If you smile and ask the barista how their day is, then the interaction isn’t faceless.
Servants Without Masters
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Servants Without Masters
#42I feel Ike the feeling of being served on our society has everything to do with economic equality. There are professions that pay more or less, and people with professions that pay more are able to afford services that people with lesser paying professions can provide. Using words like "profession" and "service" tend to imply that these are normal, usual things that happen in "free" societies, a.k.a. capitalistic soc…
There are still economies of scale i.e. it's a lot easier for me to make 100 lunches than for 100 people to make their own lunch. That's aside from how good I'll get at making lunches after making 100 every day.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#43The reason hierarchical relationships always seem to exist in the context of an organization, is that that's why civilization invented organizations in the first place. To mediate and de-personalize power.
To get large-scale things done in the world, some people need to make plans and other people need to carry them out. And the last 5000 years of civilization has been an exercise in defining exactly how people are expected to do that.
In a fully developed civilization (which we are, at least, approaching) power dynamics between people are always contained in an institutional framework with explicit limits and rights. Otherwise, power tends to get abused.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#44> It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me. >And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of soci…
> who can both walk across the street and afford the same level of service The people (often of color) who work in the back of the nice restaurants everyone with means loves to eat at can't afford to eat there, much less live near their work. The nannies who take care of the children of high earners (enabling them to be high earners and avoid the stress of a big chunk of parenting) can't afford to have nannies for th…
Having spoken with some homeless people I think many of the people working in the back of the restaurant actually do "live" quite nearby.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny, a personal servant makes us uneasy, but a personal/executive assistant does not. What’s the difference? They’re both employees and both are being paid to do tasks that need to get done but aren’t worth their boss’s time. Is it the extra indirection of the salary coming from company instead of personal coffers that does it? What if the person hiring the assistant has 100% ownership of the company like in the ca…
When I had a corporate job, the administrative assistant to the big boss in my department had real power as de facto gatekeeper and seemed to be quite well compensated. It's a role that would have been called secretary at one time. The title change was intended to show more respect and try ditch some historical social baggage for such jobs.
Which is an example of the the euphemism treadmill. Secretary means secret-keeper and has built into it connotations at least of trust and often of power. Which is why top officials of many great ministries ion are called secretaries.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I had a corporate job, the administrative assistant to the big boss in my department had real power as de facto gatekeeper and seemed to be quite well compensated. It's a role that would have been called secretary at one time. The title change was intended to show more respect and try ditch some historical social baggage for such jobs.
Which is an example of the the euphemism treadmill. Secretary means secret-keeper and has built into it connotations at least of trust and often of power. Which is why top officials of many great ministries ion are called secretaries . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Xgd7Cjm98
Yeah, that had occured to me. It just didn't really seem pertinent to this particular discussion. It struck me as a tangent, so I opted to not get into it.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is an example of the the euphemism treadmill. Secretary means secret-keeper and has built into it connotations at least of trust and often of power. Which is why top officials of many great ministries ion are called secretaries . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Xgd7Cjm98
Yeah, that had occured to me. It just didn't really seem pertinent to this particular discussion. It struck me as a tangent, so I opted to not get into it.
Fair enough.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#48Institutions, rather than individuals, as masters, makes the master - servant relationship far more consensual. You choose to serve others in the context of a job, and when that job's over, they no longer have any power over you.
A personal master servant relationship carries over to places where the servant may not consent to. It's a personal relationship, meaning it encompasses your entire person. It's far harder shed that relationship than it is a job.
Making the master role institutional, and one where the person filling it is interchangeable, also means that it's meritocratic. Anyone can fill the master's role, because it's ultimately about how useful they can be in that role (e.g. by spending more money), rather than about them having a personal status of 'master', which they need not contribute value to maintain.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#49> It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me. >And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of soci…
Not "income inequality", but inequality in the marginal disutility of labor. Someone who works many hours per week in high-effort jobs will be eager to outsource even trivial tasks to a "gig economy" worker who is in a sharply different position. That worker may have f!!k-you money of their own and be working at an "easy" job to make some extra change, for all we know - the exchange works all the same, and leaves bot…
> That worker may have f!!k-you money of their own and be working at an "easy" job to make some extra change, for all we know
I would bet that is incredibly uncommon compared to the obvious alternative, which is someone working to make ends meet at the best job they can find because of who knows what constraints.
Without data, it seems disingenuous to suggest otherwise, although I'm sure it's the kind of thing Uber employees tell themselves.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#50If you smile and ask the barista how their day is, then the interaction isn’t faceless.
Then they smile, and say 'great, thankyou!', except actually their dog died the other day, and they're just saying that because their manager is right there, and the company policy is 'service with a smile'.