André Gorz predicted the revolt against meaningless work (2023) | Hacker News Reader

André Gorz predicted the revolt against meaningless work (2023)

znetwork.org

103 pointsrobtherobber70 comments

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.

This is why some form of UBI seems inevitable. Thinking all these people will retrain as data scientists or whatever is deluded and if you don’t do something the fabric of society will tear itself apart so it’s in the interests of the well off to come up with a solution here

I think it's more practical to work at lowering the retirement age. UBI has a lot of complications, but instead figuring out how to have people retire at 55, then 45, then 35, then 25, can get you close to that direction while ignoring the complications with outright UBI.

While I like this idea, in theory, I think inevitably we need a new bracket that isn't "retirement" per se. So many people hit retirement age and they simply cannot stop working. And still do things and still continue working (if off the books they must).

I wonder if, with your proposed system, we should start working towards something between full employment and retirement and let it be a significant epoch of life.

I've always felt like 45-55 should be a time where you should be heavily incentivized (if not outright subsidized) to give back while you've still got the juice in you.

Not sure where I'm going with this... Just a thought

> So many people hit retirement age and they simply cannot stop working

In my case, I view retirement as being "financially independent" where someone doesn't have to work in order to obtain food, shelter, and health care.

At that point, there's always volunteering, artwork, inventing, watching grandchildren...

Older people aren't being forced to work off the books. Very few occupations have mandatory retirement ages. I mean commercial pilots are forced to retire at 65 but pretty much everyone else can continue working a regular W-2 job at any age if they want to, even if they are simultaneously collecting Social Security benefits or other retirement fund income.

That is not a sensible goal to work towards. We already have demographic problems with a lower and lower ratio of workers to retirees. I am absolutely unwilling to pay higher taxes just so that someone else can retire early at 55, and I vote accordingly.

A critical part of figuring out how to have people retire younger is making sure that taxes don't perpetuate a welfare state. Keep in mind that, if you live in the US, right now our increasing national debt funds social security, with the money going to retirees who already have large 401ks and will will huge sums to their children who themselves are building their 401ks.

That being said, the "I get to keep everything, screw everyone else" mentality is a major problem, because it's hard to quantify how much of our earnings are a result of social investment. (IE, how much of your earnings result from taxpayer/debt supported education, roads, research, and other investments is difficult to quantify.)

There’s another solution: a culling.

Take the now useless people and get rid of them. AI will effectively usher in a new era of eugenics in which your right to live is determined by your economic value.

Who is considered 'useless' though?

Or just kill the fiscal hoarders who can't conceive of a sustainable closed loop economy where the working class gets a fair shake at living a life. There doesn't have to be billionaires/trillionaires.

If AI can replace white collar workers than it will also cheap enough for everyone to start running their own business and join the capitalist class.

The problem is alot of people can only conceive of a life where they are handed work and a salary by someone else, when that was only ever a particular circumstance for the last few decades. Whether they can grow out of that is another question, but those who can't won't find much agency.

If your white collar skills are redundant at a company, they don't magically become valued if you call yourself a small business.

No? But I'd be creating products, not services that are already automated. Build that video game you always wanted to make, or setup a robot food truck offering your family recipes. Work with a consortium to build a luxury mall or theme park in your neighborhood. Or just invest/arbitrage in the market if you are too lazy to do it yourself. There is a vast amount of economic opportunities to take that aren't just pure labor offering.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are (at least) two different ways of viewing this equation.

One view is that the government has a stockpile of money and can give out money as long as it has some and has to get more to refill its stockpile lest it run out. Taxes refill the stockpile. Bonds are borrowing money to keep the pile fuller for a fixed term.

Another view is to notice that the government stockpile is connected to the money printer, so it's not really a stockpile but actually has infinite capacity and can't run out. The cons of spending too much are not running out, but rather they are the cons of overprinting money - inflation. Infinity plus anything is still infinity, so taxes don't refill the stockpile (it's infinite) but they do unprint money to prevent excessive inflation. Bonds are paying people to unprint their money for a fixed term, at the end of which it is reprinted.

These are isomorphic models of the same system, which provide different insights.

Note that only governments that can print money can use your second model. So in the USA, only the Federal govt. California only has access to the first model, and could go bankrupt and/or default on bonds.

US states are sovereigns and so they can't literally go bankrupt. But they can become insolvent and cease paying on their obligations. Based on current credit ratings, if any state is going to become insolvent it's more likely to be Illinois than California.

That's a semantic game playing on the exact legal definition of "bankrupt". You know what they meant: a US state can run out of money.

It's more precise to say that private assets are public sector liabilites, in other words, they are outstanding taxes. It's money the government hasn't bothered to collect yet. When you look at the tax code you will notice very quickly that letting money sit and do nothing is not taxed, hence a tax minimizer can always avoid non-demurrage taxation, which means the upper bound on government debt is infinite.

It's simply not mathematically possible to pay the debt off without demurrage.

The fact that bullshit jobs add to GDP should perhaps be taken as proof that GDP is also bullshit.

Here's another point in favour: jobs only add to GDP when they're jobs. When your parent cooks dinner at home, GDP doesn't increase. But when both parents work and then spend (for the sake of argument) one of their entire salaries on buying restaurant food, GDP increases by that much, even though the whole thing is now less efficient.

With GDP and taxation, the restaurant gets taxed. People making their food at home or raking their yard instead of a landscaper don’t get taxed for that work. If they did that’d get thrown into GDP.

I’m happy they haven’t thought of taxing our at home domestic product.

They don't get taxed because they don't get paid for it.

ill tell you right now, if washing my dishes and raking my yard was taxed, that would mean I'm getting paid for that work. Which is much better than the current system where it's actually *costing* me time, money, and energy.

GDP isn't defined in terms of taxation.

Output of what?

There are two ways to make money: you can trade people with money something that they prefer to money, or you can help people with money make more money, in exchange for a share of it.

The value of "output", whatever it is, is dependent on who currently has money. A vaccine for malaria has no value if no one who has money prefers it to money. A machine that can get you to Mars has no value, unless people with money want to go to Mars.

I say people with money, but it really people times money. And a few people have almost all of it.

So when we talk about output, GDP, whatever, as long as it's measured in money remember that it's mostly rich people's preferences we're talking about.

value doesn't have to be monetary

Yes, but it's often implied to be. If you want it to be comparable it usually defaults to be, we have few other agreed on ways to weigh one output of value against another. If someone says "we can't afford that" it's monetary value and thus mostly rich people's preferences they're actually talking about, but it's not as if it's easy to ignore either.

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.

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

> 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

Stories like 1984 try to convey (among other things) the mechanisms and effects of power. Everything else (laws, money, work) is subordinate to power relationships.

People who are good at obtaining and maintaining power may collectively be called "the ruling class". By definition, people with lots of power control us. That's what it means to have power.

But the exact appearance of that power differs in each society. In North Korea you worship the leader or they shoot you dead, because "he is literally God and how dare you defy God". In the USSR you report good numbers to your boss or you are kidnapped and brought to a gulag, because "you are interfering with our progress towards glorious communist utopia, comrade". And in the United States of America you seek out a boss to submit yourself to 40 hours a week, or else you find yourself unable to obtain food because "it's a free market and you didn't earn enough money; we can't give you food because that would be slavery".

The key difference is that in the USA you can also start your own business and obtain food that way. No one will stop you, you can just go ahead and do it. Something like 20-25M people work full time in their own business and have no boss.

???????

I think he seems to explain that in the situation that you had presented between multiple different countries, every other country doesn't even give you the freedom/opportunity to be the powerful person without requiring some same set of ideologies (communism good, or the NK example)

Whereas, in a capitalist system with no matter how much of its flaws, as long as you can produce value (whatever that is in current society), you have power and can actually be your own boss in that sense.

I am worried how much of that can change in recent year but still, I feel like socialism can be good for generating extreme amounts of money /value because as a society on whole, people are willing to take on more risks if there is something to fall back on (like not having to worry that you or your family will starve if you fail)

Sweden has more amounts of billionaires per capita than america (source wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...)

Everyone has at least some power in every situation. Even actual slave owners couldn't force their slaves to work - they just could (and did) kill them if they refused.

What you say about capitalism could work if capitalism rewarded creating value, but capitalism actually rewards taking money, and pro-capitalist theory says that's strongly coupled to creating value, but in reality we observe that it's actually very weakly coupled. If we allow alternative definitions of value (like the common "value = whatever brings money") then we could say the same thing about totalitarian dictatorship - in that system, value is defined as whatever the dictator likes, and if you create that, you are rewarded just like in capitalism.

It's not true that in capitalism you don't need a certain ideology to become powerful. You do need one - profit above all else, bribes are okay if you can get away with them, each person's moral value is solely determined by their net worth, that sort of thing. If you don't think that way, you won't become powerful in capitalism. (Well, occasionally it happens by luck, but that's true in any system, and if you didn't have the skill to deliberately seek power, you also don't have the skill to hold onto it. See Notch or the average lottery winner.)

The ideology you need to become powerful in a system usually isn't the one it says on the tin. Believing in God in a theocracy doesn't make you powerful, just average. Believing you're God's chosen prophet might make you powerful; but more likely is believing the whole God thing is a scam and it's really a dictatorship, so you suck up to the guy at the top while publicly praising God. In USSR, believing you're helping create a communist utopia doesn't make you powerful, just average (and more delusional than average). More likely to make you powerful in the USSR is believing that it's useful for the plebs to believe they're creating a communist utopia and they deserve for you to steal all their wealth because they're so stupid for believing that nonsense. You don't get powerful in feudalism by believing the king is chosen by God; you're more likely to get powerful in feudalism by believing that if you murder the king you might get to be the new king. The Gervais Principle applies to more than just corporations.

I avoid the word "socialism" because in practice it can be substituted by "something that isn't capitalism" and different people don't agree on what, specifically, that thing is.

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.

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.

Humans are social creatures. Part of our set of needs is having a community around us, be it family, or friends, or whatever. If we get cut off from community we tend to develop mental problems and die young.

I guess we could AI our way out of this, and create some kind of pretend AI community around ourselves, but I don't think that's workable; we'd always know it was actually AI. Like winning an FPS game against bots isn't actually satisfying.

There are lots of intentional communities (amongst other experiments) where people are trying this stuff out. There are lots of problems, but the root hypothesis; that people are happier when living together and sharing their lives, seems to be confirmed.

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.

“Grow up do something useful with your time”?

No further comment is needed.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

    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

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.

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.

Indeed. If your family's welfare depends on you having work, and your work is meaningless, then it can be taken away honestly and without recourse.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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