Nightmare scenarios
There are two books that embody my concerns about the direction American society is headed in...Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut is the one I'm thinking about today. If you're familiar with the book you know of its somewhat science fiction theme: an independent man fights the machines that dominate human society (if you're not familiar with the book, you should know he loses).
When I read the book years ago, I took it to be a battle with the machinery of society rather than the machines themselves. It was a society I knew at 14 years old was
- possible
- scary as hell to me by the end of the book
Production was maximally automated, therefore employment was unavailable for most because they couldn't compete with the machinery. There were still management and management support jobs though, and the base requirement for any of them was a doctorate degree...Doctor of Secretarial Services, Doctor of Pastry Production, Doctor of Dress Design. And, of course, the education was priced beyond the reach of your average worker (supply and demand, as vulgarly understood).
The economy can't operate without customers, though. And customers need money. So they got it. Everyone...EVERYONE...was on the dole. And everyone was treated equally...their needs were statistically determined and automatically filled. For example, everyone needs a refrigerator, right? So everyone got one...and the payments were automatically deducted from their dole check over the course of three years. That was the projected life of a refrigerator, you see. And on the third anniversary of the delivery of the refrigerator, a couple of Doctors of Moving and Storage would show up with your new refrigerator.
Very capitalist.
This made your average person crazy because people get bored. There was an underground skills-bartering economy. People broke things so people could fix things, traded little hand made knick-knack...bartered because the cost of your projected needs happened to match your projected income almost precisely.
There were national governments, but they worked hand in hand with transnational corporations that generated all the "money." Eventually the corporations became the dominant collective, organized by industry. Governments responded to wealth, just as they do now, and the way it worked out only the transnational corporations really had any.
Do you understand why this has been on my mind recently?
