Look to our marvelous little glowing rectangles we call the smartphone. They are a pocket-sized window into the soul of our modern humanity, though more often than not, it merely reflects a collective panic over where the money went.
In Mark Twain’s days on the Mississippi, if a man wanted to avoid paying his workers, he had to look them in the eye or at least hire an overseer with a heavy boot. Today, we have achieved a grander sophistication. I read an article recently on the Yahoo Finance, a digital ledger of our financial anxieties, which claimed that the true villain stealing the bread from the tables of our fresh-faced college graduates is not the grand phantom of Artificial Intelligence. No, the culprit is far more insidious: it is “Remote Work.”
It seems the grand viziers of management have found their latest scapegoat. The young people, they say, are failing to find a foothold in the grand climb of capitalism because they had the audacity to work in their trousers from the comfort of a spare bedroom during a global pestilence.
How beautifully we pivot! When a business owner looks at his ledger, his eyes do not linger lovingly on the line item for human beings. Ask any captain of industry today, and he will tell you, with a sigh that could blow a steamboat upstream, that his number one expense is labor. The workers, you see, have these pesky, inefficient habits.
- They insist on eating three times a day.
- They harbor an unnatural craving for security.
- They possess a stubborn, delicate thing called self-worth.
Our marvelous billionaires, whose fortunes have grown so tall they require their own zip codes, have looked upon these human limitations and found them lacking. The dream, whispered in the high-backed chairs of country clubs and typed into the glowing screens of silicon boardrooms, is to replace this fragile, demanding labor force with a robotic one.
A machine does not ask for a pension; a robotic arm does not require a dental plan to pack a box or sort a package.
Naturally, this is all presented to the public under the banner of progress. “We are lowering costs!” they cry from the mountain tops. “We are raising quality!” They chant these slogans with the fervor of a tent-revival preacher, conveniently forgetting a minor detail of arithmetic: if no one has a job, no one has a dollar, and if no one has a dollar, pray tell, who is going to buy the products these magnificent robots are sorting?
But do not despair. The system has a safety valve. We shall simply borrow against tomorrow to pay for the delusions of today. Ever-increasing mountains of public debt are stacked high to finance the grand tax cuts and billionaire dreams, while the blame for this unmanageable debt is neatly laid at the feet of the nurse, the schoolteacher, the factory hand, and the student.
Capitalism, having built a machine that runs on the blood of its consumers, now demands that the consumers apologize for being made of meat and bone.
“Let them watch Netflix,” a modern Marie Antoinette might say as she scrolls through her app store. “Or let them stream Spotify,” to be fair to the contemporary nobility.
The most delicious flavor of this modern comedy, however, is the banner under which it is marched. The grand architects of this squeeze, the politicians, the high priests of the Tech Bro Establishment, and the golden cow they have elected as their champion, routinely wrap themselves in the dusty robes of Christian piety.
I am a fellow who has read the New Testament, and try as I might, I cannot find the chapter where Jesus of Nazareth tells the disciples to look out for Number One. I have searched the Beatitudes in vain for the line, “Blessed are the hedge fund managers, for they shall inherit the tax havens.”
The greed, the hatred of the immigrant, the systematic stripping away of protections for the poor, and the utter selfishness that characterizes the modern conservative movement are not merely deviations from the Gospel, they are its direct, unadulterated antithesis.
They have taken a philosophy of radical self-sacrifice and turned it into a theology of radical self-interest.
It is a grand performance, played out daily on our little glowing screens. They give the worker his streaming television to keep him quiet, take his pension to keep themselves rich, and promise him heaven while making a tidy profit off his earthly misery.
It is enough to make even an honest riverboat captain from Twain’s era turn his eyes to the sky and wonder when the real flood is coming.