Plotting Our Obsolesence

The BBC reports that Chinese electronics supplier Foxconn has allegedly eliminated 60,000 jobs through the use of automation, which I think is just great. 

To grow a consumer-based economy, isn't it clear that eliminating potential consumers is the best path forward? While we're applauding, we should also acknowledge that this protects at-risk executives from starvation.

Genius!

After swallowing my morning bowl of corporate propaganda, I wonder how much less your next iPad will set you back as a result of this cost-reduction. Or your next Samsung Galaxy phone. Or your kid's next Sony PlayStation. I mean, isn't that why companies use automation? To lower costs?

One-hundred years ago, automation was touted as an expressway to affordable consumer goods, the most famous exponent of which was the Ford Model T. The economies of scale made formerly unavailable products available to the working man, exponentially increasing the depth and breadth of America's collective wealth.

In the twenty-first century, automation seemingly serves another purpose: to cull people from their jobs. Automation is a tool, a merciless efficiency intended to swell profit margins while it removes enormous swaths of the population from consideration of anything but the barest, most marginal existence.

Again, let me know how much less your next iPAD costs, OK?

Corporate spokesmen will argue that as opportunities close at one end, they open at another. Which is only a self-serving repeat of Alexander Graham Bell's famous quote. Like the Reagan administration's fantastical explanation of trickle-down economics, it sounds wonderful and entirely plausible on paper.

But with opportunities for living-wage jobs (not to mention access to higher education) diminishing every year, this is more public relations swill than reality.

Instead of these new profit margins being shared by a wide demographic (i.e. workers), the resulting wealth is concentrated into an ever-shrinking sliver of the population, giving them power and control not seen since the sixteenth-century heyday of the Catholic church.

As corporate titans seek to marginalize the human being, perhaps now would be a good time to take this to its logical extreme and ponder the development of robots who consume. We've already replaced the worker with technology. Why not replace the consumer, too?

In a short-sighted world whose unthinking embrace of technology is best described as we should because we can, it would be entirely appropriate.

Feudalism is a growth stock. Invest now.

Ambushed on Amazon

I often peruse the book reviews on amazon.com. There, I am refreshed and renewed by the thoughtful and literate discourse that takes place. It’s almost like another country.

I find it enormously heartening whenever my fellow Americans make new and exciting word choices that only rarely combine ‘Obama’ and ‘socialism’.

But all that changed after visiting the page for Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a book about the Wall Street cutthroats who savaged our economy for personal gain.

Techies who fancy themselves environmentalists have littered the site with belligerent demands and accusations, most of them centered on either a. Amazon’s b. the author’s or c. the publisher’s refusal to offer the book on Kindle. And how that refusal dooms planet Earth.

Never mind their entertainment options.

As a confirmed business-hater and avowed environmentalist, I would ordinarily pump my fist and yell right alongside them.

“Flaming death to the fascist corporate pigs!” Or something like that.

But not this time.

The contradiction is staggering. Traditional books are bad for the environment, but plugging in an electronic device that necessitates repeated charging and uses a stream of disposable batteries is somehow good for it?

Okay. Let me get my Shirley Temple on so I can deny the visions of coal-fired power plants in my mind, too.

Maybe I’m too cynical. I admit to viewing technology through the jaded eyes of one whom has seen—and heard—way too much breathless, this-is-gonna-change-the-world hyperbole. I mean, the last thing that lived up to its brochure was my 1991 Honda Civic.

In addition to the technology itself, I’m also a mite skeptical of people who unblinkingly embrace it as a panacea.

It was noneother than Groucho Marx who wrote that technology is the opiate of the people. And when it comes to technology, my money is on the guy who asked “Shall I call a cab or would you like to leave in a huff?”

On the other hand, perhaps it’s ignorance. Sheer, dumb-as-fuck ignorance. I mean, maybe it is just that simple. Plug in, log on and save the planet from imminent apocalypse.

I don’t know.

Mostly, I think it’s a collective shriek from the Twitchy Nation, caught in the spasms of tech-denial.

It’s these very circumstances that provoke their greatest and most hideous fear: techlessness. I’m sure it’s in the Constitution somewhere that you should never have to live life in real-time. Ever.

Okay, logging off now. I’m re-reading Walden.

And yes, it’s available on Kindle.