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What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

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Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#741

Post by Gooblebrai »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

> how incredibly toxic the web has become

A reflection of human nature at scale?

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#742

Post by Macha »

altmanaltman wrote: post #733
estearum wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years? You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is , the…

Yeah + the world was much different than it is today. It trivializes the risk by saying we have seen it before and we were okay when its a fundamentally different problem in many aspects.

Also fails to distinguish between “society came out of it fine” (generally true) and “individuals came out of it fine” (much more mixed of a track record)

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#743

Post by chongli »

altmanaltman wrote: post #733
estearum wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years? You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is , the…

Yeah + the world was much different than it is today. It trivializes the risk by saying we have seen it before and we were okay when its a fundamentally different problem in many aspects.

How is the GGP post (by Animats) trivializing the risk? They're saying "it's a survival issue" and saying the printers became homeless and struggling to feed themselves.

Sounds much more like a warning than a dismissal to me. If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#744

Post by [deleted] »

dan_q wrote: post #709
mawadev wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why we go down the route of "us" vs "them" type of thinking. Have you considered both sides to be an abstract kind of hell?

The "us" vs "them" thought pattern is the essence of "Western" (read: white, European, colonialist) culture, dating back to Plato's Republic. Marimba Ani's seminal work Yurugu is a sociological study of this culture from a non-western perspective. I can't recommend it strongly enough if you want to understand the nexus of social/psychological/epistemic factors that sustain the "us" vs "them" thought pattern and its c…

[deleted]

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#745

Post by purplemoonx »

gamblor956 wrote: post #359
facepalm1 wrote: post #335

[flagged]

Thank you for proving my point. Enjoy being unemployable. You don't need to be an extrovert to be employed. I'm not, and neither are most of my coworkers. But you do need to not be a hyper-aggressive sack of negativity that emotionally drains everyone around you. So deal with that, and you might be able to land a job before you pass.

[flagged]

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#746

Post by soulofmischief »

altmanaltman wrote: post #733
estearum wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years? You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is , the…

Yeah + the world was much different than it is today. It trivializes the risk by saying we have seen it before and we were okay when its a fundamentally different problem in many aspects.

Right now, many people do not own property and are one missed paycheck away from homelessness.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#747

Post by gverrilla »

SauciestGNU wrote: post #196
janpeuker wrote: post #190

Linking Graeber's Bullshift Jobs to Workism via his concept of "spiritual violence" would have been a nice touch because it explains the drain despite the performativity (or what Baudrillard would call reproduction)

I'm just happy people are still talking about Situationists.

They're not. This is sanitized Debord, taught in many colleges nowadays. The author even admits it's "impenetrable" even though he's citing it. This is récupération.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#748

Post by lotsofpulp »

rr808 wrote: post #734
andix wrote: post #416

I have the feeling this goes much deeper than knowledge work and AI. I see it in many places that people seem to not take their job serious anymore. The incentive seems to be gone. Also their managers don't seem to care anymore, as they are also taking their job less seriously. I can't put a finger on it, but it's not about younger people or Gen Z, it also applies to older people. It just feels like good work doesn't…

I think 15 years of asset boom has made enormous fortunes not just for billionaires but for regular middle class folks and especially anything tech or finance related. When your investments make much more than your wages, its hard to care about your career but this is the norm now for lots of people around me.

This is inevitable in any system where the old want to maintain purchasing power over the young and the proportions of old are increasing relative to the young.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#749

Post by m463 »

Animats wrote: post #221

Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died. I've heard homeless former printers…

I found reading "The Box" about the change to containerized shipping to be an interesting way to gain perspective a huge change, from the outside.

On one hand, you could see how it was rewriting shipping, then manufacturing, globalization, etc.

they touched on how the unions handled things, how real estate near waterways was changed (manufacturing and warehousing), and more

But on the other hand you could see how obvious it was the changes were going to happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#750

Post by [deleted] »

chongli wrote: post #743
altmanaltman wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah + the world was much different than it is today. It trivializes the risk by saying we have seen it before and we were okay when its a fundamentally different problem in many aspects.

How is the GGP post (by Animats) trivializing the risk? They're saying "it's a survival issue" and saying the printers became homeless and struggling to feed themselves. Sounds much more like a warning than a dismissal to me. If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.

[deleted]
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