How Jobs Destroyed Work: The Complete Edition (part three)

CHAPTER ELEVEN: CONSUMPTION AND THE PERPETUATION OF SCARCITY

Because we have built for ourselves a system that tends to cause debt to outgrow productive ability, it is essential for the perpetuation of such a system that we never succeed in ending scarcity. Now, human needs are nowhere near insatiable enough to fuel the appetite for growth that our market system has, dominated as it is by cancerous forms of money growth that extract wealth from the real economy. Fortunately for the system, human desires can be manipulated to embrace a ‘throwaway’ culture. Such an outcome requires a hedonistic, short-sighted value system and measures of ‘wealth’ and ‘success’ that define such things in purely consumerist terms. Such an outcome must undermine, as much as it can, any interest in the types of innovation and problem-solving that are not inherently based on monetary return.

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the majority of people have been conditioned to devalue all nonmonetary forms of work and to ascribe success to overconsumption. It also explains why advertising has grown to become such a dominant part of many businesses budget. It’s required to manufacture fake needs.

CHANGING YOUR BRAIN

Notice how many adverts rely on genuine meaning and non-monetary values to sell their products. TV commercials tend to revolve around people finding love, or being among friends, or having the freedom to immerse themselves in idyllic locations. Adverts for cars, for example, will show a happy driver travelling down an empty road to some stunning location, perhaps to meet a gorgeous partner. Those adverts don’t depict a stressed-out employee stuck in rush hour traffic with his superior barking in his ear through a cellular phone, whose debt levels brought on in part by his consumerist lifestyle severely restrict bargaining power in negotiating better terms.

The power advertising has to influence our minds is demonstrated by the ‘Pepsi paradox’. The paradox consists of the fact that when blind taste tests are conducted, people tend to select Pepsi as the best tasting cola. But Coca-cola outsells Pepsi. Brain scans show that when people taste Pepsi and Coca-Cola without knowing which is which, the former drink triggers greater activity in the Ventral Putamen, a component of the brain’s reward system. When the drinks are tasted with awareness of which drink is which, we see a change in the brain: Coca-Cola triggers greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain dedicated to personality expression and moderating social behaviour. As Steve Quartz of the Californian Institute of Technology explained:

“What is a brand? It is a social distinction that we are creating...Cola is brown sugar water about which the brain discerns no particular difference until the brand information comes in. Then, the brain suddenly perceives an enormous difference”.

Another study conducted some years ago introduced television to Fijian islanders who had not been exposed to Western values. Prior to this introduction, eating disorders were almost unheard of, but by the end of the observation period, the barrage of materialistic and vanity values that feature so heavily in our commercial world had altered the psychology of the islanders. As Zeitgeist explained:

“A relevant percentage of young women...who prior had embraced the style of healthy weight and full features, became obsessed with being thin”.

It would be wrong to suggest that all consumerism is bad. If we had no choice but to live in austere conditions that offered no comforts or luxuries and only addressed our most basic needs, I don’t think that would make us all that happy. It is a triumph of capitalism and market systems that ordinary people now enjoy a greater range of food, drink and luxury items than a medieval monarch ever laid hands on.

Capitalism’s success lies in its ability to solve problems and the measure of a society’s wealth should be determined by how well problems are being solved. But our debt-growing monetary system and the consumerist mentality nurtured to support it have encouraged the emergence of a market that creates problems more than it solves them, for the simple reason that monetary gain can be had if the market can perpetuate a feeling of inadequacy and inferiority so as to sell us bogus cures.

TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY IS ‘BAD’

It’s also opposed to technical efficiency. A product that maximises technical efficiency lasts for as long as possible. This may be because it is robustly made- think of a bulb that provides light for as long as physical limits permit. It may be achieved through easy repairability. Think of a tablet computer with component parts that can be swapped out as they suffer wear and tear.

Market efficiency, on the other hand, is much more concerned with driving sales, and so there is an incentive to inhibit technical efficiency for the sake of repeat purchases. Food comes with ‘sell-by’ dates- even if it is tinned food that lasts pretty much indefinitely if unopened. That’s assuming it makes it onto the shelves at all. Enormous amounts of decent food gets thrown away simply because it fails to meet the exacting standards of supermarkets who want absolute uniformity in fruit and vegetables.

A famous example of market efficiency versus technical efficiency would be the Pheobus light bulb cartel of the 1930s. Back then, light bulbs were technically able to provide about 25,000 hours of light. The cartel forced each company to restrict light bulb lifespans to less than 1000 hours- much better, at least as far as repeat sales are concerned. Today, some inkjet printer manufacturers employ smart chips in their ink cartridges to prevent them from being used after a certain threshold (for example, after a certain number of pages have been printed) even though the cartridge may still contain usable ink. When the cartridge is taken to be refilled, the chip is simply reset and the same cartridge is resold to its owner.

In 1801, Eli Whitney produced fully interchangeable parts for muskets. Prior to this move, the whole gun was useless if a part broke; Whitney’s interchangeable parts allowed for continual maintenance. Common sense would assume that such an idea would spread throughout the market, but instead we see proprietary components that ensure a total lack of universal compatibility, and products driven to unnecessary obsolescence.

Bare in mind that these products are the result of human effort. People are giving up their time to labour at producing goods that are designed to be thrown away, and the sooner the better. As Zeitgeist put it:

“The intention of the market system is to maintain or elevate rates of turnover, as this is what keeps people employed and increases so-called growth. Hence, at its core, the market’s entire premise of efficiency is based around tactics to accomplish this and hence any force that works to reduce the need for labour or turnover is considered “inefficient” from the view of the market, even though it might be very efficient in terms of the true definition of the economy itself, which means to conserve, reduce waste and do more with less”.

GDP

A clear indication of how money can distort perspectives of work can be seen in the rationale of Gross Domestic Product or GDP. GDP has its origins in post-depression America. In the 1930s, presidents Hoover and Roosevelt were looking for a way to determine how dire the situation was. A Nobel Laureate in economics, Simon Kuznets, devised a method for measuring the flow of money as a whole. Back then, industry dominated the economy, which meant that most economic activity involved the creation and sale of physical products. So, Kuznets’ measurement only tracked the flow of money among different sectors, not the creation and sale of actual things. To further simplify things, Kuznets’ model tended to undercount what economists call ‘externalities’, which refers to any industrial or commercial activity that is experienced by third parties who are not directly related to the transaction (IE they are not directly working for, or customers of, the company). Externalities can come in both positive forms, providing unintentional benefits (a cider farm’s apple orchard happens to provide nectar for a nearby bee-keeper’s bees) or negative, causing unintentional harm (an industrial process causes pollution, affecting the health of people who happen to live nearby). Also, externalities occur from both production and consumption.

So, what does life look like when viewed through the filter of GDP? Since it only tracks the flow of money, anything that does not involve monetary exchange is disregarded. In reality, work can and often does exist outside of monetary transactions. A man may volunteer to paint fences in his community because he wants the neighbourhood to look nice. A retired teacher might give free maths tuition to his friend’s son who is falling behind at school. All good work, but from the strictly monetized perspective taken by GDP, services rendered without payment have no value. Furthermore, whereas violence, crime, breakdown of the family and other such things have a negative impact on society, GDP counts them as improvements if the decline results in paid intervention. Crime results in the need for legal services, more police and prisons and repairs to damaged property. The breakdown of the family may lead to social work, psychological counselling and subscriptions to antidepressants. Since these are paid interventions, as far as GDP is concerned, social decay registers as an improvement, because it’s generating financial flows as we pay for all that extra security, counselling, and damage repairs.

GDP is obviously a simplified model that cannot accurately inform us of how well a society is solving its problems and improving lives (to be fair to Kuznets, he did point out its limitations). But notice how well it serves the logic of today’s market, which has at the heart of its context of ‘efficiency’ a focus on monetary exchange and general growth in consumption, with scant regard as to what is being produced or what effect it has. So long as money and consumption continues to grow, that’s good. Any significant reductions are bad.

Submitting to labour within a market that devalues community-building voluntarism and views the cost of social decay as a financial benefit, exposed to an endless barrage of psychological manipulation designed to persuade us that happiness comes from the possession of material things, and culturally trained to idolise the very people who tipped the balance of negotiating power almost entirely in their favour enabling them to reduce wages and benefits down to a point where there is hardly any compensation for so many hours lost to servitude, it cannot come as a surprise if we see credit card binges and other forms of overextension. During the lean-and-mean 90s, many people found that pushing household borrowing to dangerous heights was just about the only way they could obtain what seemed like an appropriate reward for so much sacrifice. Savings were put into mutual funds, but few held investments in such funds that were large enough to compensate for all the insecurity, benefit cutbacks and downsizing that typified the era. Moreover, their portfolio managers often backed the very investor-raiders and corporate changes aimed at short-term profit at any cost, that was causing so much deterioration in working life.

CHAPTER TWELVE: HOW MONEY CAN DISINCENTIVIZE WORK

Does monetary reward really provide the best incentive to work? If you live within a system that commodifies everything, turning it into private property that you cannot gain access to unless you have money, and your only means of obtaining money is to submit to paid employment, that would most likely push you toward getting a job. That seems more ‘stick’ than ‘carrot’. But what about those fortunate few, that 13% or so, who don’t hate their job? If you take their existing motivation and add another- financial- incentive to work, does that increase their desire to work?

Common sense would assume it would. Two incentives have got to be better than one. And financial reward must be the great motivator, for why else would executives be worth so much? Well, firstly, executives are not paid what they are worth; nobody is paid what they are worth in a market economy. People receive whatever they can negotiate, and with the balance of power tipped so much in their favour, those at the top of the corporate hierarchy can strike a great deal for themselves.

As for common sense’s view of an extra, financial, incentive increasing motivation, psychologists and economists have been making empirical studies of this assumption for forty years, and the evidence is that it just isn’t true. Adding a monetary incentive to work that is already rewarding does not make it even more rewarding. Quite the opposite in fact: It undermines, rather than enhances, the motives people already had.

In one study, conducted by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, people were asked to help load a van. When no fee was offered, people tended to help, inclined as they were to view the situation in social terms. But when a fee was included, that induced participants to take the transaction out of the social realm and reframe it as financial. The offer of money lead to the question “is it worth my time and effort?”. The extrinsic motivation of monetary reward undermined the intrinsic motivation of being a helpful person. Economist Bruno Frey describes this as ‘motivational crowding out’.

EVERYBODY BUT ME IS MOTIVATED BY MONEY

Interestingly, the assumption that we are motivated by money holds only in the general sense. When studies are conducted to gauge people’s attitude to work and what motivates us, we tend to see that most individuals don’t generally think of themselves as primarily motivated by money. For example, Chip Heath surveyed law students, and 64% said they were pursuing such a career because they were interested in law and found it an intellectually appealing subject. But, while we don’t think of ourselves ‘in it for the money’ we tend to think that it is other people’s prime motive. 62% of people in Heath’s survey reckoned their peers were pursuing a career in law for monetary gain. Since it's generally believed that money is the main incentive provider (‘I’ being the exception) it’s not surprising that material reward continues to be so heavily relied on.

It is important to point out that extrinsic motivations are not always bad, it is just that when an activity is intrinsically rewarding, adding an extrinsic motivation can actually reduce engagement in that task, not increase it as common sense might lead us to believe would be the case. Furthermore, studies from Harvard Business School, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and others have shown that goals people set for themselves with the intention of gaining mastery are usually healthy, but when those goals are imposed on them by others- such as sales targets, standardized test scores and quarterly returns- such incentives, though intended to ensure peak performance, often produce the opposite. They can lead to efforts to game the system and look good without producing the underlying results the metric was supposed to be assessing. As Patrick Schiltz, a professor of law, put it:

“Your entire frame of reference will change [and the dozens of quick decisions you will make every day] will reflect a set of values that embodies not what is right or wrong but what is profitable, what you can get away with”.

Practical examples abound. Sears imposed a sales quota on its auto repair staff- who responded by overcharging customers and carrying out repairs that weren’t actually needed. Ford set the goal of producing a car by a particular date at a certain price that had to be at a certain weight, constraints that lead to safety checks being omitted and the dangerous Ford Pinto (a car that tended to explode if involved in a rear-end collision, due to the placement of its fuel tank) being sold to the public.

Perhaps most infamously, the way extrinsic motivation can cause people to focus on the short-term while discounting longer-term consequences contributed to the financial crisis of 2008, as buyers bought unaffordable homes, mortgage brokers chased commissions, Wall Street traders wanted new securities to sell, and politicians wanted people to spend, spend spend because that would keep the economy buoyant- at least while they were in office.

A VIRTUAL WORLD OF TRUE WORK

It would be handy if there were another form of productive activity, other than employment, that relied on other incentives to work, for then we could see how successful non- monetary incentives are at motivating us. Actually, there is. We call them videogames. I would argue that videogames have opposing drives to jobs, due to the fact that where jobs are concerned a business pays you to work, but where videogames are concerned you pay a business to work.

Paying wages counts as a cost to a business. The company wants to reduce costs, and one way it might accomplish that would be to reduce, as much as possible, the amount of challenge, creativity, autonomy, and judgement required to do the job, thereby making it possible to employ workers who are less skilled, easier to train, and hence more replaceable and so not in a good position to bargain for a better deal.

You might wonder why anybody would want to do a job that has little going for it beyond the fact it pays wages, but of course nobody wants to do it; many are just not in a position to turn it down, thanks to the post-modern slavery system that I talked about in the essay ‘Indentured Servants…’

A videogame, in contrast, is a product people pay for. But there is a problem. Fundamentally, what you physically do in a videogame stands comparison to the dullest production-line job. You are just pressing a few buttons over and over again. The game designers must take that basic, monotonous, action and add layer upon layer of non-monetary incentive. This may include a clear sense of purpose for why you are doing what you are doing, perhaps through a strong narrative; plenty of opportunity for social engagement through team-building, community message boards and such; and a meritocratic system that rewards skillful play and turns failure into a valuable lesson through systems of feedback that constantly provide you with signals so that you know if you should rethink your strategy.

The result? Videogames are massively popular. People pay good money to do what is, essentially, work. In fact, Bryon Reeves and Jo Leighton Read, in their book ‘Total Engagement’, list hundreds of job types and show how every one has its equivalent occupation in videogames and online worlds.

The perspective mainstream media takes is usually a negative one. Buying videogames is fine, of course, as that helps growth and provides jobs. But playing videogames, especially for long periods, is a definite no-no. It’s usually described as kids stuck in front of a screen, not motivated to go out and get a job because they are ‘addicted’ to Grand Theft Auto V or whatever the current bad boy is.

Indeed, a recent BBC news item reported on a young man who is making a decent living by uploading highlights of his gameplay in the FIFA series of videogames (I imagine the money comes from payment from Google ads and sponsorship deals.) The first question the reporter asked this professional gamer was ‘why don’t you go and get a real job?’.

But why would anyone- even those of us who pay rather than get paid to play videogames- put down their controller or log out of their online world, arguably the only places where you can find something like a true meritocracy and where nonmonetary incentives have been refined over many years- and go seek a job unless you were really forced to? What for? The modern market stands opposed to everything it claims to champion, as John Mccurdy illustrated in ‘The Cancer Stage of Capitalism”:

“Non-living corporations are conceived as human individuals...Continent-wide machine extractions of the world’s natural resources, pollutive mass-manufacturing and throwaway packages are imaged as home-spun market offerings for the local community...Faceless corporate bureaucracies structured to avoid the liability of their stock holders are represented as intimate and caring family friends...If we walk through each of the properties of the real free market, in short, we find not one of them belongs in fact to the global market system, but every one of them is appropriated by it as its own”.

Who is to blame? Banks? Corporations? Politicians? Consumers? The Left? The Right? I have no definitive answer. I have heard many opinions from all sides, each providing justification for why they are right and everybody else is wrong. My hunch is that this is a systemic outcome that cannot be conveniently blamed on any one group, thing or ideology. Whatever was behind the development of the global market system and debt-based, interest-bearing currency, we now inhabit a world in which jobs destroy work by devaluing voluntarism and undermining intrinsic motivation, use technology to cause job overspill and turn workplaces into fascist regimes with spy networks comparable to panopticons, and pursue short-term profit at any cost, encouraging the growth of ‘socialism for the rich’ where the reward for risk-taking in the casino world of derivatives etc is concentrated into the accounts of the few financial nobility who now rule us, while the costs are borne by we, the taxpaying serfs, who are not physically chained but compelled to labour through manufactured debt and the suppression of true, technical efficiency for monetary gain. And now that system is gearing up to throw employees, the unsung heroes who did the bulk of the work in creating the wealth of the world, on the scrapheap.

The subject of technological unemployment will be the next point of discussion.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NECESSITY OF EMPLOYMENT

(Image from Wikipedia)
The 21st Century could well witness a conflict between two opposing drives: The drive to eliminate work and the need to perpetuate it. In order to appreciate why these ideals should become a central issue over the coming years or decades, we need to answer the following question: Why do we work?

IF YOU WANT IT, YOU MUST WORK TO PRODUCE IT

There are many good reasons to engage in productive activity. Pleasure and satisfaction come from seeing a project go from conception to final product. Training oneself and going from novice to seasoned expert is a rewarding activity. Work- when done mostly for oneself and communities or projects one actually cares about- ensures a meaningful way of spending one’s time.

But that reply fits the true definition of work (see the chapter‘The True Definition Of Work’.) What about the commonly-used definition, which considers ‘work’ almost exclusively in terms of paid servitude done mostly for the benefit of others, and which disregards nonmonetary productive activity as ‘not working’; why do we have to do that particular kind of ‘work’? I believe there is a practical and an ideological answer to that question.

The practical reason has been cited for millennia. Twenty three centuries ago, in ‘The Politics’, Aristotle considered the conditions in which a hierarchical power structure might not be necessary:

“There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This would be if every machine could work by itself, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation”.

Aristotle’s defence of slavery in his own stratified society has been applicable through the following years and to the modified versions of indentured servitude that followed. Providing the goods and services we have come to expect often entails taking on unpleasant and uninteresting labour. It has to be done, and as technology is not up to the job, it falls on people to fill such roles.

If we only had that practical reason for wage slavery, we could view it as an unfortunate, temporary, situation; one due to come to a happy end when machines finally develop the abilities Aristotle talked about. But it’s rarely talked about in such positive terms. Instead of enthusing about the liberation from wage slavery and the freedom at long last to engage in work as I would define it, most reports of upcoming technological unemployment talk darkly of ‘robots stealing our jobs’ and ‘the end of work’.

The reason why the great opportunities promised by robot liberation from crap jobs is hardly ever considered has to do with the ideological justification for our current situation. But let’s stay with the practical argument a while longer, as this was the main justification for most of civilization’s existence.

THE LIMITED ABILITY OF THE MACHINE

Since Aristotle died, we have seen tremendous growth and progress in technology, most especially during the 20th century. Despite such advances, technological unemployment has never been much of an issue. People have been displaced from their occupations, yes, but the dark vision of growing numbers of workers permanently excluded from jobs no matter how much they may need employment has never come about. If anything, technology has created jobs more than it has destroyed them.

The reason why is two-fold. Firstly, machines have tended to be ultra-specialists, designed to do one or just maybe a few tasks, with no capacity whatsoever to expand their abilities beyond that which they specialise in. Think, for example, of a combine harvester. When it comes to the job for which it was built, this machine is capable in a way unmatched by any human. That’s why the image of armies of farm-hands harvesting the wheat now belongs to the dim and distant past, replaced with one or two of those machines doing much more work in much less time. But, take the combine out of the work it was built to do, attempt to use it in some other kind of labour, and you will almost certainly find it is totally useless. It just cannot do anything else, and neither has any other machine much ability to apply itself to an indefinite range of tasks. So, as new jobs are created, people with their adaptive abilities and capacity to learn, have succeeded in keeping ahead of the machine.

THE SLOWLY-CHANGING JOB ENVIRONMENT

Secondly, for most of human history, the speed at which paradigm shifts in occupation took place was plenty slow enough for adjustments to occur. Today, when the subject of technological unemployment is raised, it’s often dismissed as nothing to worry about. Technology has always been eliminating jobs on one hand and creating them on the other, and we have always adjusted to the changing landscape. In the past, most of us worked the land. When technology radically reduced the amount of labour needed in farming we transitioned to factory work. But it was not really a case of farmers leaving their fields and retraining for factory jobs. It was more a case of their sons or grandsons being raised to seek their job prospects in towns and cities rather than the country. When major shifts in employment take at least a generation to show their effect, people have plenty of time to adjust. Educational systems can be built to train the populace in readiness for the slowly changing circumstances. Society can put in place measures to help us make it through the gradual transition. So long as new jobs are being created and there is time to adjust to changing circumstances, people only have one another to contend with in the competition for paid employment.

What happens, though, when machines approach, match, and then surpass our ability to adapt and learn? What happens when the rate at which major changes occur not over generational time but months or weeks? What if more jobs are being lost to smart technology than are being created? Humans have a marvellous- but not unlimited- capacity to adapt. Machines have so far succeeded in outperforming us in terms of physical strength. When they can likewise far outperform us in terms of learning ability, manual dexterity and creativity, this obviously means major changes in our assumptions about work.

It’s also worth point out that, in the past, foreseeing what kind of jobs would replace the old was a great deal easier compared to our current situation. The reduction in agricultural labour was achieved through increased mechanisation. That called for factories, coal mines, oil refineries and other apparatus of the industrial revolution, so it was fairly obvious where people could go. Then, when our increased ability to produce more stuff needed more shops, and more administration, we again could see that people could seek employment in offices and in the service-based industries. At each stage in these transitions, we swapped fairly routine work in one industry for fairly routine work in another.

But now that manual work, administrative work, and service-based work is being taken over by automation, and these AIs are much more adaptable than the automatons of old, we have no real clue as to where all the jobs to replace these services are supposed to come from.

There are tremendous economic reasons to pursue such a future. You will recall from earlier (in the essay ‘Overwork’) how society is generally divided up into classes of ‘owners’ and ‘workers’. The latter own their own labour power and have the legal right to take it away, but have no right to any particular job. The owner classes own the means of production, get most of the rewards of production, get to choose who is employed in any particular job, but cannot physically force anyone to work (though they can, of course, take advantage of externalities that lower a person’s bargaining power to the point where refusal to submit to labour is hardly an option).

Now, regardless of whether you think this way of organizing society is just or exploitative, it works pretty well so long as both classes are dependant on one another. For most of human history this has been the case. Workers have needed owners to provide jobs so that they can earn wages; owners have needed workers to run the means of production so that they may receive profit. The urge to increase profit, driven in no small part by the tendency of debt to grow due to systemic issues arising from interest-bearing fiat currency, pushes business to commodify labour as much as it can. The ultimate endpoint in the commodification of labour is the robot. Such machines are not cost free. They have to be bought, they require maintenance, they consume power. But they promise such a rise in productivity coupled with such a reduction in financial liability thanks to their not needing health insurance, unemployment insurance, paid vacations, union protection or wages, we can all but guarantee that R+D into the creation of smarter technologies and more flexible, adaptive forms of automation will continue. Tellingly, most major technology companies and their executives have expressed opinions that advances in robotic and AI over the coming years will put a strain on our ability to provide sufficient numbers of jobs- although some still insist that, somehow, enough new work that only humans can do will be created.

The thing is, work as in its common, narrow, definition is simultaneously a cost to be reduced as much as possible, and a necessity that must be perpetuated if we are to maintain the current hierarchical system in which money means power and wealth means material acquisition. Remember: businesses don’t really exist to provide work for people; they exist to make profit for their owners. When, in the future, there is the option to choose between relatively costly and unreliable human labour, or a cheap and proficient robot workforce, the working classes are going to find their lack of right to any particular job within a free market makes it impossible to get a job.

But, the market economy as it exists today is predicated on people earning wages and spending their earnings on consumer goods and related services. This cycling of money of consumers spending wages, thus generating profit, part of which is used to pay wages, is a vital part of economic stability and growth. If people can’t earn wages because their labour is not economically viable in a world of intelligent machines, they cannot be consumers with disposable income to spend.

We will continue our investigation of technological employment in the final chapter of “how jobs destroyed work”.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A WARNING FOR THE FUTURE

Earlier, in the chapter ‘Consumption and the Perpetuation of Scarcity’, we saw how market efficiency has no general consideration for what is being bought and sold. It really doesn’t care if the products and services are useful or not, harmful or not, so long as cyclical consumption is kept at an acceptable rate. The same is true of labour. So far as the market economy is concerned, the true utility of labour, its actual function, is not as important as the mere act of labour itself. So long as cyclical consumption and growth is maintained, what the job consists of- whether it actually serves a necessary function that encourages work as I would define it or is detrimental to it- is far less important than perpetuating the current system.

Here we are no longer just talking about the practical argument for jobs. Were that the case, we would likely use technological unemployment as an opportunity to end wage slavery and transition to a post-hierarchical world in which robots occupy positions that used to be jobs, freeing up people’s time so that they can pursue callings. Marshall Brain’s novella ‘Manna’ presents two visions of how the rise of robots could affect our lives, one negative and one positive. The positive version does show that we can imagine ways in which we might adapt to a world in which jobs are no longer a practical necessity. But we don’t just have the practical justification to deal with. There is also the ideological part of the argument, and as the practical excuse begins to wane, becoming harder to justify as machines gain the abilities needed to make Aristotle’s vision of a hierarchical-free society a genuine possibility, we shall likely see the ideological justification for maintaining the current system pushed with increasing fervour.

YOU MUST BELIEVE THAT JOBS ARE GOOD

The ideological argument is that jobs are not in fact a miserable necessity we should look forward to being rid of as soon as practically possible, thereafter to engage in nonmonetary forms of productivity as we create the work, selves and societies we actually want; rather, jobs are work, the only kind of work anyone should aspire to. Maybe it could be argued that when jobs were very much a practical necessity it did make sense to encourage a belief that submitting to a job and working hard mostly for someone else’s benefit was a way of achieving success in one’s own life. But as the practical justification for jobs is rendered obsolete by technology, the old ‘work ethic’ that cannot imagine a good reason for productive effort beyond ‘doing it for money’ becomes a serious impediment to transcending the current system.

We must ask: Who really benefits from perpetuating this ideal of working hard for most of one’s waking hours, mostly for the benefit of a ruling class of financial nobility? Obviously, it is in the interest of whoever occupies the top of a hierarchy to maintain the structure from which their power and prestige is derived.

THEY WHO BENEFIT

Throughout history there have been a few who, craving power, have done all they can to convince the rest that they ought to sacrifice the time of their lives. They have come in many guises- as lords and monarchs insisting we should be bossed by the aristocracy, as socialists who believe we should be bossed by bureaucrats, as libertarians who think we should be bossed by corporate executives. Exactly how the spoils of power should be divvied up is a topic of some disagreement among them. There is much argument over working conditions, profitability, exploitation, but fundamentally none of these ideologues object to power as such and they all want to keep us working in some form of servitude for one simple reason: Because they are the ones who mostly benefit from making others do their work for them. It’s very convenient for this powerful minority that the populace subordinate to them do not become too happy and productive in the true sense of the word; that anyone not willing to submit to work within whatever context suits their agenda is viewed with pity or contempt. As George Orwell wrote:

“If leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away”.

In Orwell’s story, an endless war is fought between three superstates. The real purpose of this war is not final victory for one of the sides. In fact, the war is intended to go on forever. The real purpose of the war is simply to destroy material goods and so prevent leisure from upsetting the hierarchical power structure.

BULLSHIT JOBS

In reality much more subtle methods, part of which has to do with market as opposed to technical efficiency and manufactured debt, are used to perpetuate the hierarchy. A popular reply to the question “what happened to reduced working hours?” is that a massive increase in consumerism occurred, as if we collectively agreed that more stuff was preferable to more free time. But that provides only a partial explanation. Although we have witnessed the creation of a great many jobs, very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of goods. Jobs such as those- in industry, farming- have been largely automated away or moved to where labour is cheapest and increasingly service-based jobs are targets for automation as new generations of AI come out of R+D. So what kind of jobs are maintaining the need for so many hours devoted to the narrow definition of work? David Graeber answers:

“Rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects… we have seen the ballooning not so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector...While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speedups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy that no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand”.

Over the coming years will we likely see more administrative jobs created in order to provide oversight, regulation, guidance, and supervision of robots, or at least that’s how propaganda will spin it. In truth such jobs will serve no purpose other than to keep us working in the narrow sense of the word. We have seen signs of this already. The London Underground’s strong union blocked the introduction of driverless trains in the name of ‘protecting jobs’. Protecting them from what? From progress toward a future in which nobody’s time has to be wasted in driving a train each and every day? I think all these union leaders are really interested in is maintaining the hierarchy they derive their power and prestige from. Not much call for unions when robots have liberated us from servitude to corporate or bureaucratic masters.

The 21st Century will see the rise of bullshit administrative jobs that have no practical justification for their existence, and are there merely to perpetuate the class-based hierarchy that has dominated our lives, in one form or another, throughout history. Such a claim may sound like a total contradiction of prior claims that business strives to eliminate work, but bare in mind that I was referring to work in the true sense of the word, not the narrow “jobs= work” definition we are now talking about. Automating truly productive, intrinsically-rewarding work out of existence and increasing the amount of bullshit administrative jobs is a win-win outcome for those with a vested interest in perpetuating the class-based hierarchy.

THE GIG ECONOMY

Do not think that those bullshit jobs will provide security. No, the rise of the bullshit job will coincide with the rise of ever-less secure forms of employment. The move toward employing more temporary workers who are entitled to less benefits than their full time counterparts will speed up as technological unemployment does away with productive and service-based jobs. Those displaced from such jobs, fighting to get off the scrapheap of unemployment, will provide a handy implicit threat to be used against the ‘lucky’ paper-pushers in administration. Although owners and workers generally have opposing interests (the former preferring workers who do more work in the narrow sense of the word for less personal reward, the latter preferring more personal reward and less work in the narrow sense of the word) they are not true enemies but rather co-dependents (or at least they have been). No, the true enemy of the capitalist is other capitalists- rival businesses competing to corner the market, and gain a monopoly. And the true enemy of the worker is the unemployed, who are in competition for their jobs. When the percentage of unemployed workers is low and the number of available jobs is high, the working classes are at an advantage. Conversely, when there are high numbers of unemployed and not many jobs available, power tips in favour of the owners. As a large percentage of jobs are lost to automation, causing an appreciable rise in the number of job-seekers, businesses will likely use their strengthened negotiating position to bring about an ‘Uber’ economy of ‘permalancers’- workers putting in full time hours but on temporary contracts with little if any benefits other than minimal pay. As Steven Hill wrote in a Salon article:

“In a sense, employers and employees used to be married to each other, and there was a sense of commitment and a shared destiny. Now, employers just want a bunch of one-night-stands with their employers...the so-called ‘new’ economy looks an awful lot like the old, pre-New Deal economy- with ‘jobs’ amounting to a series of low-paid micro-gigs and piece work, offering little empowerment for average workers, families or communities”.

According to Graeber, one of the strengths of right-wing populism is its ability to convince so many people that this is the way things ought to be: that we should sacrifice the time of our lives so as to perpetuate the system. He wrote:

“If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are ruthlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the- universally reviled- unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc)- and particularly its financial avatars- but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value”.

It sounds crazy when written down. Who could possibly be in favour of defending something like this? But this is the world that exists today. A world in which all productive activity that falls outside of the narrow definition of work is dismissed as being of no real value; those who engage in such work regarded as ‘doing nothing’. A world in which success and reward are thought of in purely materialistic terms. A world in which those who refuse to submit to the system are deserving of nothing, no matter how much material wealth our technologies could, in principle, produce. A world in which that material wealth is concentrated at the top, not because of superior productive ability and greater input, but because the monetary, financial, and political systems have been corrupted and actually stand opposed to the free-market ideals they claim to uphold.

As Bob Black pointed out, the ‘need’ for jobs cannot be understood as a purely economic concern:

“If we hypothesize that work is essentially about social control and only incidentally about production, the boss behaviour which Rifkin finds so perversely stubborn makes perfect sense on its own twisted terms. Part of the population is overworked. Another part is ejected from the workforce. What do they have in common? Two things -- mutual hostility and abject dependence. The first perpetuates the second, and each is disempowering”.

Follow these developments to their logical conclusion, as Marshall Brain has done. The belief that those who do not submit to serving the system deserve nothing will result in warehouses for those affected by technological unemployment, kept out of sight and out of mind, entitled to nought but the bare minimum of resources needed to sustain life. Those who succeed in getting a bullshit administrative job will be under intense pressure from their corporate masters ‘above’ and the impoverished, jobless masses below to ‘agree’ to intense working pressures, minimal benefits and no job security whatsoever. They will be required to consider themselves ‘lucky’ to have a job at all. Wealth will concentrate even further as the means of production, totally commodified labour power, natural resources, security and military forces and the political system will become the private property of the owners of the artificial intelligences and the financial nobility that bankroll them. The world will have become a plutocracy, run by the superich elite, for the superrich elite and there will be little anyone can do to challenge their supremacy. And all of this will be partly our fault, the consequence of continuing to believe in that false ideology that jobs are work, the only kind of work that counts, the only kind worth aspiring to. We have been told a lie, a made-up justification for why things are the way they are by those with a vested interest in keeping things that way. We must re-discover the true meaning of work, find our collective strength and push technological progress toward a future that serves the many rather than concentrates power into the hands of a few. And the time to do that is running out.

AFTERWORD

I originally intended to end the essay on that stark warning. But over time I thought it might be better to end on a more positive note and come up with suggestions for how we might arrive at a brighter future. Now, I do not pretend to know all the answers. I just want to share some insights that seemed to me to point us in the right direction while I have picked up while researching real work, wage slavery and bullshit jobs.

ONE: REDISCOVER THE TRUE MEANING OF THE WORD ‘WORK’.

If this essay series has one message it wants people to take home, it would be ‘stop thinking of ‘work’ as synonymous with jobs’. We have an unfortunate tendency to think that work should be something rather unpleasant. This attitude was reflected in a comment made by Tom Janowicz, Renaud Gagne, Leah Stephens and Richard Kaplan, regarding contributing to the Steemit social network:

“Did we say ‘work’? It’s not work of it’s fun!”

I say we should adopt precisely the opposite attitude: Only when productive activity is fun- when it is personally rewarding and beneficial to people and communities you really care about- should it be deserving of a noble word like ‘work’. If not, if you find fun despite of, instead of because of, what you do (remember, we are always free to choose how we feel about our situation) then what you are doing should not be dignified with the word ‘work’. Given that debt anxiety is the main reason why most people submit to labour they would rather not sacrifice so much time to, I think the term ‘WAGE SLAVERY’ is a far more apt synonym for ‘job’.

Rather than think of a paid job as synonymous with work, and play as being as far removed from work as any activity can possibly get, I say we should turn things around and think of jobs (not careers, not callings, jobs) as being what is far removed from ‘work’, while ‘play’ should be considered so like ‘work’ it is a synonym. This brings me to point two.

TWO: STUDY VIDEOGAMES AND HOW THEY TURN DULL WORK INTO SOMETHING VERY ENJOYABLE

I will not say too much here. For those who want more information on how play truly is work and how videogames succeed in making work so enjoyable people pay decent money for an opportunity to engage in it, see my essay ‘QUIT/CONTINUE’.

THREE: REINVENT MONEY.

Money is not the root of all evil. Money can be an incredibly useful way of calculating the various value of commodities and services and directing resources to where they are best-placed to raise prosperity.

But money has a design (I mean how it works, not how it looks) and that design can either promote cooperative, altruistic behaviour, or it can encourage us to be competitive, acquisitive and greedy. Unfortunately, the fiat monetary systems that dominate in today’s markets are designed to make us focus on short-term goals, to think selfishly, and to take wealth out of the hands of truly productive people and channel it toward a financial casino that arguably contributes nothing and just moves money around for the sake of making more money.

The good news is that the corrupt nature of modern banking and the financial sector and the political structure that exists to serve and perpetuate greed at the top is under increasing scrutiny as information and communications networks grow around the world. And people are looking to money and asking how it can be reinvented so as to encourage behaviours that are more beneficial as a whole, and find its way into the hands of those who will raise prosperity levels rather than just gamble with wealth others produce and expect others to pay costs while banksters get bailed out. For a good introduction to the new forms of money being trailed around the world, see the book RETHINKING MONEY by Bernard Lietar and Jacqui Danne.

FOUR: The robot revolution leads to ‘Production By the Masses’.

As artificial intelligence, robotics and atomically-precise manufacturing mature (and their maturation is something capitalism encourages, as it is so useful for reducing costs and increasing profit) this will put in place the foundations for a way of working that is quite different to what we were used to in the 20th century.

The industrial revolution gave us mass production. But the power plants, factories and offices that were the main places of work during the 20th century were most efficient when people were organised into hierarchies not unlike fascist regimes. The 21st century, with its robots, AI and increasingly capable additive manufacturing capabilities, could result in ‘Production By The Masses’. Unlike ‘mass production’, production by the masses works best in laterally-scaled networks that encourage cooperation and collaboration rather than hierarchies in which most people are just bossed around by superiors.

We got a taste of what production by the masses could look like when computing power became so powerful, cheap, user-friendly and ubiquitously networked that anybody could produce and distribute digital content. If anything refutes the suggestion that people don’t want to work, it is the incredible diversity of content on today’s web, most of it produced out of passion not monetary incentive. When we have not just desktop computers but web-enabled desktop factories (as user-friendly as today’s laser printers) I expect there to be an even greater embrace of open-source collaboration and work done for passion’s sake.

REFERENCES:

Rethinking Money by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne
Why We Work by Barry Schwartz
Modernising Money by Andrew Jackson Ben Dyson
The Zeitgeist Movement Defined
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H Pink
Greedy bastards by Dylan Ratigan
Total Engagement by Byron Reeves and A. Leighton Read
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
Happiness is A Serious Problem by Dennis Prager
White Collar Sweatshop by Jill Andresky Frazer
The Abolition Of Work by Bob Black