10-18-2019, 08:50 AM
(10-17-2019, 11:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(10-17-2019, 04:12 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(10-16-2019, 02:56 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: That's a good article Anthony '58. I wonder what Robert Butler would think of this Information Age model of progress if he were back here from the secret facebook site?
I obviously can't speak for him... but information will not move people between places, offer fuel with which to warm a house, let alone feed people. The most primitive needs become the most basic, with no technological fix to resolve them into non-needs. Exposure, thirst, hunger, war, and social chaos can still kill people.
The great struggle of the past has been to resolve human need through greater production of necessities. Now that we can take the necessities for granted, do the people who supply those become superfluous?
I suppose he might say, or I might say, that industry didn't supply all the needs that agriculture supplies either. But we moved into an age where industry was the main productive activity style, and more so in more places as time went on. I would date the start of that age from the early 1780s, based on the historians I read.
In the information age, which I also call the green age or the green meme, computer tech is making a lot of industrial styles of working and living obsolete. The article seemed to give a picture of the possibilities of this new era. There can be more free time, which also means making industrial style work more superfluous. People could use their time pursuing fulfilling activities rather than working to produce necessities for mere survival. Survival for what?
As I see it, the industrial-style bosses still control most of the means of production, whether high or low tech, so they hog almost all the benefits. If robots and computers are supposed to save time and working hours, though, then the bosses need to be required to share their benefits with the rest of us.
Computers don't do much farm work yet, although I suppose they could. Farms are becoming industrialized, at least. In the future I suppose they will be computerized too. Everything else is. Our fuels and transport will become as electronic as our production lines, and fairly soon, whether Trump resists this or not. So, maybe a computer can't supply electricity, though they run on it, but the sun, wind and waters can still supply it, and that's the green part of the information age.
Big Business obviously uses high technology as a substitute, if possible and practical, for human labor, or even does what people may have never been able to do economically. It can use information technology (IT) to direct tasks such as shelf-stocking A company such as Wal*Mart can use IT to use data from point-of-sale machines (the computerized version of cash registers) to tell the warehouse to replace a pair of 32x31 men's gray slacks to a specific store where such a pair of slacks was sold a few minutes earlier. Store clerks never had such capacity -- or rarely had it. Anyone capable of doing that could find more lucrative employment because such skill was useful elsewhere.
Big Business needs consumers as much as it needs workers. IT devices are never going to buy clothes, food, drink, theater tickets, or airline tickets for themselves. The people working in IT will because elective consumption is something that IT can at most simulate as a model. Note well that however right-wing American politics get, government can't take away TANF... because lobbyists for Big Business entities such as Wal*Mart, Kroger, Publix, Safeway, and Meijer would stop such with the aid of entities advocating for poor people. Food aid turns potential shoplifters into paying customers. (If I were a store manager and the store caught someone shoplifting basic food I would call the welfare system and not the police...)
The end of scarcity implies the need to harmonize work and consumption. The sweatshop model is cruel, reactionary, and (thank God!) obsolete. This is not to say that the harmonization of work and consumption is successful in a time of scarcity. Scarcity motivates businesses to make things and provide services, and need compels people to work at terms offered.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.