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Buckminster Fuller on technology and useless jobs
- edoo 8y agoI don't get these casual Marxism support articles. Something like 150 million people died the last century due to the ideology.
- sbenitoj 8y agoYep! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
- rosser 8y agoNo-one ever counts the dead that "wealth" and its pursuits created like this. Why is that? Are all of the slaves, and people who died in crap working conditions, and victims of colonialism and profit-driven wars and on and on and on just "necessary sacrifices" for progress, or something?
- sbenitoj 8y agoUm, WAY more people have died and been assaulted in former colonies than died or were assaulted during colonial rule (see Egypt and South Africa). The ethics of colonization can be debated, I’m certainly not an advocate of it, but the safety of the citizens living then vs now can’t be, it’s at least an order of magnitude more dangerous to live in Egypt and South Africa now than during colonial rule.
- monocasa 8y agoThe power struggles of post colonial time frames don't have nothing to do with the colonial rule. In a lot of places the goal of the colonial power was to leave the former colony in as shitty of a position as possible. For instance the French had orders to remove every bit of copper, iron, and steel on their way out of Guinea, going so far as to pull wires out of walls. When you wreak entire countries economies like that and leave a power vacuum, what do you expect to happen? And BTW, the whole "the savages are better with a little civilization forced on them" was one of the primary arguments in favor of slavery.
- sbenitoj 8y agoMy claim was in response to rosser's claim about "victims of colonialism" -- no doubt there were plenty, but there have been many, many more victims of poor government (and counting) in those countries (again, see Egypt and South Africa) since the fall of colonialism. I'm also not aware that the goal of colonialism was to "leave the former colony in as shitty of a position as possible" (seems like a pretty shitty way to treat an investment, which is what colonies were -- expansions of empires) -- care to provide some sources? Colonialism primarily fell as a result of internal political struggles within developed nations, not as a result of any legitimate physical threat by the colonized country.
- monocasa 8y ago> I'm also not aware that... It was the goal of _decolonization_. Edit: And my point is that making a hard separation between colonial and post colonial circumstances is a mistake, as many of the post colonial issues trace their reasons to colonial decisions.
- rosser 8y agoI'm inclined to quibble mildly with 'monocasa's phrasing, but the ultimate point still obtains that the post-colonial conditions in those countries are, in no small part, rather direct consequences of the rapacity of their colonizers. If the Dutch had left Rhodesia even marginally less resource-stripped, can you really assert that Zimbabwe would have played out like it did? If the French hadn't treated the Cambodian and Vietnamese peoples like it did, would Pol Pot even have happened? If we (the US) hadn't propped up puppet assholes around the world, would those countries and their regions have fallen into the states they did after? The entirety of the current mess in Middle East can, in a very real way, be traced back to dividing up Kurdish territory into multiple countries, because the colonial powers recognized that the Kurds were the greatest real threat to the oil flowing. Literally drawing lines on maps right through the heart of their historical lands fixed that — temporarily. Now, though, we've got the House of Saud and Iran (another great example; the Shah much?) and Iraq (another!) and Syria, and, net, a death and misery toll we will never be able to fully reckon. Consequences are a thing. Our system has a cost in other people's lives. Is that supposed to be better than having a cost in our own? I repudiate that notion. The GPS coordinates of your birth do not alter the intrinsic value of your life.
- temptemptemp111 8y agoExactly... "Open Culture" sounds like "Open Society (Foundation)" - People seem to weak to globalist propaganda.
- 420codebro 8y agoYeah, but trust us this time. (/s)
- dang 8y agoPlease don't take HN threads into generic ideological flamewar. There's nothing new in them, therefore are boring, therefore are off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- edoo 8y agoSo if someone posted a Nazi support article it would be wrong to point out how murderous and evil they are? I did not try to start a flame war, I am just pointing out how murderous and evil Marxism is. It was the ideology of the Nazis.
- orthecreedence 8y agoHang on, have you read Marx at all? He's not calling for mass genocide or a complete eugenics movement. Marx didn't kill all those people, the dictators (mistakenly) thinking they were acting on his behalf did. And if you do actually read Marx, you'll understand he's more critiquing capitalism than anything else. Marx didn't invent socialism or communism. Those ideas already existed. Marx simple put a fresh coat of paint on ideas people have been interested in for a long time. If you have a meaningful issue with the socialized means of production, please, let's hear it. But blaming someone who said "we should try to improve things for the people providing value to society" for mass genocide is a bit silly.
- edoo 8y agoMarxism is the idea you have the right to use violence against innocents to better your world. Capitalism is simple freedom. Attacking your own society is the basis, exactly like all the dictators did. Words like "improving" are weasel words, completely subjective. Their idea of improving a society is exactly what I would do to destroy one.
- dang 8y agoAll grandiose rhetoric about mass ideology is off topic here. Please don't post any more like this to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Smithalicious 8y agoI do not at all buy into the idea that many people are doing jobs not worth doing or that we are on the verge of running out of worthwhile things to do.
- notfromhere 8y agoHave you worked in a corporate office before?
- sosodev 8y agoI can imagine entire swathes of my office being eliminated after a manager figures out how to use Zapier or Microsoft Flow.
- notfromhere 8y agoyour average office worker on all levels probably does ~20 hours of real, meaningful work on any given week.
- PaulHoule 8y agoA significant fraction of people, if asked, will tell you that they believe the work they do has no value. That includes a wide range of people from gas station attendants to high-middling corporate dudes. Other people might think differently, maybe that person is depressed, maybe they are depressed because of factors at work -- nevertheless it is a real sentiment.
- dominotw 8y agoI as a software engineer feel the same way. There are way too many ppl in on the scam at any sized corporate comapnies. Mangers inflate the value and effort of their work, workers inflate and overestimate all the way up to the chain.
- notfromhere 8y ago
- rosser 8y agoThe busy-ness of business and our general obligation to "earn our keep" have squandered more human potential than every other stupid thing we've ever done, combined. How many Einsteins never left the patent office? What other contributions were never made, because dude who could have made them decided food and shelter were more important than aspiration? That is a societal loss, and we only have ourselves to blame for it.
- lukifer 8y agoWhile a great deal of jobs create non-zero-sum value, and many people thrive in their roles (in a Maslow self-actualization sense), a significant subset of the labor market seems to exist only from a slavish devotion to the social ritual of "jobs" for their own sake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- nine_k 8y agoOK, people have to be fired from such jobs, because they produce negative value. It's not these people's fault, though. Imagine that they are fired. How do they earn their subsistence? Earth is now too crowded to live by hunting, and subsistence farming is even worse than wage slavery. The only available option is some kind of organized work for the marketplace.
- majewsky 8y agoSince they, as you say, "produce negative value", this means that there is enough value produced to sustain everyone already. It's just a matter of distribution. That's very briefly why Marx argued for communism.
- mymythisisthis 8y agoI've bounced around and worked in many different kinds of jobs. From my experience; people identify themselves by what they do, the majority of work is 'make-work', people really want to learn new things, the worst type of knowledge is 'internal knowledge'. 'Internal Knowledge', is the paperwork that goes into knowing a specific job in a company. It multiplies rapidly as managers keep inventing more of it to protect their positions. It is useless, and cannot be used in another company. Companies use it as a form of punishment, you have to do this in our particular way or you won't get promoted. But from what I've seen, people are dying to learn new things. Companies just don't want to teach employees anything new, so they won't leave and find another job. I've worked factory jobs, where this was the defacto policy. Don't teach any new skills to the new hires, they'll pickup and leave.
- quxbar 8y agoExactly why volunteered for Andrew Yang 2020!
- beat 8y agoAndrew Yang is the only candidate who seems to me to be actually serious about the future. Everyone else, it's either liberals saying that our problems can be solved by more 1960s welfare and 1970s regulation, or conservatives saying our problems can be solved by less 1960s welfare and 1970s regulation. Andrew Yang is the only candidate who isn't working from a 50 year old playbook.
- mfoy_ 8y agoRegardless on your feelings about "socialism", you have to ask yourself: What will happen when automation comes for more and more jobs? If the means of production are all automated, what does that mean for our society? Do we rail against automation in order to retain traditional jobs? How would that be materially different from Keynes' idea of economic stimulus by making jobs to dig holes and them in again?
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoWhat happened when automation came for farmers' jobs? They went to work in factories. The result was that we had at least as much food as before, but we also had cars and refrigerators and washing machines. Don't think of jobs as employing people. Think instead of society spending people on jobs. When we didn't have to spend a third of our people on growing food, we were able to spend them on manufacturing, and society was better off. If we don't have to spend as many on manufacturing, we're able to spend more of them on computer programming, and society is better off. If we can automate less-valuable work, we can spend our people on more valuable work. For any individual person without a job, this isn't necessarily a good deal. "You lost the thing you knew how to do, now you have to go learn how to do something harder." That's uncomfortable. We as a society need to do better at helping them learn the next thing. But the concern seems to be that we're going to run out of "next things". What if there's no work to be done? I don't think we're close to getting there. It's like the farmer wondering what will happen when the factories have produced a car for everyone, and so there's no need for factory workers any more - not knowing that factories are going to produce more than cars, and that factory work isn't the final stage of the economy.
- mfoy_ 8y agoI agree we're not that close to complete automation. But one day we will be. What then? Society needs to have some sort of plan in place for people when there are too few, too difficult jobs left.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
- bovermyer 8y agoThe problem with eliminating work (which we're getting pretty good at) is that we don't then have a system to support people who don't work. In order for A to not have a negative effect, you have to have B.
- beat 8y agoWhy? The productivity is there. 95% of the labor input of farming has been wiped out over the past 200 years, and yet hunger is a smaller problem than it has ever been in the course of human history. The anarchist Bob Black had plenty of interesting things to say about this, but a good generalization of one of his key thoughts is that any job worth doing will have people volunteering to do it. If no one ever had to want for anything in terms of food or shelter, we'd still have firemen. We'd still have doctors. We'd still have farmers. We'd still have teachers. These are all jobs with intrinsic meaning, beyond the paycheck.
- nilskidoo 8y agoAs with communism, or democracy for that matter, faith in humanity looks great on paper but never actually seems to work out in practice.
- beat 8y agoThat's just platitude. My faith in humanity is grounded in the reality of what we have accomplished, especially over the past century.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- angstrom 8y agoSee: Healthcare Insurance Companies Employs millions, but is ultimately a nationwide make work program to satisfy congressional districts. USA encourages a byzantine system that substitutes waste for the appearance of choice.
- temparoo 8y agoSure, it would be wonderful if everyone had free health care and universal basic income, but how are we going to pay for it? In the US we're already $22 trillion in Federal debt, not including state debt and trillions we're going to owe to retiring baby boomers and federal employees.
- lewis500 8y ago“We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery…. He must justify his right to exist.” This is a framing designed to get attention but is obviously empty. "We" don't "invent" jobs. There isn't some big council of job inventors we all sit on with the purpose of giving everyone a right to exist. People and organizations decide to hire people for various reasons, and people sign up to be hired---usually so they can make money. Jobs are agreements between people. This is true even of government jobs in a democratic society: people are hired by various government agencies which, with a couple of jobfare exceptions, hire people for reasons of their own---not because of a mandate to make up jobs for people. This is a plea to an imaginary decision-maker.
- beat 8y agoEh. Supply and demand matters. There's a supply of labor even for bullshit jobs, in part because of a lack of reasonable alternatives to having a job. If there was something people could do that didn't pose a direct threat to their own safety that didn't involve "job" (you know, like UBI), then jobs would have to compete much harder for employees - better wages, or more importantly, being intrinsically rewarding. Of course, it's quite possible for the supply of workers to exceed the demand for workers. It's not a pretty sight - read up on the Great Depression for example. And that seems to be exactly where we're headed right now. People who once worked in jobs that no longer exist thanks to technological advance and market forces, who have no alternative ways to make a living, and are getting shamed as lazy moochers for it. That's how revolutions happen.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoThere may be a supply of labor for such jobs, but why is there a demand for it? If I run a company, my goal is not to hire a bunch of people to do useless "work". I want as few such people as possible, not just because I have to pay them, but also because they slow everyone else down doing the work that actually earns money. In a capitalist economy where inefficient firms can go bankrupt, why is there demand for people who will do useless work? One possible answer is that we don't actually live in a capitalist society - that government influence prevents real capitalism from happening. There is some truth to that position, but I doubt that people who promote the "useless jobs" theory think that less government involvement is the solution. I think the correct answer is that the "useless jobs" theory is flawed. No company is deliberately hiring people to do useless work. (Some empire-building managers within companies may do so, however.) The jobs are useless because of inefficiency in the company, not by design, and a more efficient company would find something real for those people to do.
- gwbas1c 8y ago> We could stop inventing bullshit, low-paying, wasteful jobs that contribute to cycles of poverty and environmental degradation. We could slash the number of hours we work and spend time with people and pursuits we love. The problem, ultimately, originates from greed for material possessions. It also originates for a need for meaningful work and contribution to society. I'd love a world where, if I quit my job, I could live in subsidized housing with free food and transportation. But how do we "pay" for it? Yes, in theory, we can automate so much food, shelter, and energy production that the cost of living is so low that it's essentially free. IMO: The way to do this is to keep the bullshit jobs, but figure out how to let people retire young. Perhaps there can be some kind of government-managed program where, once someone performs 1-10 years of full-time, minimum-wage work, there's enough money in the system to sustain that person in government-managed housing, with government-managed food, clothing, ect. At that point, work becomes truly optional. Furthermore, for people who choose full-time work, we can also do things like pair cost reductions in housing and transportation with shorter loans. Instead of targeting lower monthly payments, we can target shorter terms.
- NavyNuke 8y ago> "...to sustain that person in government-managed housing, with government-managed food, clothing, ect." This sounds like a nightmare and to me it wouldn't feel like I'm free at all...being so dependent on the government seems like a terrible idea...Who would want to be so reliant on the government for such basic needs?
- gwbas1c 8y agoI propose it as completely optional. You basically can choose to depend on the government at a very young age, or have a career for more material wealth. That's why I suggest working towards shortening loan payments, so someone can have a career and get similar benefits.
- jelliclesfarm 8y agoExcept there are limited resources. We haven’t learnt to exist without a parasitic relationship to something/someone else. And that ‘host’ as it were..is constrained and not limitless. Even the sun will disappear after a time..admittedly after a very very very long passage of time..but even solar energy ..our sun’s energy..isn’t ‘renewable’ in the bigger picture. Also.. about the occurrence of more Mozarts..and Einsteins...they will be tempered with more Hitlers and depressingly even higher proportion of ‘average joes’ who will all consume more than they produce. That’s when the cart will tilt and tip. I fear we have all passed carrying capacity long time ago. For our planet, about a billion is a good number. If we want to be ‘fruitful and multiply’ we will have to find other suitable habitats for ourselves or alter ourselves(genetically is one way) to be compatible with our new environment. This is assuming there is no other life forms out there that is already completing and searching for resources. Having said that, I have become more comfortable with the notion that rather than numbers, quality of being is better. Human evolution is random mutations. We are products of a chaotic unpredictable fickle system. That’s scary. I wouldn’t want to perpetuate or encourage it unless we have some understanding or grasp over who we are and where we are..
- hirundo 8y agoThe purpose of every job is to change the world in the way that employer wants it changed. Employers employ people for no other reason. But I don't think Fuller is saying all of these jobs are useless to their employers. It's more "these jobs are useless to me, to the goals that I support and understand." I think that just means that Fuller's goals aren't aligned with these employers. He wants to accomplish different things, and people trying to accomplish other things look useless to him. Reshaping the world to be closer to a given ideal may well be foolish and frequently is. But the proper judge of the usefulness of a job is the person paying for it, not a remote intellectual.
- chrisco255 8y agoThey're not just useful to the employer, but useful to the customer that the employer serves. This mindset of work being above certain jobs is completely alien to me. The truth is that capitalism is less selfish than communism, because you have to negotiate and produce something that is valuable to others. We can imagine that society would be well served if we all spent time on our own hobby projects, or if we could subsidize artists to produce creative works...but what about the great bulk of hobby projects and creative works that are ultimately not valuable or desirable to society as a whole? That is to say, there's nothing wrong with pursuing hobby projects for your own sake and your own satisfaction. But doing that to the exclusion of what people need and want, and then having society subsidize that...that's wasteful and inefficient. It's part of the core reason why communism fails as an economic model. There's no such thing as a bullshit job.
- benatkin 8y ago> The purpose of every job is to change the world in the way that employer wants it changed. Change the world by polluting it more? The idea that employers' actions are motivated by changing the world is a very idealistic view of business. They may have that idea at the start but that idea gets lost very quickly when actually doing stuff. Plus people from other common professions like doctors and lawyers want to change the world. Wanting to change the world says more about youth than it does about the field of business administration.
- 8y ago
- ve55 8y agoNot to be confused with Buckminsterfullerene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene), the interesting fullerene inadvertently named after Buckminster Fuller.
- jessriedel 8y agoCan't tell if you're being sarcastic about "inadvertently". The molecule was named buckminsterfullerene after the man Buckminster Fuller. ("-ene" is a word ending for molecules.) Chemists then developed a more general class of molecules which they named "fullerenes", of which the buckminsterfullerene is a special case.
- ve55 8y agoI have read the Wikipedia page I linked so I was aware of it, sorry if my choice of words appeared poor.
- pedro1976 8y agoIMO the premise "everyone needs to work in a corp" is already wrong. The question should be what do so everyone can live a good life. Maybe some want to work to have a good live, others not. The next question would then be if and how a society can afford the individual live styles. Lets discuss in a more philosophic, post-capitalistic way.