André Gorz predicted the revolt against meaningless work (2023)

related? David Graeber's On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/on-the-phenomenon-of-bulls...

it’s mentioned and linked a few paragraphs in so probably related

As people get older, they often come to realize that any job that puts a roof over ones head, food on the table, and allows quality time with friends and family, is meaningful work.

You know that this is bullshit right? We can all, regardless of our age, differentiate between meaningful and meaningless work. The fact that we need money to fulfil our obligations to our family, the bank or whatever it might be is completely separate from that. We can do meaningless jobs if we have to at any age. This does not make them meaningful. If a person, at any age, can choose between a meaningless and meaningful job - which do you think they would take?

If they have to choose between a meaningless job and starvation?

Cool. Now grow up and do some meaningful with your time. And so should I.

What you're describing is making work useful, not meaningful. More people nowadays are rejecting work that has no meaning, connection to identity and makes no use of their intellect, even if that work is a means of some income.

Attitudes like this are why the wealth gap keeps growing.

Maybe it’s an age gap thing, but I’ve come to realize this attitude is one many boomers have because they’re all doing ok. The rest of us need to course correct the mess they’ve left. The america they were born into might as well be a foreign country at this point.

This really downplays why people fight against "meaningless" work, it's not because of any philosophical grounds.

The real problem with meaningless work is it tends to be incredibly stressful. Because the underlying work creates no value, even locally (existentially of course it's all nil, but again, this isn't about that level of abstraction). The trouble with "no value" is that you also have no way know how to or even if you are doing your job "well".

Your description sounds pleasant, but my real experience with meaningless work is that it results in long hours worked, very aggressive office politics, and consistent insecurity around the future of your job and income.

The essence of "meaningless work" is captured very well in Kafka's The Trial. While their are brief moments where one can laugh at the absurdity of the situation, most of the time it sits in exact confrontation to the idyllic view of work you are proposing.

Which is funny because the only meaningful work is the work that puts a roof over someone's head, food on someone's table or provides entertainment for so people can enjoy their friends and family to have quality time together.

“Grow up do something useful with your time”?

No further comment is needed.

What I am describing is something called wisdom.

Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

What a great way to say to someone that their words could've had some value if they hadn't been too crude/maybe rude and said things in a different manner lol.

I don't agree with the author's standpoint but I can kinda understand it but their passive aggression on the parent comment was just not needed and this clever way of saying it was kinda cool. I learnt something new to say but I am not sure how many ways it would be viable to say this

Any other quotes like this that you might want to share?

There is some truth to this, but I think this way of thinking is overly simplistic. From a material standpoint, any job that can provide for you and your family's needs is "meaningful" since you can't really have a meaningful life without having basic needs provided for. From a spiritual standpoint, however, I think it is detrimental for someone to know that their job is largely pointless or achieves no tangible outcomes in the world. I think this same criticism applies to UBI and other "end of work" ideas, since a person with no job is likely to suffer from the same lack of purpose as someone who senses their job is BS. People are intrinsically wired to want to do work and make some kind of difference (even if that difference is just knowing that you helped manufacture 500 cars that day, dug a ditch that will be used for some useful purpose, whatever).

I actually don't understand what you or the article mean by "meaningful and meaningless work", the article approaches an explanation in one paragraph, but they seem to have left a lot to interpretation by the reader. Perhaps you could enlighten me?

>"In a system where, as Gorz puts it, “we produce nothing of what we consume, and consume nothing of what we produce,” it is up to each and every one of us, connecting with others as a collective mass, to regain control over the meaning of work and over the determination of the needs that legitimize it. This is also the way for us to question the disastrous impact that the economy is having on the environment through its blind logic of profit and growth."

> The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ’60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Isn't this sort of similar to 1984 Like they had ways to provide enough but they wouldn't because then they would lose the power or something similar

If Covid conditions had gone on longer, decades, then output would have gone down, the treasury from which subsidies and government checks came from would have dried up. Even bullshit jobs add to GDP. Even socialist and communists had bullshit jobs to keep people busy.

That said, the jobs I’d consider non essential are things like advertising, lifestyle, gambling/gsming and the sort. They add to the economy but I’d rather not have them.

After reading this, it could be said that instead of work, we have abstracted it away. The capitalism of Marx dealt with the real work of productive factories. Neoliberal capitalism however outsourced work, and knowledge workers worked about work. The expertise remained for workers whose jobs were exported, making them overqualified. Instead of capitalism creating the conditions for socialism, capitalism creatively destroys the working class.

Human capital, prescribed as a solution, stops to matter. The logical conclusion is the decreasing population and falling birth rates. Perhaps, basic income could provide relief for those affected. I doubt it would be successful in the long run as capitalism adapts to maintain the exploitative framework of "work". Instead of the intent of individuals directing the flow of the economy, it is wrested back by the central business and economic planners. What happens next would be speculation.

What kind of jobs do you put into the lifestyle category? Depending on what you mean by that, I think that lifestyle jobs can have some non monetary value to society by increasing wellbeing.

As usual with communist work, the critique is poignant but the prescription is trash. It is true that we live in a post labor society, that a fraction of the work done is actually required for survival and that automation and the forces of international capitalism has crushed what is left of the true working(production) class, and that much of "GDP" is just meaningless consumerism that has no bearing on productivity. However, the proposed self-determining, post-work activity will be equally if not less meaningful. This left-existential view that you can "community" your way into purpose is just BS. Purpose comes from needs and having a post industrial society where needs are cheaply met means nihilism is inevitable.

No need to ask him; ask ChatGPT. That’s what he did: “Please give me a latin phrase that says someone would seem more intelligent if they had remained silent.”

ChatGPT has lifted Latin putdowns from the province of Harvard classics major to computer programmers.

Why does having yet another toaster add more value to the economy than the ad for the toaster?

Without advertising I'm good with a good old toaster -I don't/won't need a new one. With advertising I might have to get that new toaster that would match the new color palette of the kitchen I had to change due to "lifestyle" folks.

Federal spending is not funded by taxes, the US Treasury will never 'dry up', and the US will never default on its debts or entitlements. It may fail to pay, however that is not a default, it is a refusal or repudiation of an obligation.

...so paying taxes is just there to control people and expropriate their money? Please let Newsom in on this discovery. He says he's for the common man and woman. He's gotta do something.

But sure, Weimar had more money than god --it just had no purchasing power.

I once got invited a meeting so that we could bill the client for my time even if I had no idea what the project was about. But they had no work for me to do, so I went to the meeting and ate sandwhiches and faded into the background. So, I got paid: it was useful. However, it did not make an positive contribution to the world in a way that it provided my life with meaning.

I have volunteered at the foodbank and with the homeless. I got paid nothing, but it had an effect on the world that aligned with my values and provdided meaning, but it was effectively useless for me.

Some people's jobs might be 'meaningless', but we're on the verge of lots of people's jobs being outright 'useless'. Anyone who's worked in a large corporation knows how small some people's useful output is already.

I've been wondering whether increased automation is going to cause some kind of employment crisis in western countries. It's possible we're on the verge of a "second industrial revolution" because of AI. I'll confess that I totally underestimated AI, and figured that by the time AI was writing decent code society would have formulated a plan for what to do when white-collar workers start becoming redundant. This obviously isn't what happened. What is going to happen to the swarms of Uber Eats riders on ebikes? Or all of the new immigrant truckers? Western governments have been keeping immigration relatively high to keep the service sector packed with unskilled, lowly paid service workers. What are we going to do with them all if drones replace Uber Eats riders, or self-driving trucks take over logistics? What I'm seeing now makes me doubt that we're going to look after all these people.

My favourite example is one team writing the internal compliance reports for some regulation that was repealed long ago, but the internal requirement persisted because… nobody cared enough to even check if it’s still needed or not.

As a random example of this kind of thing: I saw a manager spend a month manually tallying up the disk usage on a fully virtualised storage array… VM by VM, volume by volume. Not realising that as a consequence of the layers abstractions, the resulting numbers will be totally meaningless. I.e.: an empty 2 TB volume might need only a couple of gigabytes on the array… or the full 2 TB if someone had accidentally “full” formatted it… except that deduplication was enabled across volumes, so… who knows!?

The only number that mattered was the post-dedup allocated block count which the storage array conveniently provided on the status screen. At the time it was 1%, which translates to “don’t worry about it”.

He worried about it. Spent weeks and weeks with Excel tallying up the total, getting nonsense, trying again, over and over.

You see, two decades earlier, storage arrays didn’t dedup, VMware was not a thing, and there wasn’t a nice neat little percentage that they array itself could report. You had to tally up each volume in each server, it was the only way. So a policy was written that it’s someone’s job to go do this every six months or whatever.

So this guy followed the policy. He tallied things up.

Like a meat robot following the last instruction left by a deceased master.

It was depressing to watch.

Taxes provide the fundamental value of money: taxes must be paid in the state’s currency, making that currency inherently valuable to avoid punishment. They also provide a way to prevent the existence of individuals powerful enough to corrupt the regulatory state, as has occurred in many of the most powerful neoliberal jurisdictions.

Yes, inflation is a constraint, and a powerful one - but avoiding inflation by treating a sovereign currency system like a household or corporation that do not have powers of money creation or taxation, and therefore must balance their budgets, is absurdity. The strongest constraint on state spending is an economy’s production capacity, not an arbitrary budget.

Regarding Newsom, US states are far more constrained in their spending bc they cannot create money, and must account for their expenditures more like a household or corporation. Social benefit programs, entitlements, etc. must therefore by managed and paid for at the Federal level, just like all of the goods and services that we, as a society, deem it necessary to produce regardless of whether it makes a profit or not - like most of the core transportation infrastructure, the global military empire, fundamental science, engineering, medical research and services, etc.

The typical UBI proposal is not trying to end work at all, and wants a big majority of people to keep working.

    Hacker: That's not the point. Look at Latin. Hardly anybody knows that now.
    Humphrey: Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
    Hacker: What?
    Humphrey: Times change and we change with the times.
    Hacker: Precisely.
    Humphrey: Si tacuisses, philosophus manisses.
    Hacker: What does that mean?
    Humphrey: If you'd kept your mouth shut, we might have thought you were clever.
    Hacker: I beg your pardon?
    Humphrey: Not you, Prime Minister. That's the translation.

https://youtu.be/beuKfLn8a6c?t=96

Gene Roddenberry had a different perspective on the outcome.

Gene Roddenberry was not a political scientist and wasn't trying to develop a plausible theory or model of a post-scarcity society, and Trek depends on magitech like replicators, free energy and FTL that we can't have in our universe. So his perspective isn't really worth much beyond its entertainment value.

Taking Trek seriously for its politics is about as pointless as taking Asimov seriously for cybernetics and AI.

You’re getting unfairly downvoted for a sensible, practical point of view. Everyone here seems to want some kind of spiritual awakening from their job. But a job is just a means to some other end: affording your life, time with family, savings, security, things that are actually meaningful.

As the other commenter noted, I stole it from Yes Minister, not ChatGPT.

> ChatGPT has lifted Latin putdowns from the province of Harvard classics major to computer programmers.

I take issue with your implication that software developers can't have other interests. What a fucking narrow minded view of the world your must have.

Really? Which people are those? How did they get the privilege to pick and choose based on "meaning"? These claims seem totally disconnected from the way that most people actually live: they take the jobs they can get and make the best of it because they have bills to pay.

The typical UBI proposal will create enormous inflation and end up transferring more wealth to landlords with zero net positive social impact.

Sure I guess, the average proposal needs some fixing to prevent unfair rent. Doesn't change that UBI and work are supposed to coexist.

I hope you're not the one that downvoted me, since your complaint isn't about what I said.