The Automated Life- Is There an Alternative?
There is always an alternative if you want it enough.
I am holding onto the phone trying to get through to web support for an online account after passing through a cadre of robots. The head robot tells me the reason I am calling is invalid. I yell at the robot telling it that it is rude to answer the phone with a robot and the robot keeps on repeating itself.
It is rude but no one ever says so. Time is money, especially to the working class, and so the incremental theft of our time by automation is another face of financialization. Robots eat away at our time uselessly just as financialization eats away at our money while producing nothing of use to society. Robots create a mechanized company culture environment and are not very bright. The use of robots when limited to a very brief “select your option”, from a concise list is non-offensive, but that is not the state of the world today.
What is the cultural psychological effect of a world where humans have decreasing interactions with real humans in their daily lives? The psychological benefits of such a simple act of going into a store and interacting with a human cashier may not be factored in until it’s too late to roll back the progression of automation.
A search produced many papers written about human-robot interaction. I learned that there is a new professional category called robopsychologist. In this paper’s abstract, it describes an exploration of human-robot relationships but does not delve into the effect on humanity as individuals have increasingly fewer opportunities to interact with other human beings.
When I searched for a link that explains financialization, I thought of Corey Doctorow, but I decided it was best to go to Medium and search for financialization instead. When I opened my home page there was a new story by Corey Doctorow at the top of it about a new book that takes on the forefront of futurism.
Yanis Varoufakis’s “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism?”
This story explains financialization very well
The capitalist revolution — extolled and condemned in the Manifesto — was led by people who valorized profits as the heroic returns for making something new in this world, and who condemned rents as a parasitic drain on the true producers whose entrepreneurial spirits would enrich us all. The “free markets” extolled by Adam Smith weren’t free from regulation — they were free from rents:
I go to my computer, where, with added-on nonsense, AI mindlessly throws back the user sites I have already visited as an old acquaintance arbitrarily becomes a famous chef.
One must verify all AI-fabricated information.
The featured image for this story is a screenshot of artificial miscomprehending intelligence. The image that AI is using to promote investing in the Boothbay Region was chosen by me for its absurdity. AI threw it back at me, completely unaware of the meaning of absurd. Here is the image in my post:
Finacialization is the late stage of systemic wealth concentration and redistribution when it has fully entered the enshitification phase. Its roots are deeply embedded in the policies of the public-private state’s central management of the economy as Corey Doctorow observes when he says this:
But all that changed in 2008, when the world’s central banks addressed the Great Financial Crisis by bailing out not just the banks, but the bankers, funneling trillions to the people whose reckless behavior brought the world to the brink of economic ruin.
Suddenly, these wealthy people, and their banks, experienced enormous wealth-gains without profits. Their businesses lost billions in profits (the cost of offering the business’s products and services vastly exceeded the money people spent on those products and services). But the business still had billions more at the end of the year than they’d had at the start: billions in public money, funneled to them by central banks. source
In Maine, state programs are marketed as benefiting the public, when in fact they benefit the investor-ownership class, including the Seed Capital Tax Credit- which is the name given to the Seed Capital Refundable Tax Credit, explained in the caption of the image below. To understand that the “tax credit” is a “refundable tax credit” meaning if no taxes are owed the holder gets a cash payout from the public, you must read the statute §5216-B.-2 as the state program, FAME does not identify that it is a refundable tax credit.
The Seed Capital Tax Credit is sold to the public as job creation. The exclusion of the qualifier, “refundable” hides the role of the public as investors in the corporation where the public investment is transformed into a subsidy by the Maine Legislature. The benefit to the working classes is hypothetically that a few working for the subsidized corporations are paid higher-than-average wages and benefits. That is not really a benefit for the working class, it is a benefit for a few workers subsidized by the whole of the working class. I originally wrote that they earned a living, but it is unknown if the workers at the subsidized corporations are either needed or worthy of what they are paid as the deals are made by the Legislature, which has no contact with the workforce or knowledge of the management of the business so the deals are probably based on calculations of quantifiable income tax revenues to the state than what is needed of a workforce by the subsidized corporation. The workforce is the trading pawn in the game played between the state and its private partners. Since the Legislature has been centrally managing the economy, the term “earning a living” is being increasingly rendered defunct as working no longer means that one can support a living, which once included being able to afford rent without it being subsidized, and before that meant being able to afford home ownership, and homeownership included the plot of land that the home occupied. This denigration of the common person’s standard of living is easily ignored by the state as it promotes itself as solving the problems that it has created, while ignoring the cause of the problems, much having to do with state policy.
The benefit to the ownership class is free public money to capitalize ownership. The same formula is repeated in affordable housing, the benefit for the working classes is that they get to rent a place to live at an affordable rent. The benefit for the ownership class is that their capital investment in ownership is subsidized by the public.
I began reading State economic policy about fifteen years ago. It didn’t take long to see the network between the statutes and the planned incrementalism. I envisioned a future when the rural Maine lifestyle would be inaccessible to people of ordinary means. So here we are today. The concentrated housing zone being developed on the Boothbay Peninsula is planned like a city block devoid of individual land ownership where the residents could plant a garden or a shrub. All land is communal in a development in which the overwhelming number of units are rentals, the development will be governed by a “home-owners association”. The small number of homes that will be individually owned does not include the land the homes occupy. Retaining land ownership will allow the entire development to be sold in the future when the low-income regulations no longer apply.
In HP 1489, the State transferred authority over community character from the local governments to itself. The state’s design for state-wide community character excludes workforce access to the traditional rural Maine lifestyle. Access to nature is to be controlled by a society of overlords epitomized in Boothbay by developer Paul Coulombe who through public-private relationships has transformed the center of Boothbay from a rural New England village to a 21st century feudalistic landscape with manicured landscaping as far as the eye can see and the country club standing in for the castle in the hill, progressively reaching out to claim more and more of the community as its own, with a little help from Maine and federal Legislature’s policies.
When I first saw the manicured road decor installed obstructively all over the place, I imagined a future where all residents would be required to dress in uniforms and participate in organized sports. And so it goes. A playground in a natural field was transformed into a playground by the roadside surrounded by large asphalt parking lots and a baseball field ensconced in expensive-to-maintained landscaping. The transformation of a once natural space was funded by Paul Coulombe matching a federal land and water grant, ignoring the fact that the park, including the two new asphalt parking lots is located next to our drinking water supply.
According to Bryer and Roberts, over the years other groups have formed to help the playground. Four years ago, a re-development committee hoped to use tax increment financing (TIF) funds but found out they couldn’t be used for a park. More recently, the playground received a $10,000 donation for new swings and rides. Part of the area lies in the watershed, so any plans need both town and Department of Environmental Protection approval. (emphasis by author) Source- comments are interesting to read as well
I wondered if Mr. Coulombe’s gift is governed by §5654. Conditional gifts, including stipulations that the Town cover the costs of maintaining the manicured landscaping in perpetuity.
So far, except for the children’s playground that was relocated to the side of the road, only miscreant dog walkers and pranksters are using the park, so surveillance cameras are needed to catch them. The baseball field is uninviting for widespread use but there still ought to be notice that when one uses the park one is under surveillance.
The surveillance cameras caught the pranksters. The pranksters are three youths of the age most likely to play baseball who sprayed foam into the bathroom facilities in the manicured park. The article in the Boothbay Register announced that the youths would apologize. Such an announcement tells of an apology enforced upon them by the governors of the park. I am interested in why they did it. Was it just because, or was it an expression of something else? It would be more valuable if they wrote truthful personal essays with or without an apology. No one asked the community if they wanted a natural field transformed into a manicured baseball park. That was decided by the power of concentrated and redistributed wealth.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. Supreme Justice Louis Brandeis
As quoted by Raymond Lonergan in Mr. Justice Brandeis, Great American (1941), p. 42.h”
And so, we cannot afford to be complacent. If we do not participate in our system, we will lose it, if not the entire planet. (read Will Lockett’s latest story about global climate change action here)
And so a selling point for the bifurcated concept I promote - the two parts being the reinvention of Andersen Design production and the other development of the workers-in-residence intentional community is that both are a return to a world populated by humans and both address the ownership-class-working class divide as it has been advanced in Maine by our centralized economy since 1976 and is now entering late stage wealth inequality.
The workers-in-residence intentional community is for the small business ownership class. The Andersen Design idea is to recreate ceramic production as independently owned studios working in a laterally structured network. Including a museum that has a fiscal sponsorship function as a way to make funding for owning studios more accessible to designer craftsmen by utilizing non-profit, debt-free funding sources. Ceramics is a great anchor industry for such a community as it has never lost its engaging appeal since it first manifested as one of humanity’s first technological developments. Andersen Design is an ideal anchor industry because it can easily be recreated as a plethora of independent but related industries.
The idea for Andersen Design begins with developing the legal terms of the agreement. including protecting the intellectual property rights of the genuine authors of intellectual property- as opposed to the owners of the facilities claiming ownership of intellectual property rights as is instituted at the University of Maine. It is a platform existing in the natural world, mimicking cyberspace, as a visual aid, a Post-Post-Modern concept in need of truly innovative legal counsel to make it really real.
Think of Amazon: Varoufakis likens shopping on Amazon to visiting a bustling city center filled with shops run by independent capitalists. However, all of those capitalists are subservient to a feudal lord: Jeff Bezos, who takes 51 cents out of every dollar they bring in, and furthermore gets to decide which products they can sell and how those products must be displayed: Corey Doctorow source
No Not That! A laterally organized decentralized platform!
Even since I started studying the economic development policies put into place after the institutionalization of Maine State Inc. and Co., it became apparent that, by design, the system distributed opportunities to the top and living rations to the rest, while punishing upward mobility in the bottom half of the economy as if it were an abuse of the system for people at the bottom to improve their status.
Recently the non-profit CEI partnered with the for-profit Boulos Reality to develop a 200-bed-per-room homeless warehouse in an industrial opportunity zone in Portland Maine. The industrial opportunity is for the owners of the warehouse and its employees. It is sold as serving a public benefit through housing the homeless but that is hard to market, given the treatment of human clientele of the warehouse. Obscurity works best.
I propose the workers-in-residence intentional community as a low-income opportunity zone, which by another name is an intentionally middle-class community as the middle class is the natural opportunity zone for those of low income. Since Maine’s centrally managed economy was deemed into existence in 1976, the middle class has been incrementally obliterated, and so the alternate movements must re-invent the middle class…but perhaps market it as a sort of Disneyland historical recreation for the entertainment value of the short-term rental traveler. That way it might get past the Maine Legislature, and it would actually be an attraction for the state’s valued transient residents as humanity is inevitably attracted to genuinely culturally engaged communities. That hasn’t changed.
By making the intentional community a place where people live and work in a mutual space or an attached space, it keeps the size of the business within the micro category, but the community should further individual growth and evolution so that there is no limit imposed on how a business can grow, just that if a business wants to grow beyond a certain size, it can do so in another community that accommodates that size. The Evolution will be networked,from person to person, B to B, in the real world where it is less possible for the technofuedalist ownership class to completely control the space, charging rents for every step one makes.
The world is not only a material and digital space but also a psychological space that evolves differently in lateral organization than it does in hierarchical organization. The hierarchically organized world has passed its prime and is rapidly escalating into the enshitification phase, a term coined by Corey Doctorow, which went viral since it was readily understandable on a mass scale.
On a special note of appreciation for highly relevant series leaving Netflix
South Koreans have developed the genre of serial corporate drama with exceptional sophistication, exquisitely blending the political, psychological, and technical. One can gain insight into how multifarious industries work just by watching a South Korean TV series.
What happens in the corporate world doesn’t stay in the corporate world and so the South Koreans are doing the world a service by taking on such intricate cultural analysis in the form of a streaming TV serial. I have great admiration for this genre, which has a frequent series ending in which the main characters leave the world of corporate hierarchies to start their own small business.
One of my favorite Korean dramas of this genre is leaving Netflix in October and so I recently watched it for a second time. The dichotomy between an educational setting and life in the real corporate world is artfully exposed in a Meseange: Incomplete Life.
The Netflix drama begins at a trading company where a select group of interns are to be chosen for employment at the company.
One of the main characters in the story is a mysterious young man of ordinary economic background who has been recommended to the company by a person of influence even though he does not have a college degree, merely a GED.
The young man was formerly pursuing life as a professional GO player, an abstract strategy board game, but he lost by a hair. He does not disclose his history to his peers and bosses as he applies the strategies, he learned from years of playing Go to society at large.
In the beginning, the young man is treated abusively due to his background, characterized as “disqualified” and that he probably “won’t last long”. He is left to do his work alone and then told that he can’t do it alone, but the young man takes it all in stride, applying the rules of Go, in his own mind, as he confronts real-life situations. In the end, he is one of a small group of interns selected for hire by the corporation, considered to be the most highly skilled.
The four interns were selected for their skill level but once they find themselves in the corporate world, they are obstructed from applying their skills by an abusive culture. The brilliant female intern is treated as a maid, the young man from a privileged background is made to sit around all day doing nothing, and the intern from a factory background does all the work while his lazy boss takes all the credit and shirks responsibility when something goes wrong. It is apparent that each one wants to fully apply their abilities to their work but are prevented from doing so by corporate politics.
Except for the young man who was hired with nothing but a GED. He is fortunate to be assigned to his original team run by the gruff but humanistic manager who is more focused on the work and people than climbing the corporate ladder. The drama is a psychological construct of how to navigate a toxic environment while retaining one’s soul and integrity, often involving hiding one’s true intent as when the manager sends his other team members to do a job at another location so that he is left alone with the newbie to pick his brain for planning strategy.
The young man living life by the rules of a board game possesses emotional intelligence that leads him to respond rationally and to perform exceptionally, but his heartfelt desire to belong amongst his fellow teammates is what gratifies him the most.
The drama is leaving Netflix but might reappear on another platform. The drama is a fascinating exploration of human character within the context of corporate culture and beyond. Without giving away too much of the plotline, eventually, the manager is forced to resign, and the man of exceptional abilities does not have his contract renewed because he is a temporary worker- which is because he has only a GED. The manager starts his own small business and hires the young man, and they ride off into the sunset like Indiana Jones, happier than ever outside and the corporate hierarchical culture in the outlier society of the underground that the twentieth-century science fiction writers predicted. We are here now! Where do we go next?