Mike,
I enjoyed your comments. I was particularly struck, of course, by by own
name being mentioned so I'll drag up the relevant paragraph:
<<<<
So maybe we're looking at a social or personality basis for Keith's
20/80 partition and a non-PC notion of constructive elitism. Maybe in a
world where the tedious, repetitive, boring and/or strenuous work is done by
machines, we need to find a way to create a satisfying (I hesitate to say
meaningful) life for people willing to follow directions but who have no
interest in anything more demanding than passive entertainment.
>>>>
AS I see it, the latter tranche of people are also disappearing, not so
much because they've been displaced by machinery but because they haven't
been born in the first place. They'll be part of the population plunge in
the advanced countries that will start to take place in 20 or so years'
time (and long before then if conditions in state nursing homes continue to
degenerate as they have been doing in recent years!). I see the 20-class
part of the population as being the only part left in,say,100 years' time.
Keith
At 16:08 21/01/2013, you wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2013 5:24 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Re: FW: [P2P-F] Fwd: <nettime> Software developer
outsources own job and whiles away shifts on cat videos
> Software developer Bob outsources own job and whiles away shifts on
> cat videos
I think this is hilarious. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the
gander. Whaddya bet the Chinese guy(s) gets hired (at 80% off) to replace
the now-fired programmer?
What's the financial term for buying (usually) a currency in one market and
quickly selling it in another to take advantage of fractional-point
differences in exchange rate? If $MEGABANK or $MEGACORP and do that, I
should be able to do it too.
What is interesting to me (and is related to the other recent thread here
about hikikomori [4]) is that this guy was clever enough to think of this,
diligent enough to locate a Chinese contractor who would go good work on
time, ballsy enough to put it all in place; and yet be such a dull and
tedious f**k that he could bear to spend his days, day after day, browsing
over mindless trivia on the net.
As a PFY [1], I could never understand other kids who had no interest in
anything in particular when I and most of my friends and acquaintances were
ardently interested in *something*. For my friends, it was mostly science.
For some peers it was Latin classics, Indian [2] artifacts, textual analysis
(before microcomputers!) of the Bertrand Russell corpus or even guns or
cars. Something! None of them would have been content with cute cat videos
or dawdling on Farcebook.
In retrospect, I see why people like Edward Bernays:
Bernays was quite clear on this point - he took Uncle Siggy's [3]
line that democracy was impossible because people were irrational
and ignorant. The best hope of social order was to have an
"intelligent few" who were capable of "regimenting the public
mind". Needless to say, Bernays believed that public relations was
one of the most important means by which the elite could
manipulate the habits and opinions of the masses, and even the
"terms of public discourse". As one commentator put it, Bernays
developed a "strategy of social engineering", and though we may
not like the PR men and the spin, we fall for it. It is proving
more powerful and more enduring than any social engineering
attempted by the state, or why do women still turn to smoking for
liberation, even when they know it will probably kill them?
-- Madeleine Bunting, "Slaves of Our Desires"
In The Guardian of London, 25 Mar 2002
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0325-03.htm
conclude that the only route to continued civilization is for the elite to
manage the masses. In the 50+ years since my PFY days, I've encountered a
lot of folks, many of them university grads, who aren't really interested in
anything in particular. Contra popular opinion, this has nothing to do with
social class. I worked once for a guy who dropped out of school after the
3rd grade but was a successful machinist and metal fab guy in his own shop.
Even though he never did learn to read, he was keenly interested in almost
everything. One of my neighbors 40 years ago had prison tats but was
interested in cars, sufficiently interested that he had overcome being a
teenage drunk and 20-something bar room scrapper to work on cars in his
mid-30s. A total social loser but at least he was interested in *something*
beyond sex, violence and alcohol.
So maybe we're looking at a social or personality basis for Keith's
20/80 partition and a non-PC notion of constructive elitism. Maybe in a
world where the tedious, repetitive, boring and/or strenuous work is done by
machines, we need to find a way to create a satisfying (I hesitate to say
meaningful) life for people willing to follow directions but who have no
interest in anything more demanding than passive entertainment.
It's a problem. It isn't helped any my the cognitive dissonance arising
from conflicting dogma, inter alia:
+ Labor is a resource. We have no obligation to those trying to
sell it (or currently selling it) to us.
+ Consumers are the lifeblood of the economy. We must have a
flourishing mass of consumers.
+ The hoi polloi are mostly scum or leeches. Profit rightly goes
to capital. It's their problem if they fail to find a way
acquire capital.
+ Credit is good. Interest rightly accrues to capital. We owe
nothing to those who default on loans. Under the doctrine
of individual responsibility, debtors owe creditors everything
forever until the debt is satisfied, regardless of individual or
social consequences.
FWIW,
- Mike
[1] PFY: Pimply-Faced Youth
[2] Yeah, yeah. REH says "Indian". Am I okay or should I be more PC?
[3] He was Sigmund Freud's nephew.
[4] Hikimomori isn't new. In his 1996 novel, _Idoru_, William Gibson
had a character that was both otaku and hikikomori.
Well, the electronic game creators do one thing by diligent
contrivance that is homologous with the cigarette industry: they
engineer in an addictive quality. I have only one game that I
play occasionally (Civilization I, a strategy game ) on long
winter nights. The timing is such that the opportunity for the
next move arrives just quickly enough after the last move to
preempt other distractions. Playing on a fast computer vs. on
slow UI (such as a DOS emulator) makes this very evident. In the
first-person shooter and other action games, this effect must be
even stronger.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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