone is, it's essentially just a tool. If there's a problem with it, it's how it's used by people, not what it is.
I'm not blaming the technology -- I'm blaming the societal pressure that determines how it is used.
TBH, it wasn’t you, but I was having problem fully grokking the post — a worst night’s sleep than usual kept the synapses from firing well — but have an issue generally about blaming the tech but not users, society, etc., which, you know, would be more beneficial and all that.
Sorry for missing the point.
If you misunderstand me, maybe it's me! I'll think about it and maybe approach the subject again sometime because I think it's a rich field. I do believe the earlier applications of digital infotech went one way and later ones went another. How and why remain at issue.
Hopefully by the time it comes around again on the guitar, as they say, I'll have actual thoughts. Because it's a subject I find incredibly fascinating, but also brainfog so the only thoughts I can identify today involve cats.
Which, you know, the internet has probably saved my marriage and my life by providing me with endless cat pics and endless people who are... really pretty okay with cats being the only thing you're interested in talking about.
I’d bet this time it was me. As I said, woke up with serious synapse misfirings from worse night’s sleep than normal.
Sometimes it is the technology
Tech is not to blame. I took Edroso to be referring to the Gold Rush+transformational nature of how Tech As We Know It was implemented. I invoke Fudd's First Law, if there is a System someone will try to game it. Tech was monitized, like everything in a loosely regulated capitalist culture is monitized. Your cell phone is a black box that runs apps that wake themselves up to phone home for updates and send whatever interesting data they have back to the mothership, all out of your control and sort-of spelled out in the EULA you agreed to by installing the app, or by buying the phone with the apps (that you can't delete) on it. The unprecedented interactive nature of computers + Internet is the Mother of all Systems, and it has been gamed to within an inch of our lives. It didn't have to be this way, but given who we are it almost had to turn out this way.
My point was that it’s not inanimate objects that are bad but the people behind the objects and the societal dysfunction that lets them get away with a lot of abusive behavior.
Unless my streak of misunderstanding is continuing — likely!! — you, too, maybe misunderstood Roy’s thrust.
Now I feel awful.
What I remember is what was heralded as the potential of tech, freeing people from drudgery. Though I'm a fogey it now appears to me the drudgery has been built into the system. Even the hope of changing the system may not eliminate the drudgery. But we could do some things to ameliorate some of the drudgery if it weren't for attitudes held in spite of evidence.
Just the mind-crazing drudgery of trying to work one's way thru a digital service dept...
Well I guess I could have edited or expanded the above, but the following sentiment sits or stands on its own:
Coulda written "virtual" instead of "digital" up there. But non-existent higher being strike me down if I ever accede to that crapified term. Why on earth have we succumbed to "virtuality" when "actuality" (previously known as "reality") served the planet for 4 billion years? Remember, the Deepfolx with their Deepfakes gonna make it practically (see what I did there?) impossible to tell actual people and events from purely-made-up ones by the time you finish reading this screed.
And if you would be so kind as to stay virtually off my imaginary lawn it would be appreciated. Thank you for your kind attention.
Well, that's progress, innit? Instead of a whole room of customer service staff, we've got Marge, who has to handle all of the angry-as-fuck survivors who successfully fought their way through "press 3 for billing" and the AI voice-recognition "Please state your problem" to get to the ONE human still working. It's tech that turned a simple "please cancel my service" call into a Quest from Legend of Zelda, but are we grateful? We are not.
You can sell access to a virtual world, and you can sell an idealized Self in a virtual world. Zuck is attempting to buy first mover advantage with his 8-bit Eden.
The Onion once had a brilliant article (but I repeat myself) about a guy finally realizing his dream of owning a bookstore/coffeehouse - in Second Life.
How those service call people cost money, that would be better spent on my third vacation home
Agreed. The Drudgery Is The Point, I think.
"mild downfall to goose the tension in the second act, followed by a big comeback"
As succinct as can be, and as true...
And bonus points for proper use of a Second Act reference
Back to work, boyo – those pizza boxes won't fold themselves!
I got in on the (FAR more localized) software dev boom in the 1980s. (Charlottesville, VA. Yeah, them days ain’t coming back.) Now I have to do two tech jobs to keep up. For once I am not being snide
I can’t speak to most of the occupations you’re discussing, but in the medical area, starting in the 1930s and advancing rapidly in the later 20th and early 21st centuries, it became increasingly possible to successfully treat illness and injury. The contrast between what my doctor dad had to work with when he started out, what was available to me in the 70’s and what we have now is astounding. I readily admit that sanitation and immunizations had the biggest impact - refrigerators, toilets and vaccines save lives! But the frustration of having only sympathy to offer patients with infections, cancer or heart disease has morphed into more procedures and medications than anyone (at least me) can keep track of. And the despised electronic medical record has made it possible for front line practitioners to review much if not all of a new patient’s medical history - no one misses the days when you had to request a medical record and wait hours if not days to get your hands on it. There’s a lot fucked up about the American medical nonsystem, from insurance to hierarchy, but technology is not one. I close by pointing out that all this technology has made it hard, if not neglectful, to practice in the little solo office of yore, much less from home.
Excellent point! I should have been clear that I was talking about information technology generally. Medtech is fantastic and if anything the problem there is the government refusing to do what it could to mandate tech standards (though they're getting better about info blocking).
Hear hear. My mom's 92, we've had plenty of encounters with the medical-industrial complex lately, and I'm blown away by the improvements in medicine that make abdominal surgery on a 92 year old not just possible, but *almost* routine. A lot of this, I think, is much better infection control, and even things like the use of surgical glue instead of sutures, and plenty more I don't even know about. And every hospital stay is followed up by home visits, sometimes for a month or two, just to make sure she's doing OK because we've figured out it doesn't make much sense to spend $40k on an operation for an elderly person only to have them die a couple of days later in a slip and fall accident. Some of these improvements may have been inspired by a fear of lawsuits, but I'll just take that as evidence that we humans can actually learn from our mistakes, something I'm in need of reminding about right now.
“someone coming out of that experience with some of its glittering prizes”
Now I have the Simple Minds song “Glittering Prize” stuck in my head.
Simple Minds think alike.
Remember how tech was always going to eliminate drudgery and give us all more free time (see the many starry-eyed MST3K shorts from the 1950s and ‘60s, like the one about the Seattle World’s Fair)? Weird how the free time and benefits of productivity never came. The profits just flowed upwards while wages stagnated, and to compensate we got Amazon, Über, and DoorDash with which we could exploit our fellow workers.
In my own little bubble of higher ed, tech has greatly increased the workload for the teacher, while also greatly improving the student experience (I think.) There's an expectation now that anything you make available to your students in class - including your own class notes - should be freely available to students, and that's great, but it also means spending at least two weeks before the semester starts building out your Blackboard site. Gone are the days when I could run off copies of my syllabus the day before and walk into class with a set of handwritten notes and feel adequately prepared. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, my students have it much better than I did in terms of resources available and that's a GREAT thing, but the magic that makes information freely available to you means someone, somewhere is doing a ton of work.
I should add that part-time instructors don't get paid til the semester starts, so shifting to a system that requires lots of advance set-up screws them even more than they had been screwed in the past. Progress!
I mean, the obvious solution here is to have hybrid learning models on all levels going forward and for the government to provide funds to *hire people to make that happen* rather than dumping it all on teachers who are already overworked and underpaid.
During the pandemic, teachers here had to craft both online and in-person curriculums and manage both as students were in class for a while, then out sick, then back, etc. it sounded like an administrative and workload nightmare.
My experience is that the experience isn't better for students these days
Maybe I just had really bad teachers, so my standards for what counts as an improvement are lower?
I would’ve been a much worse student having to do as much work online as current students have to. I just don’t learn that way. Maybe I would’ve if I were born now, but…
All I know is math, but most math courses today, even in high school use some kind of online homework system. The advantage for teachers is NO GRADING, and the advantage for students is instant feedback. The disadvantage for students is no partial credit, and the system can sometimes be picky about formatting so a correct answer is marked wrong. But compared with the days when I would assign homework but not collect and grade it, I'd say it's an improvement. compared with checking the answers to the odd-numbered questions in the back of the book.
See I would have hated this. I also hate VAR, Hawkeye, and Instant Replay in football. They promise much but generally fail to deliver.
I teach science/engineering particularly to graduate students. I could probably write homework, and tests and quizzes that could be graded by a grading software, but for that level they would be pretty sucky for the student learning and understanding. But then my tests typically take 24-48 hours of work for the students to finish
Also, explaining why what they did is wrong is much better feedback than just saying there answer is wrong
Yes. OK, I just woke up too... <rant>The cynical gatekeepers of NewTech c. 2022 are keeping innovation, roll-out and distribution of anything that could be people-powered as you pointed out during the first tech boom(s) firmly in their grasp so no newbs can get a piece of that juicy pie anymore. It's much like before moving type/the Gutenberg press all over again, the 'elites' have it on lockdown and unless you're part of that gang all any tech-addicts can do is twiddle their thumbs and wait for this week's built-in obsolescence to frustrate and complicate life for 'us down here.' It really is a race to the bottom; when you said 'Tech is not making new opportunities; it’s making doordashers' I said PREACH out loud like a good Gen Xer. All anyone can really do now to get ahead on those platforms is try to get monetized... and the cycle continues. The entire concept of a people-powered high-tech democracy is six feet under. </rant>
Oh Gott In Himmel New Tech 2022 aka Web 3.0 is the plot of a badly written YA dystopia trilogy. It is a con disguised as a solution to a problem that not only doesn't exist, the "problem" is really the solution to old issues of trust and reliability in economic transactions that their solution would replace with a marketplace made of straw and wet farts.
It's the old sweet shoppe argument tarted up for tech.
I'd been working in warehousing and physical distribution for nearly 25 years when the Y2K crisis allowed me to turn a hobbyist's interest in computers and networks into a 2nd career in IT. They were so desperate for bodies that anyone who didn't run screaming at the sight of a command prompt could get hired, and luckily for me, my experience went back to the days when Windows was essentially a menu system running on top of DOS.
So I just can't understand why kids today can't simply invent a time machine and go back to when that sort of opportunity still existed. No initiative, I guess.
I don't really have any strong opinions about this today . Everyone seems to be making valid points . Of course, especially Roy. I'll probably feel differently tomorrow but by then the moving finger, having writ, will have moved on.As it were.
I did have a conversation with a co-worker the other day that might be pertinent. She was complaining about the hours - one week there's hardly any work and the next 3 weeks they expect everyone to work 12-hour days. I said" well Karen,"( her name really is Karen)" That's just agriculture. 6000 years ago we'd probably be squatting along the banks of the Nile, planting rice in the muddy water hoping the crocodiles didn't get us, bitching to one another about how we were going to "learn to carve hieroglyphics and then by Isis, we'd be farting through silk"
I guess it's like Bob Dylan said
" we always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view."
or like David Byrne said " Same as it ever was."
What's different/gone is the system where a high school grad can get job to support a family. An information/service economy pushes the entry bar for that job higher, supplying "gigs" as a replacement. Ask a musician about gigs and a gig economy.
“I’m not sure how many people over forty know this. But I bet everyone under forty does.”
I know it now. THANKS, SLEEPY JOE!
Biden isn't just old, HE'S DRAGGIN' THE REST OF US ALONG WITH HIM.
My first thought on reading this was Ezra Klein (and "Ezra Klein" is usually NOT my first thought on ANYTHING). Made a name for himself in the early days when blogging was a free-for-all and anyone who could reliably produce content on a daily basis could rise to the top, parlayed that into a big following on Twitter, now bringing in the big bucks on Substack.
How would that work for a youngster wanting to break into the biz now? It's an attention-based economy, and a couple of billion people are screaming for your attention. It probably helps to be really hot, other than that, youngster, I got nothin'.
Matt Yglesias too, and look how he turned out, LOL. Today with TikTok everybody is a star. I recently heard Zoomers get most of their news from TikTok.
First mover advantage, plus the insight that regular fresh content is 90% of the formula. Now, you need notoriety just to get your foot in the door that's been nailed shut. You might as well try selling Pet Rocks.
There was a story recently about a guy who rented a plane, jumped out of it with a parachute, and then filmed the crash, claiming "the engine cut out, what else could I do?" The FAA investigation showed that was bullshit, he was just looking for clicks. And that's where we are today.
The Luddites get a bad name: they broke into factories & destroyed machinery not because they were scared of technological innovation, but because they knew those machines meant the end of their jobs & their livelihoods, their claim to societal regard (however puny that claim). In Capital Vol. I, Marx shows how these machines drastically reduced the cost of their labor-power to the capitalist, & so would impoverish the working class.
Information tech was no different, even if it transformed the commodity into abstract data. The sort of tech-gaming, gee-whizz-get-rich schemery that our Host observes above was just a distraction from the widescale alienation to come. Those fucked-up chickens have come home to roost at last — & here we are ready to lose all the benefits the labor movement earned for us: minimum wage, 40-hour work weeks, weekends, medical benefits, safe working conditions, & yes upward social mobility.
Bye bye
"Those fucked-up chickens have come home to roost at last — & here we are ready to lose all the benefits the labor movement earned for us: minimum wage, 40-hour work weeks, weekends, medical benefits, safe working conditions, & yes upward social mobility."
This. One of the big impacts of tech was to streamline and accelerate the decline of unions. Heck, gig economy workers aren't even employees, no less unionized. That and the increasing influence of the financial pig sector -- private equity, hedge funds, etc. -- has practically eliminated the -power- of workers of any sort over hours, pay, anything. I'm glad to see that unions are more favorably seen in opinion polls, and that being in one is recognized more and more as a necessity these days.