if we look at the last 30 years: yes. The IT industry doesn't seem to be developing towards anything that resembles efficiency or minimization of work. For every useless technology, a caste of users and a caste of experts are created in order to be able to absorb the information that can be generated.
The information society is a machine maximizing information exchange, something that only incidentally implies increasing profit or increasing productivity.
> It’s not in your interest as a worker to let capital think that its workers are saboteurs.
And although documentation can make you somewhat replaceable, it is a joyless and tiring experience to work on something that is quickly evolving yet completely undocumented. I'd rather be made slightly more replaceable if it meant my job wouldn't be a tiring, joyless grind.
The part about code reviews and meetings is about working to rule, to further delay progress. Don't take risks with bugs, review thoroughly. Don't ask for forgiveness, ask dor permission and escalate it in meetings.
Yeah. "I, the individual, am going to do my best to make sure that I get mine, even if it harms the company and my coworkers". That's not "class warfare". That's narcissism.
As opposed to “I, the executive or founder, am going to do my best to make sure that I get mine, even if it harms the company and my employees." Who has the most incentive and power to be the narcissist? Employees would be smart to understand this dynamic.
The current production system is driven by the need for growth. What you're describing was true maybe until a century ago, until the 1929 crisis. After that it was clear that demand had to be artificially stimulated to meet the needs of the production side. First it was war, then mass consumerism. Desires are not natural, they are induced and in the same way they are induced (socially, culturally, politically), they can be removed, usually with a higher level of happiness for the people involved.
> The current production system is driven by the need for growth.
I would say our current monetary system is driven by the need for growth. But our current monetary system is a political tool, not an economic tool.
> After that it was clear that demand had to be artificially stimulated to meet the needs of the production side.
No, what was clear, at least to anyone who hadn't drunk the kool-aid of Keynesian "economics", was that the US government (and other governments weren't much better) was completely clueless about how economics actually worked, and so its interventions were making the depression worse instead of better. (Btw, this was just as true of Hoover's administration as of Roosevelt's.) All of the talk about having to increase "aggregate demand" was just a manifestation of the cluelessness. The real problem was not lack of demand but mismatched supply and demand: the government's messing with the money supply had led to a massive misallocation of resources, so that many things were being produced that nobody wanted and many things that lots of people wanted or needed were not being produced, or not being produced in sufficient quantity. Whenever that happens there will end up being a crisis when the misallocation can no longer be sustained.
What the US government should have done in response to the stock market crash of 1929 was...nothing. That's what the US government did in response to stock market crashes in 1920-1921 and 1987, neither of which led to a prolonged depression or even recession.
> Desires are not natural
Really? My desire for music and movies is not natural? How about my desire to post on a site like this one?
I think you have a very simplistic view of both economics and human desires.
under capitalism, this simply doesn't happen. More efficiency due to automation or other factors always result in constant hours worked, resources exploited more efficiently, humans squeezed harder and less worker's autonomy.
Any reduction in the work time was won by unions and as soon as they were destroyed, we got stuck with the 40 hours workweek.
Your narrative worked maybe one century ago: now the world is on fucking fire and everybody is in therapy. Nobody believes this stuff anymore.
This pretty clearly isn't true. You could simply work fewer hours and live a 1920s lifestyle, if that's what you want. You won't have good healthcare (neither did people in 1920), you probably won't go to college (just like most people in 1920), you won't be able to buy lots of fancy and complicated consumer goods (exactly like people in 1920), you won't own a laptop (just like every single human being in 1920), or live in an apartment with AC (like almost everyone in 1920), and you won't drive a car (like the average person in 1920), or own a lot of nice clothes (like most people in 1920) and so on and so on.
This option is available to you and to everyone else, but hardly anybody chooses it. People pursue full-time employment because of all the enormous benefits, but absolutely nobody is making you do it.
Continued here (instead of editing the comment above).
The obvious retort here is that the cost of healthcare, education, and housing have all increased dramatically, so even if you’re willing to forego modern toys and conveniences, you still have to work full-time to stay afloat. I think even this is not true. First of all, it’s worth thinking about what people spent their money on 100 years ago. Here’s a typical budget (by share of consumption) for an urban family in 1917:
Food ............................... 41.1
Housing ............................ 26.8
Transportation ..................... 3.1
Clothing ........................... 17.6
Health care ........................ 4.7
Other .............................. 6.7
The first thing you’ll notice is that healthcare and education are not major line items (but food and clothing, both of which are drastically cheaper and more widely available today, are). I think you can basically toss them out. Just by virtue of having access to a modern emergency room you’re miles ahead of anybody living in 1917. As for general health insurance and higher education, you can simply forego them — just as almost everyone did in 1917. If you get seriously ill or injured, you can go to an emergency room and they'll treat you to a standard of care that didn't even exist 100 years ago. And you're opting out, remember, so what do you need a college degree for? That's just another spoke on the hamster wheel we're trying to avoid.
So, housing remains and it’s obviously a bigger factor. A big obstacle here is that you can’t save money by downsizing to a tiny unit, living in an SRO, occupying crowded tenements, or foregoing modern conveniences like hot water and indoor plumbing -- all commonplace in 1920 -- because those options have in the meantime been made illegal. So the government has taken those options from you. For this to work you’re going to have to live in a relatively undesirable region and probably with roommates, if you want to be anywhere near a major city. But this is not impossible, if you're truly convinced that the alternative is unacceptably exploitative.
This is not even close to reality in the US.
Zoning laws and various regulations mean that attempting to live like it is 1920 will eventually get you locked up in jail and your property condemned after you are fined to death. Assuming you can afford any property as our government has allowed corporate and foreign interests as well as excessive immigration to inflate property well past the ability of the average 1920 man to afford.
I addressed this in a comment adjacent to yours and I think it's a good point, but I don't think it's sufficient to explain why most people don't accept a 1920 standard of living in exchange for doing less work. I'd like to see most of those regulations repealed, but I have a hard time believing the result would be a bunch of full-time workers cutting back their hours to live more simply. What people would do, instead, is consume all the resulting productivity gains as quickly as they could.
Say a machine gets installed at work that increases productivity by 20%. In a sane system, you could now work 20% less for the same output, a vast improvement in quality of life.
In reality, you might lose your job. Or if you keep it, you'll work the same hours as before. You'll definitely not get a pay increase due to the higher productivity. Meanwhile, cost of living keeps rising.
You probably can't do every job at 20% speed and expect to keep it. If you're a middle manager at a giant corporation, for example, there is no 1-day-per-week option. It's all or nothing. But that's not all jobs. Any freelance work, obviously, fits the bill. As does restaurant work. (In fact, I know a fair number of people who are (at varying levels of awareness) actively enacting this work-less-and-live-on-less strategy, by hopping along a never-ending string of part-time bartending and server positions.)
The great thing about trying to live like it's 1917 in 2022 is that you still have access to all this 2022 technology to make it happen. A software engineer could pretty clearly choose to do the equivalent of 1-day-per-week's worth of work throughout the year by taking on freelance/consulting projects. Most software engineers don't do this for the simple fact that they'd rather work more and make more.
> You'll definitely not get a pay increase due to the higher productivity.
that's because the source of that productivity wasnt you - it was the invention and capital investment in that machine (which you happen to drive).
In a system which redistributes wealth, you'd get some returns (such as better public services). Under the current system of capitalism, there's not that much redistribution.
You're missing an important part of the equation. That 1920s lifestyle includes lower population density outside of the big cities, food that is organic by default, etc etc. You can't just look at the downsides.
nah, you would end up in jail and most of the supply chain that was there for what you call a "1920's lifestyle" is not there anymore. We criticize this way of living because we are stuck in it.
I am not making a point on whether workers work harder now than they did before. But at the same time, there are clearly ways in which we have had technological advancements that produce goods and services with less input (where 'input' includes natural resources, human labor, etc) than would have been required before these advancements. I used this example in another reply, but (just off the top of my head) computers + internet have allowed abundant knowledge lookup and communication for far less input cost than the services would have required previously.
Generalizing here, there is 'growth due to making people work harder' and 'growth due to inventing stuff that lets us do new things' and whatever your views are on each of these, I think most anti-growth articles ignore the latter.
You're misunderstanding the argument. Hours worked can remain the same while production and wealth increase. There are many jobs this isn't true of, but there are enough where it is true that that it can drive up housing costs. (A few rich people wouldn't be enough to do that, so there have to be lots of people.)
A better counter to this argument is that national averages are misleading and irrelevant for many people.
You’re not even disputing the parents point. More output with the same input doesn’t mean people are working less. It means they’re working the same amount…
free market policies. Proper Co-ops are designed not to exploit workers, local resources or destroy communities in order to create profit therefore have a hard time competing with ruthless profit-oriented companies in most markets. Co-ops create social value and are beneficial to workers and society alike, but they need to be nurtured actively.
On the other hand, less free market - which is what you get when you allow monopolies and oligopolies to dominate it - is harmful to them, just like any other business that's not "big enough".
That's a deep mischaracterization of positions against aging research. People are against because in the way it's conducted and given the existing social order, it will reinforce inequalities and make the world a worst place. If you are more privileged you will live longer and have more chances to concentrate money and power for yourself or your family and away from less privileged people.
This is even more the case in a world on the verge of ecological and social collapse where the age expectancy is lowering.
If you are more privileged you will live longer and have more chances to concentrate money and power for yourself or your family and away from less privileged people.
It doesn't have to be that way, even in our current system.
Metformin was discovered in 1922 and is very low-cost to make. It's available over the counter in many countries but in the US and the EU, you currently need a prescription.
It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines [1].
It's used primarily for treating type 2 diabetes. What got noticed is diabetes patients on metformin (on average) outlived otherwise healthy people who didn't have diabetes.
Turns out it activates some of the longevity pathways being discussed on this thread. People on Metformin are also less likely to die from the diseases of old age: cancer, Alzheimer's and heart disease.
Now many doctors are prescribing off-label for patients who want it.
There's a major clinical trial going on to see if aging can be treated with metformin [2].
Metformin costs pennies per day to take, so you don't need to be affluent or privileged to afford it.
Wealthier societies and individuals always get the first shot at new technologies, so this is a general argument against any improvement until we've established global communism. Cancer treatments and Covid vaccines have not made the world worse despite being unevenly distributed.
It's a particularly bad argument here because mitigating the harmful effects of aging would result in massive reductions in medical expenses. Governments and insurance companies would be highly incentivized to get them to as many people as possible.
No, it's not an argument against improvement, it's an argument against inequalities. Fighting inequalities is fundamental to unleash the potential of medical technologies. Potential that cannot be reached under the current economic model that is hindering research, progress and wellbeing.
The argument about medical expenses doesn't make any sense: it's more profitable to have sick people living longer and increare their medical expenses. The failure of the American healthcare system is proof that a market economy is not fit for healthcare.
The argument about medical expenses doesn't make any sense: it's more profitable to have sick people living longer and increare their medical expenses. The failure of the American healthcare system is proof that a market economy is not fit for healthcare.
Profitable for who, exactly? Companies, individuals, the state, or whole society? For that matter, which companies are we talking about?
It's not true: their labor is a scarce resource and often they have plenty of choice who to give it to. They could go work for other things instead of dystopic nightmare projects like Facebook or Amazon.
Anyway the working class Jews had nothing to do with Germany's economic problems but that didn't stop the Holocaust. It takes nothing to make scapegoats.
It's already a political topic: for example movements for affordable rent are trying to incorporate a narrative of "it's not the single programmer the problem, it's speculation and the market" because there anti-tech sentiment already translates to aggressions in many cities against tech workers and tech companies.
I agree that choice in employer is relevant, but my impression is that the influence of developers is often disregarded completely. The decisions in corporation comes mostly from the top.
It is also an opportunity because it allows you to learn a lot in such an environment. Facebook management isn't stupid, they know the angles to push for developers to rationalize their work as something beneficial, how to make people feel important and peoples overconfidence blinds them to see a broader picture. Some just withdraw themselves from that and just focus on the technical side. Not a good excuse of course.
I know a lot of people expected more from classical software nerds, more from the internet and its effects. And it was something to rely on for a time. But overall user behavior was much more influential. People bought at Amazon because it is convenient. They shared their lives on Facebook to compete against each other. They did not care about the consequences either for whatever reason.
Many hate these developments too and maybe devs could search employment elsewhere, but it would not change that much as ultimately they are replaceable too.
Honestly, don't give those with animosity a noble lie. I think some devs could very well profit from having that sentiment being screamed in their faces because they can see the problem as well but believe it is what people want or they even hope for people from outside the industry to make some noise.
except big tech is destroying lives throughout the world and most of the population from San Francisco to Rural Kenya to the suburbs of Canberra are impacted and so people take sides.
