‘T’was about two hundred year ago that the world tilted toward changing at an exponential pace.
The advent of the steam engine had a lot to do with this. Imagine, for instance, what native American tribes, living primitively, must have thought about the first locomotive when they saw a big huffn’puff thing speeding toward them along the steel track.
It was a terrible sight to behold-- belching steam and screaming along across the landscape like it owned the place.
And in terms of world history, that wasn’t so very long ago. We humans have definitely picked up the pace of our progress.
We’ve come a long way since those groundbreaking days of the steam locomotives. Back in those early techno times our big deal was extraction. By means of steam-powered locomotion we extracted vast amounts of resources from vast landscapes for a vastly long time and then we transported those extracted elements vast distances, to industrializing cities where they were converted into vast products that were sold and distributed to vast markets of people whose consuming habits were fastly becoming vast.
All this vastness was enabled because our new powering technologies made everything happen on vastly larger scales, and in vastly faster timetables.
Eventually, the trains went the way of the buffalo when our cars and trucks began to roll off mass-production assembly lines and then all across the globe. Before you knew it, everybody and their brother were driving around via internal combustion vehicles of one type or another, spewing carbon emissions and additives and whatnot all around the globe.
Because so many people had jumped onto the industrio-techno bandwagon we found ourselves with vast labor markets which consisted of vast numbers of people cranking out all these vast inventories of consumer goods and services.
That whole industrial revolution thing wrought the humanic world into being a carbon-belching machine. After a century or two it has become an emissions-emitting perpetual motion device. But nowadays our whole vastly spinning automaton of techno progress is being re-evaluated. For the sake of equality-based prosperity, those vast labor markets are being tweaked by office-loads of technocrats who want to do what is best for mankind. But in a world of expending (used to be expanding) resources, it becomes more and more problematical to keep everybody busy in production.
By ‘n by, for management purposes more and more folks have become involved in producing information, so we can be smart about stuff. Information used to be stored in libraries, but now is stored in digitized files. Our terminology has morphed. As we used to shovel dirt and ore and coal and whatnot we now move vast loads of information. For simplicity sake we now call it info. Furthermore, as our exponential changes are happening at a vastly stepped-up pace we have spun into calling it “data.”
We notice that, while the world economy used to run on vast extractions of elements, it now runs on vast iterations of data. And if you believe that, I’ve got some swampland in Houston I’ll sell ya.
But I digress.
In our 21st-century techno-world we have generated vast hordes of data-analyzers, experts, number-crunchers and technocrats, whose mission is to keep everything cruising along on an even keel.
Their informed consensus is that we need a steady state, which eventually morphs into a steady State. Old style capitalism is dead, y’all.
The most potent example of this trend is the Fed.
A century ago, we had banks that were fervently financing the great industrial expansion. Now all the banks have become mere bit-players; the real mover and shaker is the Federal Reserve, the financier of last resort, as they are moving vast file-loads of reserve fiat currencies around the world the way JP and John D used to move their earth-shaking investments.
Now the Fed keeps it all humming along on an even keel, not too fast not too slow. No more boom or bust, no more depressions, but rather one long macro-recession/expansion whereby we perpetually power the world economy at a predictably stable theoretical 2% expansion rate so as to assure that the main characters have assets to pass around like peace pipes and, along with that, generally everybody has a job to do so we don’t have too many folks fall into non-productive dependency on the system.
Good luck with that, y’all.
Therefore, let us henceforth have everybody producing something, but not anything that will aggravate the emissions hockey-stick curve. Let’s keep the proles fat n’ happy—or, excuse me—fit n’ happy, if possible without deepening the carbon footprint, lest we fall into deep sh_t.
A good way to do that is convert everybody to being producers of data instead of them being producers of carbon-spewing autos and such.
In olden days we had vast factories where workers cranked out trains and trucks and autos and washing machines and TVs and then microwaves and computers and now data and data and data and more data.
So now the world runs on data, don’t you know. And if you believe that I’ve got some swamp land in Houston I’ll sell you.
But I digress.
How ‘bout I give you an example of what it means to be living in a blahblah new world where our collective assets are studiously maintained by tweaking technocrats.
Check out this data from an analysis of labor/welfare incentives in Europe, posted last week by Daniel Seikel.
https://www.socialeurope.eu/activation-work-poverty
“If it were true that employment is the best route out of poverty, including in-work poverty, then, logically, the share of working poor should at least not increase if there is significant employment growth. The combination of employment growth and increasing in-work poverty suggests that activation policies might shift poor jobless persons/households to poor working persons/households. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse the effects of different labour market policies on in-work poverty. In particular, what impact do the different elements of activation policy – conditionality, re-commodification and active labour market policies – have?
In theory, two effects are possible. First, active labour market policies can improve the qualification of job-seekers and enable them to get better paid jobs. This can lift formerly poor households above the poverty threshold (disposable household income below 60 percent of national median income). Second, the demanding elements of activation – strict conditionality and a high degree of re-commodification – can force unemployed individuals to accept job-offers even if the pay-levels are low. In this case, the income of the successfully activated might be too low to lift the household above the poverty threshold – poor unemployed would become working-poor.
That’s true, Daniel, I suppose. I’ll take your word for it. But whatever happens, however all this turns out, I can see we’ve come a long way from
to
In the olden days, the command was:
Move that barge; tote that bale!
The new program is:
Tote that phone; send that file!
This is progress, and this is what progressives have called for. It's no wonder the outcome is Twitter, in which all the complexity of former times is dumbed down to 140 bits or pieces per event.
Good luck with that, y'all!
Glass Chimera
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