- cross-posted to:
- socialism@beehaw.org
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- socialism@beehaw.org
- technews@radiation.party
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
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because we ran a simple experiment in 2020 where we all (but a select few) just ‘stopped’, and there were no material Ill effects.
The lockdowns of 2020 were a proof that the world is absolutely fungible in regards to how we interact with it. We could change our opinions tomorrow and basically solve climate change. Most human labor and effort is just used kinda putzing around proving ones utility. It’s mostly just bullshit to keep an extravaganza of consumption going, but 99% of it offers no material benefit to anyone.
So yeah, like, we got the data. Most jobs are bullshit. We could almost all not have jobs and the world would keep on spinning.
On top of that, knowing that the main reason you have to work is because of a modern slavery that just considers that you have to serve people who were born in a rich family or scammed their way to the top, and even having a “meaningful” job becomes meaningless.
I’m usually self-contained when it comes to this subject. “But”…
Keynes wrote that, after increasing technological efficiency, people would gradually work less and less until our biggest problem would be to fill up all the leisure time we had.
Was that before or after being jailed for vandalism? :^)
Okay, I’m half-joking, to highlight that Keynesian economy followed by the letter leads to the broken window fallacy. Now to be serious, give this a check:
What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor? // First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. […]
That’s Marx, from 1844. A “bullshit job” is just a pop name for a job that alienates your labour from its output. A bullshit job has some output because otherwise it wouldn’t exist on first place, but the worker himself sees that output as non-existent, unnecessary, or meaningless.
