Too far?
I would view your example as being the growing pains of adjustment to a new system.
We are shaped by viewpoints created and imposed by a system which wanted us all to be beavering away productively.
We are living in a society which in fact needs increasingly fewer of us beavering away but has not yet admitted that or, where it has admitted it, hasn’t yet fully assimilated it.
In those circumstances it’s not surprising that people chase the fewer jobs available.
I suspect that if things go well, we’ll go through a period where our children who embrace the new paradigm all get treated like Bertie Wooster and his pals in the Drones Club.
Maiden Aunts tutting about the youth of today wasting their time on frivolity rather than being productive members of society without realising that doing sod-all was the most productive thing they could be doing given their circumstances.
Then people’s attitudes will adjust if our society survives that long, which of course it almost certainly won’t.
The chance of sufficiently stable, sufficiently technological societies holding up for long enough for fully automated luxury communism to become an actual thing seems so incredibly remote.
The likelihood is that the problem of too few jobs for too many people will be solved by ensuring fewer people.
Oh dear, I seem to have forgotten my HappyPill™ today.
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Bread Santa is best Santa. >:)
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Is that tRumpanzees, or tRumpansies?
(Insert ‘why not both’ gif of your own choosing.)
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Oh how sweet it would be if our real life gun nuts met the fate of the average redshirt far more often.
e.g.: Mitochlorians
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I agree with that sentiment when we’re talking about a symbol like, I dunno, the American flag. Because even though historically speaking it’s actually the symbol of 400 years of atrocity, people associate it with good things. So it could make sense to take that symbol and align those good feelings with our new revised meaning. That’s kinda what AOC is trying to do with the Democratic Party (good luck with that one, lol).
But when we’re talking about a symbol that both a) actually historically represents atrocity and b) is widely reviled, it’s like…what’s to be gained here? If you’re not actually like a Leninist, it’s just edgelord-y.
That’s why the hammer-and-sickle is trending these days. Not because we love the USSR or even communism but because it’s edgy to suggest that we do. Upsets lots of people, which is good for lulz. That use is strategic in some situations, but memes take on a life of their own and then we get situations like this where one realizes “Oh wait, you thought we were serious…”
The root of my complaint is that I take communism very seriously as a modern political approach. So it’s super frustrating to see even apparent comrades deliberately conflating it with a discredited authoritarian regime.
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Personally, I’m not down for anything that’s like “ironic” Hipster-(Stalin-Nostalgic)-Putinism. The Hammer-and-Sickle is not a progressive symbol for me.
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Player Piano isn’t a great comparison. The major premises in the novel are also that there’s a) a distinct social and political striation between the engineering/managerial class and everyone else, b) everyone still has to work a full time job, which for the majority is either the military, which does nothing but march in formations all day, or some type of pointless public work, and c) the economy, including the vast majority of personal spending, is completely dictated by a computer system.
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Now, this is all tongue in cheek, and all a wide digression from AOC’s statement, but I do feel like I ought to defend Star Trek’s vision of the United Federation of Planets and its Starfleet. What we can see of it is a population organised by planet, and each planet having a say in governance. “Colony” seems to be more of a term for planets inhabited by life forms that originated outside of the planet’s biosphere, not so much colonies in the political sense. But we don’t see the details, for good reason. Utopias are boring. It’s why we prefer stories set in Hell, never set in Heaven (except when Heaven is to be destroyed, of course).
What we do see is mostly the Starfleet ships and personnel working outside of the Federation, dealing with the ethical quandaries that come with being the outsider. Sure, the USS Enterprise could use orbital bombardment or even punch through the atmosphere with its phasers, but they don’t. We see them tying themselves in knots trying to be as respectful as possible. In most episodes, Starfleet is either heavily outgunned or refuses to take the easy way, worrying all the time about if they are becoming the next East India Company and seeing that as something to be avoided at all costs.
We all seem to be concentrating on Dr. Crusher’s casual “just charge it” comment, which does suggest some sort of compensation scheme has been set up beforehand, and that the UFP citizens are not all that concerned about it. We also do not know if the local vendor has access to a full replicator, or how they manufactured the fabric. It’s treated more as souvenirs and works of art, like “oh, I could have this replicated, but having the original is more sentimental.”
Now, the only problem with this analysis is that the writers found this too restrictive, or were unable to come up with new ideas, and slipped back into conventional stories and '90s capitalist views. But now I’m going so far off course that this deserves a totally different thread.
I can only reiterate that I am fully on board with AOC’s vision of letting tech kill off jobs if it means we can ditch having to “earn” a living as well.
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At a certain point, if an ideological/political movement does the kinds of things that the Soviet communists (or Nazis) did, insisting that you’re just using their symbol but don’t want any of the baggage associated with it might not be the most realistic option.
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Right?
I’m not thinking that those who currently embrace the hammer n sickle would also embrace anyone else’s embrace of the swastika. No matter how or why the swastika gets embraced. (And plz no one start with the Buddhist thing.)
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Like most fictional dystopias, Player Piano is better read as an allegory for the author’s present, than as a prediction of an unknowable future.
It’s not quite a classless society yet.
b) everyone still has to work a full time job … which does nothing but march in formations all day, or some type of pointless public work,
This is exactly what a lot of people are doing this now, in a lot of work that is generally performative and unproductive.
c) the economy, including the vast majority of personal spending, is completely dictated by a computer system.
Let’s just file this under everything we want to manage with “the happy world of algorithms”.
His setting wasn’t being offered as a solution or prediction. He was outlining the problems already directly encountered by Fifties society and was exaggerating them for effect. They’re still the problems of today, and with more a) Social division b) Empty MakeWork and c) Non-Human-Centered Decisions; it will still be the problems we have in the future.
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Yeah, I’m not so sure I would be terribly charitable to a group of National Socialists marching down the street with a swastika, even if they insist that they’re just advocates for large public works projects and planned cities, but don’t want the symbols to be bogged down with all the negative stuff.
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I’ve often wondered how much better YouTube would be if no one had to sing for their supper.
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That’s actually the sort of reading I’m concerned about, as much as I can be about the lives of fictional space people. The Federation is very clearly Space America, and that’s especially clear while I’ve been rewatching TOS for the first time in a few years.
The TOS episode “The Apple” (the one with the Children of the Giant Papier-mâché Snake Head) seemed especially troubling. Compare to the idiot “missionary” committing suicide-by-Sentinelese recently. A redshirt dies early on in a way totally unrelated to the inhabitants of the planet, and his death is leveraged to give artificial standing to interfere in their society, which they conclude is “stagnant,” and therefore not eligible to be protected under the Prime Directive (this seems like yet another case of starship captains taking enormous liberties interpreting situations that ought to be taken up above his pay grade). Spock objects, entirely correctly, but is overruled. So they blow up the giant papier-mâché snake head that’s been both controlling the population and protecting them from what appears to be an amazingly hostile environment. Kirk then promises the Federation will sweep in and benevolently fill in the vacuum left by destroying the thing that their entire existence has centered on for tens of thousands of years.
Somewhere there’s an optimistic story to be told about the first Child of Vaal in Starfleet, which will totally gloss over how the rest of his people are now employed mining explosive styrofoam rocks and emptying wastebaskets on a shiny new Starbase set up by the Federation Galactic Outreach. There’s a conversation we’ll never see (though we do see its like elsewhere) about how if they don’t welcome the Federation with open arms, eventually the Klingons will find out about their exploding rocks and enslave them outright. That argument will be revisited when the Enterprise, or another starship, is called back later to put down a miners’ revolt. That episode would have Kirk making a show of wanting to talk it out while a stuffy Commodore breathes down his neck to start phasering natives immediately, but the episode would be framed so that the revolting miners are definitely unreasonable terrorists trying to thwart the Federation’s legitimate need for all the exploding rocks it can get its hands on, and the question whether the Federation has any business being there at all would never come up. It’s just a given that Federation colonialism is the right solution for everybody.
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide was a radio play before it was a novel. (The later installments in the series were novels first, but eventually got radio adaptations.)
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You’re moving your goalposts around already. You said in your example jobs were scarce and the dole paid better than a job. If it’s all about keeping up with the Joneses, and the Joneses are on the dole, then being on the dole would not be a problem.
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That would be best.
Why are fewer people a better solution than, say, technological innovation that allows folks to enjoy the benefits of modernity while also being sustainable?
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