New Escapologist : February 2020 🐍
"It's a Living!"
Reader, what are your honest thoughts about automation?
An encounter at a local mini-market prompted the following thoughts. All three self-service check-outs were vacant but a woman waited patiently with her shopping behind another customer at the one staffed counter.
As I scanned my bagels and paid for them, I overheard the woman as she reached the counter say something about self-service machines “putting people out of work.”
This is something I’ve heard many times, as doubtless have you. The thought probably even crossed your mind when you saw your first self-service check-out.
There might be a valid case that these machines and other concessions to automation reduce the potential for important human interaction, but the “putting people out of work” thing surely DOES NOT COMPUTE.
Think about it. You’re saying that labour-saving (and, in this case, queue-busting) solutions should be resisted in favour of people doing work that does not in reality need to be done.
It makes me think of animals being used as household appliances on The Flintstones. Some cement is mixed in the beak of a pelican and he says to camera, “It’s a living!”
Intelligent lifeforms doing what machines can do automatically!
Serving lines of impatient customers in a supermarket–take it from me–certainly felt futile before these machines came along a few years ago; now, since the machines exist, it really is futile.
If we need to create work for people (and we don’t), how about creating work that is useful (in that robots can’t do it yet) or serves to hold back the ecopocalypse, or is pleasant to do, or is at least a little more meaningful than breaking rocks?
OR should we pay intelligent humans with the same internal hardware as Leonardo da Vinci a minimum wage to stand in the corner in case someone needs a convenient hatstand?
These thoughts on automation were originally posted at the New Escapologist blog. Here are some responses from our lovely readership:
Tom writes:
We seem to be at a stage in our evolution where we are half accepting of automation invading our lives, and sometimes unnerved or annoyed by the lifeless screens barking orders at us. Even though few actually have conversations with, say, cashiers, the possibility remains. With an automatic checkout machine there is no chance of it responding if we were to ask it how its day has been going.
I suppose when people express dismay at another job lost to a machine, perhaps what they are really getting at is that feeling of helpless angst when it comes to the elimination of human interaction, in whatever form that could be, even though, for the most part, we humans seem to keep our heads down and mouths shut, in urban centres at least.
But it’s also possible that some people are genuinely afraid of jobs being lost, putting some in a precarious financial situation.
I agree though: most results of job creation are absolute garbage.
Martin writes:
This discussion raised an interesting point for me. Work still does indeed have dignity (depending on the job and the beholder, I suppose). And yet it feels like the dignity of work is an obstacle to getting rid of Jobs altogether and replacing them with Basic Income + deciding what to do with your own time.
People’s psychological desire to work at a job would need to be more widely dispensed with before enough people can be convinvced that their lives are better spent in a mixture of idleness and self-directed activity.
I feel that would be a tricky period to navigate.
Briony writes:
Not sure I agree with you on this one. Rejecting the self-service checkout is a vote for a human-scale world. Big corporations want the autobots, small concerns will be unable to afford them.
The Man wants autobot employees because they are consistent, don’t need holidays and sick days, don’t have hangovers or grumpy days. In effect, their customers are working the machinery for them, instead of employees. We are paying for the privilege of handing over our money. We are slaves, tied to the company store.
And as for “it’s a living," it may not be the job of your dreams, but it is not undignified. The most disagreeable aspect was the attitude of some customers who treated us as subhumans not worthy of basic politeness or acknowledgement. Your piece shows a little of this contempt. Otherwise I enjoyed my shop-working days – definitely more tolerable than office-working, despite the perceived lower status. The day was varied and there were plenty of people to watch. At the end of the day I walked away without bringing a mental load or contamination with me – I was not expected to be reachable outside of working hours, I did not work outside of my shift, I did not give the job a moment’s attention once out of the door. If more jobs were so constrained, they would not be so damaging. Work itself is not evil, only when it is out of proportion. Even the “factory of the future” with only a dog and one man, needed the man to feed the dog. The point, surely, is to minimise the time you need to spend feeding the dog by reducing outgoings and commitments, rather than shooting the mutt.
See the original post for my replies to those comments and to join the conversation yourself.
Analog Sea
An erstwhile New Escapologist subscriber has sent me a very nice letter. Among other things, he explains that he recently set up a print journal of his own.
It’s called Analog Sea Review and it offers willfully-offline fingerfood: literary essays and excerpts on philosophy, nature, and living well. Escapological topics essentially.
A pocket-sized and beautifully-typeset hardback, it’s an ideal technology for the Wage Slave who wants to disconnect from her Infinity Device on lunch breaks or while commuting (decolonise your time!); and perhaps also of interest to the escapee who finds that the cables of The Machine are still too present beyond the dayjob.
The Analog Sea team commendably practice what they preach. Their only online presence seems to be a website explaining how to get a copy of their Bulletin (a sample of content along with some lovely paper ephemera and an order form for the Review) by post. No social media.
Their publications are available in an impressive number of reputable independent bookshops across Europe and North America, the list of stockists being something you’d get when requesting a Bulletin.
Here in the future, there’s something eccentric and mysterious about a journal or organisation that is all but completely offline, communicating entirely through bookshops and by Ye Olde Postal Networke, but let’s not forget that this was the norm until relatively recently and that it served us very well.
Anyway, it’s a fun time. Here is a pic of the glorious physical object (and there are a couple more here).
Welcome Home, Peaches
My friend’s daughter, Caoimhe, has a pet snake called Peaches.
Today we salute Peaches for a daring escape attempt. The little rascal slithered off for four months before turning up again, happy as can be.
Nobody’s sure how she thrived for so long without her heat lamp or a supply of freeze-dried mice. Nor does anyone have know where she’s been.
Welcome home, Peaches.
Out of Office
When I press the big red button on this newsletter, sending endlessly faffed-with content to a thousand or so readers, my phone will start vibrating as twenty or so “Our of Office” messages hit my inbox.
I know there are ways to stop this from happening, to divert such email directly to trash, but I prefer to have a quick look. You can tell a lot about a person from their “OoO,” so it’s a way for me to get an ever-so-slight insight into the readership.
I’ll say this much: many of you have positions far too responsible to be reading New Escapologist. But I’m glad you do.
I’m also pleased to see there’s not a doofus among us. This I can tell because none of your auto-responses are longer than a hand span, none of your signatures are longer than the actual message, and none of you have “I’ll be back on ______” dates from several months or years ago. Truly we are an intellectual lot.
On the subject of “OoO” messages, I once got this one from TV’s Alan Partrige:
To: rob@newescapologist.co.uk
From: alan.partridge-bbc@bbc.co.ukI’m not in the office so both cannot and will not respond to your email. If your email is urgent, perhaps you should have tried calling instead. The very fact you were content to type out your query long hand and settle back to wait for a reply suggests it can wait, even if you’ve put a red exclamation next to your email to make it stand out in my inbox. Won’t wash with me, that.
Is that not a treasure? It should go to Letters of Note really.
Patreon Sucks OR DOES IT?
To shake things up a bit in our Patreon campaign (and since coming to terms with how the subscription essay model wasn't working), I've launched "Running Man," a monthly short feature about creativity and writing process and that sort of thing.
It's a bit behind-the-scenes, is potentially useful to any other escapee writer/artist types, and more emotionally/personally candid than the Escapologist's Diary series. The first edition is already live and it will continue once a month from now on. Please join us for a couple of bucks* a month.
The idea for Running Man came from consultation with the New Escapologist readers who currently contribute to the campaign. Since the essays were too laborious to write and release to a regular schedule and to a high enough quality, I ran a survey asking for guidance on what to do next. I even included a "Patreon Sucks, scrap the project" option, which thankfully not many people selected. The answers, generally, led to the instruction to make shorter, simpler, more regularly-scheduled posts. Join us. See what you think. The feedback so far has been encouraging.
(*NB: Patreon emailed users a couple of weeks ago to explain that the Euro and the British Pound will soon, at long last, be supported at the platform, meaning I won't be slammed by their idea of currency exchange anymore and you won't have to think in dollars if that's not your currency. Sweet.)
All for now, m'lovelies. We shall speak again through this channel in March, or in the more regular/relentless fashion at the blog.
Peace,
RW x