Leisure, Excellence, and Happiness

I don't think people look out far enough when projecting the future. Or maybe I look too far out.

There is no evidence that increasing the amount of labor a person engages in can have any effect upon improving their standard of living. Since 1980, compensation of workers has been totally divorced from the value of the work they provide to their employers. Whether they earn their company $100,000 a year or $1,000,000 a year, they will be paid mostly the same. It is more valuable to companies to suppress the 'market rate' of valuable positions than it is to lose individuals due to underpayment.

It seems to me that very few people realize the consequences technology has had upon daily life. It has radically increased the productivity of individuals - and guaranteed they see no benefit from it. It has expanded their work life to encompass more and more of their total life. It has contributed to workers being seen as interchangable, disposable cogs. It has destroyed economic mobility entirely (on the national scale).

It has also inspired in the whole of society (so far as I can tell) an unreasonable faith in a sort of thought process that I've seen best described as 'systems thinking'. People are willing to lie down and accept as immutable any sort of 'process' or 'policy' that is ever defined. If it is 'policy' that you must sit in an uncomfortable seat, well then you simply have to accept it. You can't hold the person who provided you with the seat responsible, they're simply following the policy. And policy is formed by, supposedly, very well-informed beings of wide understanding who could not possibly explain themselves to regular people. When someone suggests that people should not be restricted in a particular way, the very first question they will hear is "Why should people be allowed to do X?" Restriction is the assumed norm. Each action a person can take, whether in their work life or personal, must be justified as a useful and integral part of the overall 'system' of society.

I fell in love with computers when I was 9 years old. But I studied philosophy alongside CS. While I still spend both my work and personal life working with technology, I try to do so in ways that do not cause me to fall into those philosophical tar-pits that seem to have ensnared nearly everyone else. I was a teenager in the 1990s. I still hold on to some of the hopes for technology ushering in a better future. Hopefully we're simply suffering from some growing pains and before long we'll look back at this time period and say 'what was wrong with those people? Why did they let employers yolk them like slaves and wring profit margins out of them simply because they used a computer to generate titanic amounts of value for the company?' We would think it very odd if an employer proposed paying someone less because they were going to use a hammer to build a chair. But if someone is going to use a computer to do 300x as much work as someone doing a thing manually, we find the idea that they should be paid 300x as much similarly nonsensical. Why?