When the Corporatists Win

 

(originally posted on Medium 8/7/24, pre-election, titled "Our two choices this election are clear")

If you look at the duality of our economy, owners vs workers, Wall Street vs Main Street, CEOs vs janitors, you can see it mirrored in our political choices in stark terms this year.

Looking at the background of both sets of candidates, it’s clear that Trump/Vance come to the campaign largely as businessmen, representing corporate interests. Their governing experiences (4 years/1.5 years respectively) have been guided by corporate interests from the start. If you run a business, you might think they can do the job as well or better than the politicians. Right? Many CEOs and techbros believe this idea.

Harris/Walz comes with decades of government and public service experience. They have been trained to serve the law, the greater good, the workers, and The People at large. Equity is written into the Constitution that they vow to protect.

Corporate culture makes no such vow. The mendacity and greed of the corporate class has been laid bare these last few years after the pandemic. Our current economy is based on stockholder riches, not operational flexibility so they can’t hide the incompetence anymore. We all know now the contempt that business has for employees — they can’t replace them with software fast enough. These companies have no respect for consumers either — products are shoddy, customer service is nonexistent. This is true across the board in every industry at the corporate level.

Why do we want these people running our government when they obviously are only out for their own enrichment and are running our once-strong institutions into the ground? They have no commitments to us and no inclination to do the right thing for the country.

It should be clear to everyone right now, and I’m going to shout it, that BUSINESSMEN HAVE NO BUSINESS IN GOVERNMENT. The objectives and contexts of each endeavor are radically different. STOP ELECTING BUSINESS PEOPLE TO CLEAN UP GOVERNMENT! They will treat their constituents like employees and treat their stockholders - their donors - like constituents. And look out when they figure out we can’t be fired and we’re not going to leave. They have already made plans for security to see us off the premises.

AI, Linotypes and Labor

 

(first posted on Medium Jan. 14, 2024)

Is anyone old enough to remember these behemoths in action?

A dark basement held 50 or more of these 8 foot tall monsters at the newspaper plant I worked at in my 20s, around 1974. They and the whole workspace had been used to typeset the daily news not that long before, and the room had been filled with workers at the composition boards. Little slugs of metal holding backwards letters and words were lined up in trays that were then used to make heavy rubber plates of each spread that were printed on newsprint on the floor above us. These ancient machines were crowded into corners in the dark, like silent ghosts. I never saw one in action, so the details are forgotten, except by Wikipedia and art printmakers.

We were doing ad pasteup with phototypesetting in a tiny corner of the basement, brightly lit like an island in a black sea of past technology. We 15 or so were on the graveyard shift, from 10pm to 6am, wielding our Exactos on photo printouts of artwork and text that we ran through wax machines and then positioned and burnished on a board. It seems pretty quaint now, but I miss those hands-on days, with the big tables, rolling t-squares and tall stools. Pasteup was a creative enterprise back then, and I was pretty good with a blade. No surprise I went into graphic design later, continuing to cut and paste my layouts until the desktop publishing era arrived which, again, destroyed jobs and made old technology obsolete.

As we watch AI take over the supposedly human-touch skills that we thought were safe, please remember that Capitalism abhors human labor, and always has. No matter how cool the technology, the question remains, does it make the society as a whole better? Or does it just benefit the owners and stockholders of the monopoly that offers it. Just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean it’s not going to cause upheaval, unemployment, poverty, suicides and depression. But hey, that corporate bigwig just bought a new mega-yacht, so it must be worth destroying 3 or 4 huge print-related industries and the lives they supported. And the software is so freakin’ cool!

I’m not advocating the return of Linotype. But all this new technology has a cost and a challenge: what to do with all that archaic human labor. We’ve been told since the 70s that robots were going to take our jobs, but crickets from above. No corporation or government official has come up with an answer other than UBI, not a terrible idea in these days of price gouging, but not near a full solution. What do we do? How do we spend our days, and our paltry basic incomes? How disposable do we become then for government and corporations who don’t like to face the human cost of their business decisions?

I lost major clients to desktop publishing and ironically also taught the software to the printhouse stripping teams that also got anachronized practically overnight. I was lucky then, that I could pick up the new tech easily, but these older men, experts in their field, weren't all that interested. ‘But who cares about them? They retired early. Look what Quark can do! ‘

This story was repeated just 10 years later, when I went into web design and programming to keep ahead. Each new platform got slicker and easier to use, and more homogenous in style. Design became a matter of settings. Literally any person could design a website, as long as it was pre-programmed. And who cared if the kerning was crap, look at this spiffy javascript module! So I retired early too. I started my career with U&lc and ended it with Wix.com. Sad.

The environment now, where billionaires own all the media, and whole departments are being vaporized to serve the online market, is just more of the same. The world of print design is almost extinct. The wide array of vehicles for design in the 90s — newsletters, magazines, posters, invitations, annual reports, print ads and more — has been shrunk down to the size of a phone screen and a short scroll of clunky fonts. Design is secondary to screen real estate parceling, and once gorgeous magazines are ugly and buggy and impossible to read.

I can’t say I’m surprised at all that AI has overnight usurped original art and text of all forms, taking down another slew of jobs formerly held by humans. If designers, illustrators, copywriters and other creatives don’t bite the bullet and learn how to prompt an AI properly, there will be far more retirees. Expertise will be meaningless, and even a liability. And the business owners will pocket the difference that they saved hiring a kid with an iPhone over you.

I hate to be a Cassandra, but the outlook is not good for my former profession. I watched it turn itself inside out as each tech innovation came and then was usurped by the next. Each wave is designed to fling off human labor as so much seafoam. Capitalism is designed that way.

Winning

 

(previously posted on Medium April 17. 2023)

Winning, as a precept for human interaction, is a failure.

Winning at business, politics, and social stature has no benefit to society.

Winning used to be applied to quality, that is, being the best. The best athlete, the best car on the track, the best employee in the office.

These days, winning is just about not losing. Whatever you can do to avoid losing is the overall strategy of corporations, politicians, media heads, insurance companies, banks… every institution in our society is driven not by the goal to be the best, but to be the last one standing.

The carnage that that implies is obvious to everyone who isn’t playing the game of “I win, you lose.” Because if you don’t have the money to play that game, you are always the loser.

If you think that money is the goal, please stop. Everyone at that level already has more money than they and their descendants will ever need. It’s only the winning over someone else that counts. This is why cruelty is so often the point.

You name the industry, I can tell you how companies cheat and lie to get their company’s price higher on the stock market than it’s competitors. How Fox News cheated and lied to keep it’s position at the top of the ratings chart. How 3 tech bros who squeeze their employees to get just a few more billions of profit, spent them on a rocket ship ride, trying to beat the other tech bro billionaires. And these are seen as the Winners of our society!

But even the losers play the game. Again, there is no goal, other than to beat the other guy. Cheat, lie, play games, falsify and gaslight, these are tactics that have real world consequences, but it doesn’t matter as long as you win.

Winning for the right wing is now about destroying their opponents, for no other reason than they want to have all the power. The ultimate win. And this win requires psychological warfare and torture. Gangs of trolls and bots, all dedicated to “owning the libs” a form of winning that is as twisted — “I will demean you and threaten to hurt you or someone you love, in order to make you angry, which means I win” — as it is meaningless. Now these trolls write policy, so hurting other people just to win is a government precept too.

But what is the goal? How does this move society forward? Do these wins the right wing claims achieve in any way some higher goal? Certainly not Christianity which they have re-worked to leave out everything Jesus stood for but includes the Prosperity Gospel and Aryan tribalism. Because fuck Jesus, Christianity has to WIN!

Does competition now happen without the competitors involvement? Does the winner just win by declaring it? When your product is shoddy, but your fellow techbros like how you union-bust, do you deserve that price per share? Is there any reward anymore to winning when you are not the best, just the meanest?

This is why the right wing stunts seem so pointless — there is no point other than to take an ephemeral strike against some ephemeral imaginary opponent.

Meanwhile, as our society crumbles under the weight of so much pointless victory, the precepts of cooperation and mutual support, protection from harm, making stronger, safer communities and yes, the precept of Quality, are being vilified as weakness.

Winning as a structure for society is bankrupt, reference entirely intended. Our economy, banking system, healthcare system, judicial system, supply-line, everything is predicated on winning, and the winning billionaires have discovered there’s no ceiling on that need to win more, or on the amount of collateral damage needed to achieve it.

Liberals are caught in the War Games conundrum: there’s no way to win except to not play the game. But we are now wired to win also, it’s the prevailing value in our political climate.

I think we need to undermine the gospel of Winning and promote the values that will make society better able to deal with the crises that Winning has caused. 

Winning needs to die.