Would that be due to the skewed educational system or the political
ideology dissemination system? It is difficult to teach new ideas
through walls of fear of reprisal from the authorities and your neighbours.
D.
On 9/13/2011 6:00 AM, Ray Harrell wrote:
Down here Natalia they would call you a welfare mom and Libertarians
would use you as the bogeywoman for their children. They won't even
discuss these issues.
REH
*From:*[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *D and N
*Sent:* Monday, September 12, 2011 3:28 PM
*To:* RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
*Subject:* [Futurework] Are most jobs obsolete?
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. *
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