One of the most ridiculous bugman beliefs that you sometimes see floating around online is the idea that AI and automation will “free us from work”. It is one of a long list of frankly quite childish computer fetishist pipe dreams that try to salvage the bleak actuality of our cyberdork dystopia. As the specter of technological progress continues to dazzle us with break-neck innovations such as smartphones in slightly different sizes and apps that can make 50 distinct fart noises, the miseducated mind of the bugman is “inspired” to ever-greater fervor in his computer worship. The promise that his Toy God will eventually save him from the banal drudgery of his empty life keeps the bugman spellbound, awed by the supposed genius of various toy merchants. The bugman, however, fails to understand the inner logic of the system that he partakes in. He cannot see the world for what it is, instead deluding himself with what essentially amounts to Gnosticism for nerds.
One of the many lies told by that fork-tongued devil Progress is that it is responsible for giving us what little free time we have through the much-vaunted eight-hour workday. What it does not mention is that this was only an improvement from the hellish working conditions of the early industrial era, not a universal improvement. Medieval peasants worked less than modern Americans and a Roman freeman worked significantly less. Furthermore, most modern Americans work closer to 50 hours a week rather than 40.
Why is this significant? The eight-hour workday was instituted in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th century, before computers were in wide use. Following the widespread adoption of computers in the workplace, people actually work more, as evidenced by most Americans today working more than 40 hours a week. Likewise, the Industrial Revolution also led to people working longer than they had done before the introduction of advanced machinery into their work. Technology increases the amount of work we must do – this is the historical trend. There is, therefore, no reason to assume that automation would be any different.
If this seems counter-intuitive, it is because you do not understand the nature of work. Let’s take computers as an example. Manual labor is naturally limited – there is only so much ditch that needs digging, only so much shit to shovel, etc. With computers, the situation is different. There is no end to the amount of text documents, pdf:s, spreadsheets and other files that can be created; these then need to be reviewed, revised, have each revision tracked and documented separately; this all gets filed into multiple databases and folder structures that all need to be catalogued in new spreadsheets and pdf:s. There are the endless software updates, subtle UI changes that require frustrating periods of adjusting to get used to, compatibility issues with hardware or other programs that take weeks to figure out. Thousands upon thousands of emails being sent, responded to, logged and catalogued; meetings about what’s in this or that pdf, what’s uploaded or not uploaded to some server or other, what was or wasn’t said in last week’s email. Hours wasted at meetings and then more hours wasted writing protocols for these meetings – more pdf:s! more spreadsheets! – which all need to be uploaded, logged and catalogued. There is quite literally no end to the amount of completely superfluous busy-work that can be created by a single computer. And this is what all office work is about, at its heart.
But while it is certainly possible in the modern technological workplace to create endless amounts of busy-work, surely there can be no economic incentive to do so? Wrong. It is important to understand that much of what we think of as “the economy” is a scam. Made-up money being moved between made-up financial instruments; buzzwords like “spending parity index” that don’t mean anything and angry-looking graphs that don’t measure anything; nothing but ever-increasing made-up debt that can never be paid back. The stock market rises and falls at the whims of its owners – about eight people or so – and has no connection to any supposed “fundamentals”. There is no rhyme or reason to this “economy”, it is an entirely constructed and nonsensical paper monstrosity with no connection to reality. It is completely fake and gay. The actually productive sector of the economy – the sum-total of making and doing – stopped being the determining factor of how the economy “works” a long time ago, you see.
After the Second World War, the focus of the productive sector of the Western economies shifted from meeting demands to creating them. The reason for this was that productive capacity had increased to such a level that shortage was practically abolished. The limiting factor for consumption was no longer scarcity of consumables, but the demand for them. As the economy changed from meeting demands to creating them it stopped being about controlling material resources and instead became about controlling behavior. The problem that the modern economy is trying to solve is not starvation – the US throws away as much food as it consumes. It isn’t boredom – there is more entertainment available today than anyone can consume in a lifetime. It isn’t socks, toothbrushes, jackets, onions, bread, kitchenware or gadgets – we have all of these things in ludicrous abundance. The problem that the economy is trying to solve is you.
From the perspective of the people who own and manage the economic-political machine of the West, the thing that worries them is not shortage of bread or consumer electronics or YouTube videos. They are worried about their plummeting political legitimacy, about narrative collapse, about increasing popular dissatisfaction, about the rise of right-wing political dissidence, the proliferation of “conspiracy theories”, and free speech on the Internet. This is what their attention is turned towards. And one of the many ways that they go about controlling dissent is through the combined power of consumption, debt and work.
This is the true nature of modern work. The primary goal of most work is not to produce any kind of value but to keep you busy, waste your time and energy and keep you under control. Combined with debt-driven consumption, the common man is kept perpetually stuck in a state of frustrated drudgery that sees him too weak, busy and dependent to put up much of a fight against those in power. In recent years we have seen how work has been used as a political weapon through the practice of doxxing dissidents and harassing their employers. The very concept of cancel culture requires dependency on a job from which to be cancelled. And consider this: the highly intelligent, educated and ambitious people who could threaten the elite are precisely those who are encouraged to waste their lives doing overtime in pointless office careers.
Leisure is politically dangerous because it is the prerequisite for political activity.
The Ancients knew this, and the regime knows this. The purpose of modern work is control. For all intents and purposes, the post-scarcity dream of the computer fetishists is already here. Far from giving us leisure, it has forced us into working even more. Should the economy ever become totally automated, our work hours will only increase as both the need for control and the capacity to enforce it increases.
I wrote something similar a few years ago https://hasenjudy.wordpress.com/2019/01/25/the-contradiction-of-technological-progress/
Basically, a very small portion of the economy produces the actual goods everyone needs and wants (houses, food, electricity, etc). Everything else is just people doing busy work so they can receive money so that they are allowed to acquire these goods.
Most jobs are just ways for money to get "circulated". The circulation of money is what counts as "the economy". The more money circulates, the "healthier" the economy is said to be.