Just before I run off to the eye doctor, I thought I’d post something that has been getting on my nerves for a while now, and which recently culminated in a comment from Whimsical:
Forgot to mention your luddite old-man, “Get off my virtual lawn.” schtick is getting old and tired. The Internet is here to stay- adjust your business model to it, or deservedly die.
Get over it already.
You see, my irritation is that the tone of response (Whimsical’s reply is representative of a swath of Internet-firsters) is so short-sighted. It’s like listening to the SUV drivers saying that the scientists have global warming wrong and all we need to do is drill all that oil up in Alaska. They don’t want to listen to objections about the impracticality of it, how the supply will only marginally delay the reckoning that must come, or any other issues. It’s four-second sound bites and anyone who tries to explore in detail or apply Socratic methodology simply gets dismissed as a crank or a loon.
The Internet model is non-sustainable. Period. The Internet has invaded pretty much every corner of business, and we’re in the middle of a jobless recession that has no sign of ending. If the Internet led to more opportunities, the unemployment rate would be down to something like half a percent by now. Even young people, who should be the ones most likely to take advantage of the Internet explosion, are failing to find work. Or are they all just living with mom and dad because that’s what every 27-year-old wants to do?
And it isn’t just in media spots. Outsourcing — and, just as importantly, the threat of outsourcing — gives employers a cudgel to beat down resistance. Want a raise? Tough. Want better benefits? There’s 10 people in India and China who’ll do your job for 1/5th of what you get. Be grateful you have a job, sit down, shut up, and get back to work. That’s happening to computer programmers, lawyers, newspaper people, you name it.
Although pre-Internet business was also all about profit, it’s only the arrival of the Internet that allows the owners to run wild. Outsource or freelance everything. Maximize profit. Cut the workforce to the bone. At some point however, the inevitable will occur: all these companies will discover that the tiny sliver of a population left that can afford the products (made for slave wages and sold at a markup) is not sufficient to maintain the company’s costs. Once the middle class drops below a certain level, the corporations will follow. $240 Nikes? Even if you could buy them, you wouldn’t because someone would kill you for wearing them. As the corporations will be losing money at the time, they will not be willing (or able) to raise salaries or hire enough people to regenerate the middle class. That’s the Internet Model.
I’m not a Luddite. I love technology. I don’t love how no one seems to grasp that jobs are disappearing and not coming back and that this is not something individuals can correct but rather an in-built flaw of a business model designed like a chain letter. Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates, Whalen, they all made their money already. You think they’re going to warn everyone else away? Being rich is great. Being rich when everyone else is poor? That’s even better. The model is dysfunctional because it leads ineluctably to disaster unless the corporations apply a moral component. And that won’t happen any time soon.
There’s a difference between telling everyone to get off your lawn and telling everyone to stop walking on a minefield.
15 Comments.
I agree with most of what you said; there were a few things that stuck out to me.
First of all, the actual, historical Luddites weren’t angry old people on lawn chairs. They were English weavers whose lives and livelihoods were ruined by the introduction of mechanical looms and the subsequent collapse in fabric prices. They responded by forming a political movement. So in many ways you actually *are* a Luddite; but it’s something to be proud of.
The fact that Luddism is not new also reminds me that this crisis is not as unique as we sometimes pretend it is. The idea that mechanized labor and increasingly liquid labor markets are driving wages down in a manner that is unsustainable and might well lead to the destruction of capitalism is at least as old as Marx, and probably older. In the past, this trend has been counteracted by economic growth, social democracy, or government economic control. It’s unclear whether any of those will happen this time around, but it’s certainly a possibility.
Also, anyone who tells you to “deservedly die” is an asshole and probably not worth responding to.
R4Good points all. Seems idustrialization, urbanization, heck – civilization, has all been a big mistake. It wasn’t always like this, and it won’t always be like this. 10,000 years ago there were no cities, no intensive and agriculture, and no domesticated animals; except for dogs perhaps. Humans lived as they always had, in small groups, and in balance with nature. Ah, the good ole days…
anschelsc beat me to it.
The Luddites are a terrifying reminder that if you do not win, and win big, you will be slandered without hope of reprieve and tossed into the dustbin of history.
The Luddities were for, effectively, a differing implementation of technology, not the abolishment of it. We are not economically reeling because of the existence of powerful technologies, we suffer because our aristocracy insists on using said technologies in horrible, destructive ways. Robots and modern telecommunications can lead to productivity gains that can be shared with workers, but workers are, quite simply, the enemy of the aristocracy, so instead those gains are used against the worker. Sorry: the independent contractor.
Everyone remember when a meat producer started testing for mad cow in the U.S. and, in response, the other meat producers sued the former?
We have the tools to live well; we do not have the right to do so.
As John Maynard Keynes, in his Economic Consequences of the Peace, once said of a population driven by austerity to desperation, “Men will not always die quietly.”
Also: “The blackness of the prospect itself leads us to doubt its accuracy; our imagination is dulled rather than stimulated by too woeful a narration, and our minds rebound from what is felt to be ‘too bad to be true.'”
Folks, don’t waste time interacting with the retarded Whimsical. Just listen to him go on about “Blue Dogs” here, and that should make it clear what an idiot he is. No one – and I mean NO ONE – has even uttered the words “blue dog” in three years. There’s a reason for that. They’re not relevant anymore. Yet, Whimsical still uses them as some sort of cogent argument to defend his savior, hero, nanny, and god: The One.
Whimsical likes to pretend that HE and ONLY HE knows how change comes about. Too fucking stupid to live, that’s all he is. You can’t even address this idiot, ok? He’s just too fucking stupid. Don’t engage him. Why waste your time? Your time is better spent doing anything else.
In 1926, the unemployment was 1.8%. In 1929, it was 3.2%. By 1933, it was 24.9%, and far more than 24.9% out of work but not technically unemployed. After that, unemployment remained very high until 1941. People who’d thought 1.8% was normal, full employment and 3.2% was a recession saw technical unemployment rates above 15% for more than a decade, The ‘experts’ made the same arguments: that the rich and upper-middle class could get all their toys produced by less than 76% of the old labour force. After ’33, the recession was over, the economy was rising rapidly, production was up, but huge numbers remained unemployed, and the experts blamed the automated assembly lines that made at least 24% of workers permanently unnecessary.
Kurt Vonnegut saw a return to massive unemployment after WWII, as portrayed in his novel, Player Piano.
But, as the aftermath to WWII showed, given demand, jobs will be created. And demand comes from sensible policies, which we don’t have, and won’t have no matter which crook gets elected to play the next Distinguished Gentleman in the White House.
The New York Times has conceded the House to the Republicans. The Senate is a toss-up, with Democratic control slightly unlikely, no control a possibility (i.e., fewer than 50 Democrats AND fewer than 50 Republicans, with independents holding the balance of power), and a reasonable chance for a Republican Senate.
If President Obama is re-elected, we get four years of deadlock, no relief for the middle-classes and working classes, and small-scale drone-based war against anyone whose death will play well in the Times . If Romney is elected, we get large-scale war and the elimination of Social Security and Medicare.
So choose wisely.
@sekhmet has it exactly right, the internet is a wonderful tool controlled by the wrong people. It’s just yet another way for the capitalists to screw the workers, and the Luddite analogy is exactly right. Don’t argue against the technology, take the technology and use it for good, not evil. As for @anshcelsc, right you are about Marx and earlier, but the thing is I wouldn’t hold my breath for anything to counteract the current trend, anything short of the proverbial shit really hitting the fan. Our overlords have learned many lessons over the last 150 odd years, and they are taking no chances. The only reason the working class ever got anything was massive union organizing and fear of revolution, and with the death of the Soviet Union that’s gone, for now anyway.
Aww poor little plant. Reduced to copy and paste non-sequitors which show how poor your reading comprehension is, (I haven’t uttered the phrase “Blue Dog” in forever), because your adhominems have been about as well recieved as your attempt to foster the revolution your right wing masters want.
Are they getting rough on you for your continued failure and ridiculous extremeism?
Good.
@Alex
Old and tired. I’ll bet you any amount of money that you care to name that the Internet model will be going long after both you and I are dead, and all your over-reacting carping and pointless fearmongering can’t and won’t do a damn thing to stop it.
(I don’t deny that WWIII or Mother Nature might unplug the internet, but they are the ONLY things that stand ANY chance whatsoever of doing so).
Oh, I have no doubt there will be changes. Societies and institutions will adjust to the internet, there isn’t even a remote chance in hell of it being the other way around.
And frankly, any society or instiution that won’t adjust to the internet deserves to die and be replaced by a newer, more in step model. Old fogeys who cling to some ridiculous notion of a glorius past are sad, and that’s about all they are. @aaronwillimas has it right- every piece of technology since the beginning of civilization has had doomsayers like alex, and they have all been proven wrong (straw man arguments about unemployment included). Alex and his complaints about the internet are no different.
Be proud to be a luddite. Embrace it. In the end you’ll still be steamrolled over by history- which is on my side.
Or let your irrational hatred go. It does no one any good- least of all you.
Anschelsc, I belive outmoded societies and insuitions should die, not people. Despite alex being pretty much as wrong as possible on pretty much every point possible (though nowhere is he more wrong than about the internet) It’s always at least interesting to hear what he has to say, and I would never claim that he needs to “deservedly die” merely for being wrong.
@whimsical,
Are you deliberately misreading people’s responses, and the original post? The point isn’t to get rid of the internet, or try to, but to change who benefits. You’re right, the internet isn’t going anywhere, copyright is dead, all sorts of things have changed, but the issue is that the beneficiaries of this are the same as they have always been, and that is what has to change. As @sekhmet pointed out, the Luddites didn’t want to eliminate technology. Marxists certainly don’t want to eliminate technology.
Good points, @sue… I guess. I didn’t get much past “Aww poor little plant” myself. I’m really turned off by W’s continued assumption that everyone who disagrees with him is either an idiot or an agent provocateur.
No, Whimsy, I was speaking (well, writing) literally. Civilization has turned out to be a huge mistake. There are too many of us, we are too stupid, and we are spiraling out of control. Gooooo massive depopulation!
Failure to ever mention “Blue Dogs” nor DCCC (as far as I know), speak volumes to the miserable inadequacy of the “Democrats will eventually save you” analysis of our self-proclaimed intellectual superior.
Whimsical.
“Societies and institutions will adjust to the internet, there isn’t even a remote chance in hell of it being the other way around.”
The entire point of my post is that the Internet, by its nature, is poisonous to society in a way that cannot be adapted to. The Internet will cause so many people to become “surplus to requirement” that society will collapse. Read some Rousseau, he talks about this. For him, the reason people surrendered some of their freedoms in order to live in society was that society offered protections and advantages.
When society no longer offers those protections and advantages, people will stop following the rules of society.
As to making a bet. Let’s wait until the elections are held and our current bet gets settled.
@sue
Alex has repeatedly and consistently argued for the “turning off” of the Internet. Maybe that doesn’t equate with “getting rid of it” in your book, but it sure as hell does in mine. I have the benefit of having considerable history with Alex on this topic, so I’d say I know his opinion on the topic better than you- especially if you’re basing your conclusions on this point.
@Russell
Not everyone, just ex. History has shown us that people who advocate the extreme level of violence that ex has, and who go out of there way to use ad hominems on the people who call them on it are almost always plants.
@alex
Plain and simple, you’re wrong. Society is infinitely adaptable- there is nothing it can’t adapt to. You’re as wrong about this as you are about the results of the November elections. Hell, you’re wronger about this then you are about the elections- the Republicans have a decent chance of taking one of the big 3 (though they still don’t stand a chance in hell of taking all of them, especially now- Ryan was a toxic choice).