Technological Economy

Technological Economy

1. The present day Technological Economy is hell bent on eliminating as many real productive jobs as possible. This is done in order for the powers that be, the capitalists and others to profit as much as possible from as little labor as possible, for them to be as independent as possible from labor, other people, their will powers. By using as few people as possible, by needing fewer and fewer real, necessary, and productive workers, the capitalists have more freedom to do anything they want, they avoid the possibilities of labor opposing any plans and any decisions the capitalists may want to take.

2. The way that corporations and other entities eliminate work is by optimizing and streamlining all productive endeavors, rendering them as independent as possible from people and needing as few people as possible, by using all the knowledge accumulated in years of research. Computers and Software, Communications, Internet are used to automate as many office type endeavors as possible, robots in factories are used to automate repetitive production rituals. All kinds of chemical and physical technologies are used to get more product out of less input, and also less energy, fewer manipulations, larger economies of scale, etc.

3. No one notices how much labor is really not needed, people are “intellectually lazy” so to say, they “go with the flow”, they accept everything non critically, never really looking into the larger scheme of things. This process of translating labor from the necessary to the optional has been going on for decades. But like a frog boiling in water, no one ever noticed it. The slow substitution of agricultural labor and manufacturing labor into office type jobs, information workers, sales, marketing, relationships based type jobs has been going on since the 1950s on and even before, no one ever questions what the collective result of all of this labor is, what general good is produced, how the society as a whole really benefits. Well, it doesn’t, only the capitalists and fewer and fewer hands hog up all the profits.

4. The serialization of labor, the accumulation of labor processes is one of the things the capitalists are most afraid of: this would create a huge amount of wealth and it would become very difficult to hide how much wealth the system can produce, it would be hard for them to hog it all up for themselves, they would have to distribute it because there would be so much product that it would be impossible to not distribute it. Some examples, millions of homes built in Spain, now standing empty (but the prices don’t go down anyways) or Florida, same story. So many Chinese toys are sequestered by governments in Europe, but they just pop out all over again, as in those factories in China can produce a virtually infinite stream of toys, it doesn’t make a dent to them if they keep on losing huge batches of illegal toys, etc. And there are many other examples. So one important thing the system must impose is the atomization, parallelization of labor processes, each process in contrast to each other, each one destroying the work of the other so as to avoid the possibility that labor may add up, like in Rockets to Mars, Skyscrapers, or High Speed Trains.

5. The brainwashing of everyone that they need to “compete”, that they are in “competition with” other imaginary fake entities, especially while 80 % of jobs are service and fluff jobs where the principle of competition is totally irrelevant and not applicable. Competition in any endeavor can optimize corporations, but past a certain point, competition also becomes a diminishing return endeavor: there is only so much that can be optimized and competed against, competition can only reach so much in the end: kind of like formula one cars, they are all optimized up to an extreme limit, the differences become really random, casual, microscopic differences of a few seconds faster of one car compared to another. Nothing really big anymore.

6. Labor is no longer necessary in a Technological Economy, more and more labor is destined to disappear no matter what. This would be and should be good news, the scientists and engineers did their jobs very well, they are giving back a lot more than they received, this could improve the lives of billions worldwide in a jiffy, but this also creates a huge psychological and ideological crisis in the present day, still anchored in the 18th century model of 8 hour jobs in plants mentality.

7. In order to hide the fact that labor is not needed anymore, the capitalists invent a huge amount of non necessary, fake, make believe labor and work processes, rituals, that have one very important property: these processes can be eliminated in an eye blink, since they weren’t necessary and needed in the first place. A good example is how fast and how many thousands of people are laid off in a jiffy by corporations in the USA. They are used only as a place holder, as a make believe abstract entity (and probably crushed by a huge amount of fake “work” to do, the more fake it is, the more work they have to do, but it is all make believe fluff, standards, paper work, a never ending array of creative ways of simulating fake necessities, so no one notices just how little real work is needed anymore) that can be hosed in any moment giving the capitalists that huge satisfaction of how much pure power they have on the lives of so many other people.

JHK (kunstler.com) has a large scale narrative of the world, “Peak Oil”, a large scale organizing principle where all events and all of reality is filtered through. Everything serves as a demonstration and as a confirmation of the principle. If it were true, that oil is really running out, then JHK would be 100 % correct: problem is, it is not true, or it is only very partially true. He confuses the effects of mostly technology plus oil as only oil, he sees oil as a single point of failure of the system whereas, the system is oil plus all of the technologies used to harness the energy, and it is mostly the 80 % technology that creates the “free wealth”, the amplification of labor, the creature comforts the first world has enjoyed for so long, and will continue to enjoy as technology becomes more and more optimized. In fact, one of the things that terrorize JHK, is the threat that technology may contradict his entire edifice.

In any case, whether his large scale organizing principle is correct, or whether it is mine, we may simply end up like the frog slowly boiling: the system will slowly adapt to reality, substitutes for oil will be found, people will organize themselves differently, all very gradually, without any sudden tipping point or phase transition.

And the same with my large scale organizing principle, if work is no longer needed, this truth will emerge one way or another, the capitalists can choke on only so much cash in the end, it could gradually flow back to where it belongs and namely to everybody. Working hours will decrease, Low rent prices will become the norm, subsidized salaries and large scale projects will emerge, Rockets to Mars, Skyscrapers, etc.

Any target can be reached from any starting point like a frog boiling, if it is gradual enough no one will even barely notice, just like so much real labor got substituted with fluff labor in the 20th century. We may be exactly the “World Made by Hand” of JHK in 50 years without even noticing how we reached it, or we may have trillions of skyscrapers on Mars without even noticing how we reached it. Interesting to see the typical “Standard International” buildings all similar, all over the world, boxy like structures, all kinds of, in Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, New York City, etc. with street view of google or daum, reflecting the same phenomena exactly the same everywhere.

More likely, everyone will fight everyone and create an ever greater hell on earth, as people love to hate and fight more than anything else, therefore we need to engineer the neural network in people’s brains and change them, the direct manipulation of brains and minds, the Instant Singularity.

And this is the fluff - optional economy that lets me write, just like JHK, about how much the economy is based on fluff optional endeavors and how the system will eliminate as many real productive jobs as possible structurally, from the outset, as it is defined to begin with: productivity (notice this word, and how often it is used in economics), innovation (you wouldn’t do something in a new way, or introduce an innovation that makes you pay more money for something, hence this always will translate in some job getting cut somewhere in the world), etc.

An interesting corollary of this is that if you have a job that has some real purpose, some usefulness, some kind of (even if indirectly) cause and effect, it is surely going to be a high risk job, one of those that will be axed, one that will surely be optimized or outsourced. If on the other hand, it is a very vague (the more vague the more secure the job is), abstract, fluff, undefined, unmeasurable by any kind of metrics job (or as is more often the case, measured by the wackiest arbitrary opinion the boss at hand invents, and these are becoming the majority) it is probably sure to last and not be axed. Of course, these are the jobs that can easily be axed all together, in a group of thousands, like the great mass layoffs the USA has every now and then, just for the fun of it, but still they are the most secure.

If it is a real job ax it, if it is a fake job save it for some time, the fake ones are way more useful for the capitalists, they are convenient place holders, they can always ax them all of a sudden by the thousands to prop up the apparent bottom line when the time comes.

From:

kunstler.com/blog/2011/03/make-no-mistake.html

"Obama, should have said “By the end of this decade, by the year 2020 we will put a Man on Mars, we meaning only the effort of the USA, and we will create all the companies and entities (public and private, as in private capitalist corporations that can make profits on it too) that are needed to do this, to advance civilization”. "

I am astonished by how miserable the United States of America has become as a nation: people celebrating and giving so much importance to the (supposed) death of an old stooge in some forgotten town of Pakistan, as a way of “getting back”, as a way of “solving a problem”, “justice has been made”. By the way, the connection between OBL and 9/11 has never been demonstrated in any possible way, it was just a simple personalization of an enemy (not that he is innocent, just saying), since you can’t win a war against ideas and ideology, but you can kill a person or people.

This is the level of discourse of the most “technologically advanced” nation on earth, the “richest nation on earth”, where thousands of students worldwide flock to to go to the best universities worldwide for “higher education”.

True, in the USA (and most of the world) people really, REALLY believe the rich deserve all their money, really believe all the fake labor is real and necessary, you have to compete and fight for work and at work, there is all of this work needed, you have to pass your “performance review” and all kinds of idiotic lies, given that a technological economy is rapidly doing away with most real productive labor, but people really, REALLY love to beat up others ,to judge others, really love this idea of having to work oh so hard, and compare each other and punish each other in a never ending useless and futile fight.

Most people have no idea of the absolutely huge amount of money such small minorities hog up lavishly and not doing anything at all for it, there are so many trillions of dollars in the hands of a few thousand rich families you wouldn’t believe it: but everyone is in “punishing mode”, beat up the small guys, all workers have to make the “sacrifice” for the “free market”, “capitalism”, “productivity”, “competition”, and so on. And if it isn’t that false mantra, then the greens will come in and say the same, workers and people must always make the “sacrifice” because of “overpopulation”, “resource scarcity”, “energy is running out”, etc. These too are all false and lies, they are just a way of telling people that they deserve to be punished because they enjoyed too many creature comforts (given out for free by technology), just like a religion where you have to “repent”. What total fools, I can’t believe it.

Obama and the USA should have celebrated some real valid decisions and endeavors such as:

1. Man on Mars within the year 2020, only using all USA technology, by a public - government entity like NASA, with the help of private corporations;

2. A new High Speed Train network across most of the USA, along with many more traditional trains, like JAPAN has;

3. A Huge BUS transit system across most of the USA;

4. The hiring of millions of people for all these new real jobs, real collective efforts, adding up to real collective results that everyone can benefit with;

5. Low rent (200 dollars a month) homes all across the USA, if unemployed then a subsidized salary of 1,000 dollars a month until the subject finds work;

6. Complete government run public Health Care system: kick out all the private actors from this;

7. A plan to build thousands of skyscrapers all across the major US metropolitan areas;

And many other choices that start benefiting the collectivity. In Portugal they want to “privatize” the economy, good luck with that, this will just give other billions of dollars to private hands all over again, no collective benefit here.

Now go on, challenge me, contradict me, tell me that all information is only symbols, all information is always and only abstractions. Go on, tell me that if you don’t measure and do not have a description of the starting point and target, if you don’t have an association of this to what it implies in terms of manipulations and emotional - social meanings, than any and all starting points and targets and their paths are equivalent.

Killing OBL as referred to the story of 9/11 is more important, has a social - symbolic - emotional value much greater than going to Mars, satisfies the majority of people much more than space travel: after all the end result of OBL dead or man walking on Mars are the same, it is just information and symbols, what they imply as far as the path to reach them, what manipulations, how many, how hard, all the single endeavors adding up to a final aggregated - single - collective result is what gives it most of its importance and meanings.

The connections that are made, the associations that are made or invented or forced, the aggregation of elements, the arbitrary aggregation of elements that are always totally independent and atomic are forced into a coherent make believe model and picture (but only coherent to our warped minds, that love to connect things and make them appear intelligent, make them appear as a unit, when in all truth, there are no units, only an infinite number of totally independent, not related in any possible way, not even by the laws of physics (which don’t exist and are LIES), or by their presence in space - time (which is just another fancy mental construction and LIE) elementary particles).

Elementary Particles which themselves are not one whole or one unit, but made up of another infinite number of totally not related independent particles, all the way up to infinity or the vanishing point, whichever sounds better.

From:

kunstler.com/blog/2011/05/lying- … ormal.html

Right Wing Thug says:

" 5) Low rent (200 dollars a month) homes all across the USA, if unemployed then a subsidized salary of 1,000 dollars a month until the subject finds work."

I’ll be in Hawaii for a year or so, looking for work. It’ll probably take me at least that long to find a job so keep the subsidy flowing. Thanks in advance."

I answer:

I hear the economists always blatter on about new types of jobs that “will” be generated by technology and innovation. False, technology and innovation is applied to the economic system to do more with less, to use less energy, less manipulations, and in the end to cost less so somewhere down the line, jobs will be cut, and only cut. No jobs will be generated, jobs will be eliminated, otherwise why on earth apply technology and innovation in the first place ? In fact we even haven’t begun to really use computers and software efficiently to optimize work processes, because if we did, millions of other jobs would dissappear.

But they say, the service economy will generate jobs, this is totally false, all those jobs are not needed, make believe, and they just make everything cost more and more. What we have is only power relationships, who can force who to pay more for some basic need, and that is what generated the housing bubble and health care disaster since there are no other really productive endeavors in sight: there will be increasingly fewer and fewer jobs, and all this while there are more and more people who need jobs.

But the US GDP is 10 trillion dollars, if you give 10,000 dollars a year to all people, as a free salary, that would only cost 3 trillion dollars, so you have an extra 7 trillion dollars of free wealth, how is that generated ? because the technological economy generates 7 trillion dollars of free wealth, only the rich hog it all up, it isn’t doing anything or going anywhere better. Therefore, either you give out the free salaries, or the rich will just hog it all up, it has to all end up somewhere, it doesn’t do anything good for the collectivity, as all of us can see, collectively everything has been getting worse for years.

And notice the idiot economists never specify exactly what kind of new jobs are needed, they are always described in the most abstract, undefined way possible, because the truth is there won’t be new jobs, only cuts, there will be less and less jobs, no matter what, therefore we need free salaries and large scale projects using people.

From:

kunstler.com/blog/2011/05/lying- … ormal.html

Right Wing Thug says:

"Old6699;

Free salaries? Still about the free salaries? WTF are you talking about?"

I answer:

Yes, like a hammer, these issues must be repeated forever, this is what everyone should demand, no more distractions, no more changing subjects:

1. House rent 200 dollars a month with a salary of 800. It is high time builders and home owners stop stealing an entire salary because people have to rent prices higher than minimum wage.

2. If there are no jobs, free salaries, there is no changing subjects anymore, there is no other solution.

3. Increase train and Buses by a large degree.

And again I emphasize:

Don’t change subjects, don’t get distracted, demand what should be yours: the basics, a salary and a home, the system will no longer give this to anyone anymore, hammer them forever, force them to give it to you, make them know that you can’t be fooled anymore, the resources and money and homes are all there so now they (rich capitalists) have to give it out.

1. Home prices at 200 dollars a month, salaries at 800.

2. Free salaries if there are no jobs, and since there will be fewer and fewer, then the rich must give this out, no more discussions, they have all finished hogging up all the trillions, they have all suffocated on the trillions they have hogged.

3. Huge BUS and Train transit systems across the USA.

This is exactly what the dominating classes want, distractions, people talking about other issues, all kinds of unimportant things, all kinds of issues that are irrelevant, just like the “too much information” environment we find ourselves in. Don’t make them fool you anymore, demand back what is yours: low house rents, free salaries if there are no jobs (or huge public - private private projects hiring people for real jobs) and huge mass transit systems, trains and buses, no more changing issues or subjects, no more distractions, like a hammer, like a machine gun, obsessive and repetitive forever, hammer them all with just these three items, the rich - capitalists must give it all back, millions must demand all of this back to them. Stop them short and tell them to go to hell as soon as they start saying “you have to deserve it”, you have to be “competitive”, “productivity”, your “performance review” must pass the grade, “innovation”, “skill sets”, and all the other excuses which really just mean, WE ARE SUPER RICH HOGS THAT DON’T WANT TO GIVE ANYTHING BACK, SO GO FLY A KITE. Don’t take it anymore, fight back.

Now, go man go, go Obama, do it, give it all back, forget that stooge of OBL, who gives a crap, we need homes, jobs and BUSES!!!

On the story that companies now need specialized labor in manufacturing processes and other endeavors:

This is the real story (and in fact notice Germany doesn’t layoff their workers, but keeps them even in a downturn, wonder why ?)

They have been doing this trick and selling this BS for decades, now, it is all planned to hose workers, always, it is a very subtle game, first they close factories where specialized activities have been performed (especially so as to not depend on the specialized workers who now have leverage and some power with respect to the employers, since they know how to do a difficult job, they can negotiate their power based on their skills). They open this factory in India or somewhere else (paying the equivalent workers a lot less, etc), remember the capitalists have virtually infinite power and know exactly where and how to do these things.

Then they keep the previous workers out of this kind of job for as long as possible, always with the excuse that either they are too old or that they now need “programmers”, or “nurses”, notice they are always changing the kind of jobs needed, every few years, there is something new needed, all of the skills that you have accumulated must become obsolete, not needed.

And then after a few years in another location, suprise, those “jobs” came back all over again, they need those “old jobs” all over again, oh, look we need that numerical machine expert person (the ones that you had in a different location 4 years ago, but you laid off, and lost track of where he is, probably now trying to train as a nurse or programmer, etc.).

Wow, now we need all of these experts in those old manufacturing processes, look, it is always the workers fault, they always, for some strange reason, have the wrong skill set, are always out of sync with the “free market”, what a bunch of lazy, freeloader, losers the workers are always.

Cool, isn’t it ? And the capitalists have been feeding this BS to millions of people worldwide for decades, and everyone really, really believes them.

We need 1) Free Salaries since the Technological Economy won’t generate jobs anymore, it will kill more and more jobs 2) Cheap Rents 3) Huge BUS transit systems 4) Huge large scale private public projects that accumulate labor processes, collective endeavors for the collective good like high speed trains, skyscrapers, rockets to mars, etc.

This is also part of a more generalized mechanism where opposing entities reinforce and define themselves, opposing items furnish the definition of what they are and create a path of interactions and actions and reactions according to the opposition that force them both down determined (sometimes predetermined paths). You leave the window open, I will close it just because, because your action defines the opposite and I will perform the opposite just for fun, for definition, to follow some kind of defined and determined path.

A bit just like forum discussions, just like the management - labor disputes, just like right and left oppositions: you say A, I say not A and B, you then say D, I say not D, and something else, etc. Or often A just defines and imposes not A, just because, just because we are, and Mass Energy and Matter is intrinsically contradictory, intrinsically in search of contradictions, and oppositions inside itself, and also aggregations, in a continuous dance of division, aggregation, contradiction, synthesis, definition by opposition - contradiction, and subsequent aggregation of elements, more and less larger and larger aggregates (collective efforts that add up ?) that then explode down and disintegrate all over again, a never ending thesis - anti thesis - synthesis, etc forever.

Innovation and Technology doesn’t create jobs.

I was recently reading about a european country Italy, that has a group of 400 biotech companies plus another group of 600 companies operating in Brazil in manufacturing, high tech and all together they generate at most about 700,000 jobs (including services and other external necessities). But this can apply to any nation, whether the USA or JAPAN or Indonesia.

And those are the high - tech, competition myth, innovation, technology driven corporations.

This goes to show that even if you increase these types of entities by many orders, it still won’t make a dent in job creation, aside from the fact that it is very difficult to increase their numbers since these corporations become ever more optimized, shed jobs, or merge with larger ones, always cutting all the “now redundant jobs”, since you don’t need “two XYZ offices, now do you, so layoff the extras”.

Just this shows that jobs are not needed in a Technological Economy, they are destined to diminish no matter what, all of this talk of education, research and innovation necessary for job creation is false: this will just accelerate the number of jobs killed.