On 05/24/2013 04:50 AM, nettime's avid reader wrote:
Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary, thinks that
the challenge of the decades ahead is not debt or competition from
China but the dramatic transformations that technology is bringing
... a world of what Summers calls automated doers.
They will do everything for us, eliminating the need for much work.
The only jobs will be in writing the software and building the
doers, creating a bifurcation of the labour market that is already
discernible.
Summers is just as dead wrong as Will Hutton, the author of this
article. Summers assumes that production is the only job that counts,
therefore, automation can only produce massive unemployment. Meanwhile
Hutton, with the utopian visions of his conclusion, assumes that
heightened production will free people for human development: care for
the ageing, the solution of ecological problems, the explosion of
creative professions. Neither will admit that the maintenance of a
social order requires a very large number of professional educators,
ideologists artists and thinkers. That is exactly the case of society
today, whose predatory form of financial capitalism is maintained and
developed by an oversized management sector, including politicians and
technocrats alongside bankers, CEOs, strategists, advertisers,
designers, human-resource psychologists, union bosses, entertainers,
etc. We live under the grip of *that* professional universe, whose
expansion and accumulation of power has marked the entire neoliberal
era. If there is no counter-project, their power will only grow in the
course of this crisis.
Breaking the neoliberal grip and learning to live otherwise, learning to
imagine, desire and put into effect another kind of collective
existence, would require large investments in education, in renewed
forms of the humanities, in cooperative processes, in the maintenance of
community and ecology, in the development of a philosophy of coexistence
that makes exploitation obsolete. We can clearly afford those
investments, since we can afford to print over $10 trillion, in the US
alone, to bail out the current financial-ideologial system! Today's
managers know this, that is why there is a such a concerted and vigorous
worldwide move to dismantle the existing educational apparatus and
replace it with online job-training for the corporate sector. While
profiting from the bailouts that sustain their vampire culture, they
want to use technological unemployment to impose greater competitive
discipline. For those currently at the top, squeezing uncontrolled
thought and imagination out of the public sphere is just the same as
squeezing labor out of production. Yet without a far-reaching change in
education and in ethos, automation can only reinforce all the negative
trends of today's societies, where classes are pitted against each
other, mainly in an aggressive battle of the upper sectors against
everyone else. What has been developed by the neoliberal managers is a
bloodsucking form of suicidal society. But so far, even in the face of a
tremendous economic crisis, there has been no change of these trends,
only continuing attempts at the radical intensification of already
failed policies.
The horizon of change today is artistic, cultural, social and political.
It asks for fresh kinds of perception and imagination, wiser and more
generous forms of thinking, a upsurge in the capacity of social
cooperation, and the translation of all that, not only into new
technologies for surviving and thriving, but above all, into a new
governing system. None of these things can be accomplished by
individuals or small spontaneous groups: they all demand the
construction of coherent middle- and long-term movements operating under
the influence of a kind of ecological common sense that takes the
codevelopment of human and natural potentials as a guide, replacing the
exclusive profit of a few which is today's measure of success. It's
obvious that current governments and two-party systems will not create
these movements or the common sense from which they could spring. They
will have to be created outside existing institutions, through stuggle
that is not only about dissent and violence. Revolution does not occur
by just throwing out the old. It must be preceeded and carried forward
by the constituent forces of a new way of living. How to become part of
such constitutive forces? How to cooperate outside the neoliberal
pattern of automation and competition? Isn't this the central question
of the current crisis?
I would love to hear what people think.
best, Brian
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