There is a fundamental misunderstanding in this piece about what the real problem is. Productivity and automation are great, fundamental things that fully trans

There is a fundamental misunderstanding in this piece about what the real problem is. Productivity and automation are great, fundamental things that fully transformed the human condition for the better. The office and factory automation mentioned are just the latest steps in a technological journey that took people out of the caves and into flying machines, allowing even the poorest in our societies luxuries that not even kings dreamt of. I simply don't care if your CNC machine-sitting job bores you and it's making you anxious about your skills as lathe worker: quit that job and do something you like, and let some unemployed off the streets operate the CNC. Regardless of who is doing the sitting, that machine will produce so much more parts, cheaper and better that one skilled worker could. And herein lies the problem. The real problem. The lathe worker turned CNC-sitter or the skilled typist inhaling copier ozone aren't oppressed by "productivity culture", whatever that may mean, they are oppressed by a highly polarized jobs market that no longer offers them alternatives at their professional level. So they are forced to accept dumbed down machine work that anyone could do, for less pay. It's as if a great chasm has opened: you are either a highly skilled professional in some un-automated market that can still wield power against capital due to your very rarefied skill-set, or some version of the manual labor monkey pushing buttons for a near minimum wage. Automation has transformed economy and greatly improved our standards of living, but has also robed workers of their human capital, the only leverage they traditionally had against financial capital. The resurgence of unions is just a simptom of workers grasping for some form of leverage in a labor market that turned against them. The dramatic rise in inequality is another. What machines we are pushing against are the limits of human society to create and use high creativity jobs, the biological limits of humans to adapt to the intelectual requirements of such jobs, and the strongly ossified structure of academia and class that fundamentally prevent most people from even entering social groups that beget such jobs.