Sunday, June 3, 2018

Bullshit Jobs and the Pseudo-Knowledge Economy

How is it possible that nobody noticed when humanity passed a threshold as significant as the industrial revolution or arguably even the neolithic agricultural revolution about half a century ago? What looks like bullshit jobs give us a clue.
Jobs are bullshit because the real knowledge economy was strangled in the cradle and replaced with an ongoing society-wide performance art piece designed to keep everyone confused enough that the current system seems if not exactly reasonable, then at least the only imaginable option.
The result is a fragmented obsolete directing class, the subordination of knowledge production to the reproduction of the obsolete social structures, the deployment of massive apparatuses of befuddlement, hyper-alienated knowledge workers with an inverted pay scale, stagnation in all the leading economies that has enabled formerly lagging economies to catch up, and large number of people with jobs they recognize as not contributing to society, in other words bullshit jobs.
To run a real knowledge economy, we have to do two things at once: we have to motivate those doing all the work and we have to release all the knowledge to be shared freely. In a pre-post-scarcity economy, motivate largely means monetarily compensate, but it does not always have to mean that. Knowledge does not want to be free in the sense of not being funded, but it does want to be free in the sense of untrammeled.
In the actually existing world, knowledge is both trammeled to ensure that someone can collect monopoly rent on it and contaminated in order to protect powerful interests, for example big pharma and tobacco and oil companies. It is as though we live in the post-comet world of 55 million years ago, but all the decisions about how to restore the devastated biosphere are being made by the last few dinosaurs. For some funny reason, none of the decisions the dinos make seem to work out all too well for any of the other species, you know the ones that actually have the capacity to regenerate life.
One of the reasons why it was so easy to not see the real knowledge economy being smothered at birth was that, contrary to my colorful metaphor about the dinosaur-killing comet, the changeover was gradual.
The foundations of the knowledge economy were created by the industrial economy. That was the whole point of the industrial economy. There was no small amount of consensus on that spanning from fascist industrialists to the revolutionary left. That is one major difference between the industrial economy and the current pseudo-knowledge economy. The industrial economy had a point.
Plant and infrastructure were improved qualitatively and built out quantitatively until most of the work that had once required the manual labor of nearly the entire human race could now be performed by a small fraction of the population and with massively more output. Education levels were raised by orders of magnitude. Sometime in the post-war era, while large parts of the population in the first world were finally enjoying the fruits of the hard, often brutally hard, work of the previous century and a half, the prerequisites were ready for an economy powered primarily by knowledge rather than by plant and infrastructure.
What ensued was the post-scarcity paradise that we know today. Well, OK, no, what happened was that control over the emergent knowledge economy remained in the hands of the folks who had, having successfully suppressed more humane alternatives, controlled the industrial economy. Up to this point, even if they did a needlessly brutal job of it, the directing classes actually had a historical function: to build the prerequisites for the knowledge economy. More precisely, they got everyone else to build them, but the point is that under their rule, they did get built. Once that task was complete, the existing directing class no longer had any function. They were obsolete.
The exact mechanisms by which the obsolescence of the directing class causes the broad social degeneration of which bullshit jobs are one aspect is worth figuring out in detail. Here is a first take.
As obsolete as the directing class was becoming, it was still in power. In the resulting pseudo-knowledge economy, the production and distribution of knowledge was thoroughly subordinated to the reproduction of the existing power relations. The forms that had evolved under the industrial economy to deal with knowledge, patents, copyrights, etc. continued to be used to constrain knowledge so that it could be treated like a material object. This had long been the case, so in a certain sense, this was not a change, but whereas crippling of knowledge in an industrial economy had fairly low impact, this same crippling in a knowledge-driven economy became crucial. The ability of knowledge to be reproduced and shared at nearly no cost was eliminated. Post-scarcity Superman, meet kryptonite.

Because this shift occurred within societies in which the fine arts of consumerist befuddlement had been raised to a high level, little of this was visible. Advertising, public relations, and the rest of the befuddler strata are the original bullshit industry par excellence and they are the model industry that much of knowledge production has been transformed to resemble. In recent years, forcing large parts of the work force to market itself has spread this model through much of the economy and is responsible for bullshitification of many jobs that might otherwise be bearable.

We might date the onset of the pseudo-knowledge economy to The Sixties, at least in the U.S. Mass university education was turning out a work force ready for a knowledge economy, students looked at the crippled jobs they were being offered, freaked out, and tuned in, turned on, and dropped out, for a while anyway. The obsolete directing class and its top servants launched a counter-attack to block avenues of input from the hoi polloi even though that meant cutting the flow of information from bottom to top.

Because the directing class had become obsolete, no purpose held it together other than continued power for its own sake. What we have now is more like what astronomers call a dirty snowball comet, only loosely bound together. The shards of what once was the directing class only coalesce in order to protect themselves from visible challenges, as seen for example in the coordinated paramilitary assaults on the Occupy movement. However, the directing class is no longer capable of disciplining its own rapaciousness even for its own long-term benefit. Our modern day Rome acts less like the unified on-going slave empire that Rome was and more like the separate plundering barbarian hordes that brought it down.
These hordes are quite willing to plunder each other too. A small example is campaign consultants who convince politicians to spend needlessly large amounts of money on ineffective campaigning. A large example is the way that directors rip off their own too big to fail financial institutions. Given how rigged the system is in favor of those financial firms, this is the only way such firms could reach the edge of bankruptcy.
The inability of the directing class to discipline its own members even when they nearly bring the entire system crashing down proves that we no longer have a functioning directing class. The US directing class in the 1930s was quite able to do this.
This also means that it is all the more important for the directing classes that any classes that might have a different agenda be kept either in feudal submission or confusion or even better, both.
Knowledge workers, whose deformation is the key to sustaining a pseudo-knowledge economy, are generally better paid, although in many cases, pay is inversely proportional to actual usefulness to society. University presidents are massively overpaid to at best do nothing, while adjuncts are systematically underpaid but do actually useful work. This is because knowledge workers are primarily tasked and paid not with creating and spreading knowledge but with protecting the existing power structure
Knowledge workers are enfiefed by the deals required to get their better pay.
The deal with technical knowledge workers is amorality. “You just code the code and let us worry about the uses your work is put to. That facial recognition technology? Oh, that’s for finding missing children. Excuse me, I have to get to my meeting with the NSA. What? Today is the guy from the Chinese Communist Party?”
The deal with that portion of the care workers who are professionalized is that they pretend not to notice that many of the problems they are tasked to solve are social not just individual. The deal with administrators is simply to stay in role. Top knowledge work administrators are basically paid to not-see.
In a pseudo-knowledge economy, many knowledge workers are hyper-alienated in the sense that not only are the fruits of their work turned against them, but the very act of working is turned against them.
It is hard to know which of these three deals is more crazy making, but one of the secondary toxicities of the pseudo-knowledge economy is that inner technologies such as yoga and meditation, which humanity developed over thousands of years and which have liberatory potential far beyond what could be unleashed in pre-industrial economies, have been turned into mental palliatives for knowledge workers being driven mad by the irrationality of their jobs. The yoga pose of the current age is to be buried under bullshit, with a long thin straw sticking out in the air keeping you alive.
Fortunately, as much as the actually existing pseudo-knowledge economy strives to make all this seem natural, it is not. What are natural are curiosity and joy in creating or sustaining something good in the world. That is why we will find ways to create the kind of fulfilling societies that bullshit jobs are there to prevent.

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