<nettime> the disappearing middle class and snake oil salesmen

[allan siegel <allan@allansiegel.info>]

hi there,
well, to tell the truth, after reading just the infamous (so it seems) Jaron Lanier interview it is not his shabby analysis that is shocking, i.e. "Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible." Duh! What ahistorical rubbish; seems that these kinds of prognostications a great for those swimming in the kiddie pool (the shallow level of political discourse in the MSM) where Marx is still a dirty word (something like polio before Jonas Salk). Hard to figure out what the future might look like when one's image of the past is so limited.

allan


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