Technological Economy
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.