Index

Economic and Social Clouds on the (Much Too) Near Horizon

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F. Kennedy

I find it rather funny that in a couple of generations, likely by the end of the 21st century at the latest, we as a society are likely to be able to look back at what we call “work” now and realize that there was only a small difference between slavery and the current definition of work.

If we haven’t managed to wipe ourselves off the face of the earth, we will have to have realized by then how counter-productive this near-military. hierarchical work structure is overall.  Creativity is the one thing that differentiates humans from robots and AIs, but the educational system we have built  is designed to squeeze all of the creativity out of us, so that the vast majority of people have been rendered useless for anything but robotic manual jobs and drone desk work, things that are becoming useless at an incredible rate.

If the current fascist/“capitalist”/rapist socioeconomic model that is operating in the US right now continues to hold sway, this trend will reduce the majority of the populace to slaves competing for survival basics with each other, with the “lucky” ones getting to work as personal slaves for the ultra-rich overlords, an Elysium-like existence with no way to escape.  I suspect that if it gets close to this, unless the overlord class has managed to build a space station to live on they won’t survive the ensuing violence; that said, this is the sort of model the rich have been aiming for at least as far back as Ronnie Raygun, and there is some question in my mind whether we will be able to avoid the bloodbath that is the endpoint of it, e.g. the French Revolution.

I truly hope that we never have to go through another bloody revolution like the French did, but those holding real power are going to have to allow the soft sorts of revolution to hold sway, or face that violence.