https://rushkoff.medium.com/if-it-aint-real-don-t-fix-it-c080b27f82c5
"While giving a recent television interview about promise and peril AI, I was
asked about the inevitable “unemployment problem.” What would we do about all
the jobs that would be lost to AI? I paused, then almost jokingly responded,
“what if it’s not an unemployment problem but the unemployment solution?” It
may sound like a jest, but who wants a job, really, anyway? Jobs are actually a
rather recent invention, created after the establishment of “chartered
monopolies” that made it illegal for any small business to compete with one of
the king’s officially chartered companies. Instead of making shoes and selling
them at the market, the cobbler now had to work for His Majesty’s Royal Shoe
Company — a favored merchant who offered a kickback to the Crown for the
exclusive right to monopolize the sector.
In fact, that’s the moment in European history when the clock went on the
highest tower in the town, as if to “naturalize” the human invention of wage
labor and the power that embedded in the earliest corporations. Until that
moment, the only people who sold their time were indentured servants. Five
hundred years later, we accept such employment as a condition of nature. This
is the history I chronicled in my book
Life Inc, which sought to demonstrate
that both central currency and corporations were invented by particular people
with particular agendas at a particular moment in history. We need not accept
them as fixed features of our world. As the book’s flap copy plainly announces,
“This didn’t just happen.”
That’s why the first intervention to change the register that I’m calling
for—the one that’s a prerequisite for all the others—is to
denaturalize
power. This simply means helping people recognize the underlying assumptions
embedded in our world: inventions and social constructions that we mistakenly
accept as conditions of nature. We are misconstruing the maps for the
territory, and must work to reveal their origins, manufacture, biases and
agendas."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
