i’m worried about the future of humanity because of Trump, but not, like, in the usual way.
labor’s going to keep being more and more automated. right now, i’m working on writing medical records and appointment scheduling software, which will reduce the need for bookkeeping personnel at my aunt’s general practice. she has expressed excitement about how she’ll finally be able to fire all these people*.
*(because she is delusional, she’s managed to twist herself into thinking it’ll be good for them, because they’ll be able to get a better job with this on their resume, and hasn’t considered the myriad reasons why they don’t just leave right now if that’s actually the case. in her defense(?) she hasn’t had to apply for any kind of work since presumably residency after medical school, and hasn’t experienced financial insecurity in thirty years, and is just generally disconnected from reality in a lot of ways.)
my job right now is to eliminate the jobs of as many people as possible. in like a month when i’ve finished the project i’m working on, i’ll have gotten at least two people fired as the explicit aim of my employment. this isn’t unusual, it isn’t part of some sci-fi future, it’s a real trend that is actively and earnestly being pursued by every company out there.
this ought to be a good thing. instead of this work taking up hours and hours of people’s time that they could be spending on other things, it gets done automatically. at least two people who get to now live lives of self-actualization!
except instead the result is now that the expired caviar rotting in the back of my aunt’s fridge is going to be moderately fancier.
which, okay, whatever. in principle, there’s nothing wrong with investing in a thing and profiting from it. she doesn’t owe those people anything, they didn’t pay me to build the software, she did. sure. this is just one sorta delusional old lady using her power greedily and wastefully.
my aunt is motivated by an unnecessary sense of frugality borne of an impoverished childhood, by a tragic susceptibility to marketing for fancy gourmet premium rich people food, and by a disconnect from the economic reality of what she’s doing to her workers. she’s not one of the better human beings, but she’s human.
but this isn’t the usual case.
the usual case is a manager needs to protect the bottom line or he’ll get fired, by another manager who needs to protect the bottom line or he’ll get fired, by […] fired, by a CEO who takes orders from a board of directors (or he’ll get fired) who need to protect the bottom line or else investors will panic and they’ll lose all their money and the company will collapse and die because it was outcompeted by a company that did ruthlessly automate as much labor as possible. the obscene profits companies are pulling in aren’t going into the pockets of wealthy CEOs, they’re being fed into the desperate struggle to keep their numbers going up as fast as is theoretically possible because only the companies with the highest numbers escape destruction.
the human race is currently ruled by the blind desperate “greed” of people who need to do what it takes to survive (plus governments that are basically the same thing except instead of shareholders with money it’s an increasingly unstable mix of lobbyists with money and taxpayers with votes.)
we’re going to reach a point, eventually, where enough labor is automated that the value of most human labor is going to plunge beneath subsistence. it’s already happening, with the whole $15 minimum wage controversy. it’s only going to get worse- working two or three minimum-wage jobs at once is going to go from barely enough to live on to just plain NOT enough to live on, and eventually the unemployed aren’t just going to be a tiny unskilled underclass that looks at a glance like it’s basically the same economic entity as the historical unemployed class.
it’s going to be a voting bloc, and then we’ll have to fall back on Democracy, our last flimsy line of defense that keeps the inhuman, perfectly efficient optimizer that is the Market at bay. we’ll have one last chance to say “we, as humans, are going to decide what human civilization is going to look like.”
i don’t know if we’re going to win that battle.
the inhuman perfectly efficient optimizer doesn’t sit idly by when it’s threatened by democracy. voters can be fooled, can be bought, can be intimidated into silence. Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson is the United States president-elect’s nominee for Secretary of State. said president-elect is- i mean, it’s Donald god damn Trump, aka the media’s poster child for cartoonish fat cat excess and ruthless profit-optimizing for the past thirty fucking years. the opponent he barely defeated was Hillary Clinton, who’s not exactly known for being tough on big business. the runner-up hail mary third option that gets laughed out of the polls for caring too much about human freedom is the Libertarian Party.
that’s not the end of the world right now, we’re not quite at the stage where we need to once and for all decide whether to be ruled by Moloch… but the fact that it happened is a terrible terrible omen, when it comes to how we’re going to fare in that final fight.
i don’t know how it’s going to go down. i don’t know, once more than half the voting populace is reduced to below subsistence, what the Market is going to pull out of its sleeve to somehow defeat Democracy in its own most desperate hour. i can’t imagine what it could possibly come up with, when backed against the wall and forced to make the tiniest space for the happiness of the human race.
i can’t imagine it, because i’m one guy whose family isn’t about to starve if he doesn’t imagine up with a way to subvert democracy and have it on the boss’s desk by yesterday, dammit.
