2014-12-18 #
A large part of what makes contemporary living so novel from the past is
that its surroundings are transient and inconsequential. There is no
regard for people in our area, just a relocation away from being
irrelevant again. A person might move for college, then for work, more
work, or a loved one. With careers being obsoleted and jobs are filled
by more highly replaceable beings, there is not even the security of a
fixed location.
No wonder that San Francisco is deemed a transient city, with people
moving in and out because that’s where the jobs are at. The transience
is visible in all walks of life, from the homeless who were evicted or
relocated to the Tenderloin, to the tech workers who just moved into the
city for work. The people who will remain are those who have lived
generations in their deeply entrenched communities.
2014-10-19 #
The year is 2014 and the vast majority of people are compelled to do
something they would rather not do for half of their waking hours, in
exchange for money that is largely spent on shelter, food, thus securing
their existence. Despite approaching a post-scarcity economy in which
the cost of the manufacture of goods sinks due to automation, society
demands that everyone must work, for what? The march of technological
progress is no match for the cruelty of the human condition.
A wage is not something to be proud of, unless your sense of self-worth
is defined by how much money other people are willing to pay you. Those
who actually create value have the lowest social status, and this
excludes people whose jobs involve mentioning the phrase “creating
value.” Creators are often unable to extract value from their own
creation, though becoming wealthy or famous is hardly their motivation.
Society would rather idolize those who extract value from the work of
others, than those who create it. The sooner that humanity comes to the
realisation that it is a rather contrived means of control, the better
life would be for the majority of people.
The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money
doesn’t exist in the 24th century … The acquisition of wealth is no
longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and
the rest of humanity. — Captain Jean-Luc Picard
2014-10-08 #
A disingenuous meme about technology is that it enables many tasks to be
automated, thus freeing humans from work and giving more time for
leisure. This is at least partly true: startups are offering de facto
taxi services, groceries hand-picked and delivered to your door, laundry
pickup, parking spots, restaurant reservations, and more. All of this is
facilitated by fluffy and visually appealing “apps” (I loathe this
terminology) that help automate daily chores for a fee. The audience for
these kinds of apps often neglect the human costs of these services, and
more glaringly the low tech nature of it all.
The average provider in the poorly named sharing economy offers their
labor at below minimum wages. As independent contractors and not
employees of a company, they are not subject to minimum wage laws and do
not receive any benefits that an employee may have, such as insurance.
In terms of career, it is invariably a dead-end job, doing menial tasks
for the bourgeoisie. The only thing that Silicon Valley has managed to
disrupt lately is labor laws and the lives of the formerly middle class
turned peasants. Those that do these small jobs to “pull themselves up
by their bootstraps” as conservatives like to parrot, belong to the new
underclass: the sharers, also known as suckers.
The startups that facilitate the sharing economy are technically
accomplishing nothing new, read & write from a database through an user
interface, as if this alone qualifies them as a tech company. Their
biggest and most often discussed problem is scaling, rather than more
challenging technical obstacles. Human labor is far more difficult to
scale than computing power, so they stay confined to large cities where
the affluent can afford their services and perpetuate the erosion of the
middle class.
But what of the software engineers who are working hard (overtime,
actually) on these “apps”? They must belong to the elite class with
their high salaries and expensive consumer tech products, according to
protestors. However, they are merely the favored pawns of the real
elite, well-connected founders and venture capitalists. By circumstance
of large swaths of entirely incompetent programmers and relatively
limited immigration, programmers hold a middle-class standing. When
given the opportunity, the elites can and do screw over everyone below
them, and this includes programmers. Programmers can only lose in a race
to the bottom against an endless supply of outsourced employees largely
from India who are willing to work for a fraction of the cost, providing
a new and larger base of people for the elites to screw over.
Ultimately, the new wave of Silicon Valley startups is about fulfilling
retro-futuristic visions in the same vein as the Jetsons in which people
can relax and not work hard because nearly everything is automated from
food preparation to transportation to cleaning, except that everything
is actually powered by humans and therefore only accessible to an elite.
We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has
to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can
make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.
The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of
earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that
everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according
to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we
have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for
inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be
to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking
about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a
living. — Richard Buckminster Fuller