If food and shelter are to be considered human rights, I think that
within a shelter's function, energy to operate it should be included,
and an internet super-grid connection by which to both receive and send
out info and energy. This could have had a much broader scope, but is
very interesting.
Natalia
In part, from:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/index.html
**David Rushkoff, CNN *- I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is
unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks -- or
at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that
money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?
We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal,
employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have
pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it
could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for
its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough
food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories
per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands
of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile,
American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing
vacant dwellings Video to get the empty houses off their books.
Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't
have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.
Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always
worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early
Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes,
plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who
then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle
Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.
The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their
titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the
chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries
were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned
corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean
getting a "job."
The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and
unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less
important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and
laborers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're
using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more
people, and increase corporate profits.
While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder
just how truly bad is it for people. Isn't this what all this technology
was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask
ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered
obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around
something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we
currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more
collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?
Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to
negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not
employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have
generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a
world that has already produced far too much stuff.
The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything
evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised.
The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right
now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply
suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade
into the distance.
But there might still be another possibility -- something we couldn't
really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of
virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need
to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange
information-based products.
We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The
work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want:
the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.
This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity.
Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from
the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without
going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write
books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through
bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money
we use to buy real stuff.
For the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global
economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might
want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we
want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends.
*
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
