|
dafremen
|
Alright, look..
I've got nothing against technology. With an entire childhood and career life wrapped up in and shaped by technology, how could I? What I have a problem with is the short-sightedness our people display when we wheel out our new gadgets for everyone to "ooooo!" and "ahhh!" over..and we say "hell yea!" and adopt these conveniences that put people on the street.
From robots in factories to self check out lanes in grocery stores, we suck up the convenience of cheaper cars and line-less checkout without once making the connection between our obsession with convenience and our rising jobless rate.
Corporations need a board, maybe a CEO and a CFO. If they could pare the economy down to just that minimum number of paid positions in the name of making a profit, they would. They are in the business of making more profit, not keeping jobs around, not feeding families, not helping people stay in their homes. And it is claimed that this is how our "society" works. But there's nothing social about that contract. This isn't a society. It's a meat grinder. It's a social revolution pump, cranking out growing indignation.
It's not that the promise of a work-free world isn't appealing. If the corporate powers can make every tedious activity human-free, by all means that's a wonderful thing. But not for as long as we insist that a person make money to survive.
If we can't produce new livelihoods to replace those which our technologies eliminate, and if we are not ready to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the destitute WITHOUT penalty, social or otherwise, then those technologies must WAIT.
The needs and quality of life of the MAJORITY of our people must come first. For we are to be first, an association of people, a society..working for the benefit of as many of us as our efforts can manage. These days, that's all of us.
I have nothing against a rich man who recognizes the struggle and suffering that butters his daily bread. I have everything against the notion that our society should put a higher value on a man having more than he needs than it does on the elimination of human suffering. That a man would choose to fatten an already bloated pile at the cost of making others homeless, struggling, miserable and destitute with flippant disregard and in some cases arrogant contempt for those whose suffering indirectly paid for the pearly whites of that sickening sneer. That man is a baby. That man is deluded. That man isn't a man at all. He's a consumer..a living, breathing incarnation of product marketing and social engineering. He's the ultimate product of corporate research and development: an insatiable buying machine. This brainwashed child in an adult body is the unwitting enemy of his own kind, gone from us for now and maybe forever.
And now, we are here. Struggling, dying, drinking, drowning in our worries for the future of our families. A perfect buying machine always needs more money and doesn't care about anything but aquisition. Bodies lie like candy bar wrappers, littering the ground around a skyscraper that is hooked up to the internet; surfing craigslist, browsing porn. We kick them out of the way with the wind of our briskly marching feet and move on.
On we go to join the "successful" consumers or distract ourselves from what they're doing to us; what we're doing to ourselves by burying our heads. And our people suffer. But gadgets are neat, we're too tired or impatient to wait in line to save a job, and how about a cheaper airbag?
|
130630
|
