Long live the new efficiencies (7 July 2010)

I always knew there was something suspicious about concentration, considering how inconvenient and inefficient it is, slowing my consumption down unconscionably. I'm so glad the network can glean the by-products of my perpetual boredom and restlessness and make proper, efficient use of them. I am glad we are evolving.

In an essay for the NYTimes Opinator blog, evolutionary-psychology proponent and "card-carrying Darwinian" Robert Wright responds to Nicholas Carr's case in The Shallows that our interaction with the internet affects our ability to concentrate, leaving us permanently distracted. Wright suggests that this feeling of permanent distraction is a good sign, indicating that our brains are being fused to others, contributing to purposes larger than we are capable of comprehending. If we could actually concentrate on what we were doing in responding to too many things at once, we would end up cutting out the myriad networked connections to others that puts informational tidbits in motion and makes them useful.

On balance, technology is letting people link up with more and more people who share a vocational or avocational interest. And it’s at this level, the social level, that the new efficiencies reside. The fact that we don’t feel efficient — that we feel, as Carr puts it, like “chronic scatterbrains” — is in a sense the source of the new efficiencies; the scattering of attention among lots of tasks is what allows us to add value to lots of social endeavors. The incoherence of the individual mind lends coherence to group minds.

That's pretty chilling. It reminds me of The Charge of the Light Brigade:

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:

All hail the new efficiencies! What difference does it make if they obliterate subjectivity as we have known it? An overrated propensity, identity, unless it can "add value" to "social endeavors," that is, unless it has brand equity. But as for individual autonomy? Who needs it. As Wright tells us, "this fragmenting at the individual level translates, however ironically, into broader and more intricate cohesion at the social level — cohesion of an increasingly organic sort." The group mind must know what it's all about -- it's organic, after all. Wright notes that he is "nostalgic as the next middle-aged guy for the time when focus was easier to come by," but he is not worried that the superbrain is malevolent or totalitarian.

I, for one, also welcome the group mind. It relieves me of all my anxieties and responsibilities. It makes me feel comfortable in my ignorance, which obviously is integral to a larger purpose determined by the magic conjunction of those who share my avocational interests, who are kept equally ignorant. A thousand gut reactions always amount to more than one considered response.

Logan's Run Economy (21 June 2010)

To follow up on the post yesterday about foolish austerity, and the noxious view that unemployment benefits shouldn't be extended because it would be rewarding a bunch of lazy slackers: some of the unemployed would love to be hired but are (a) stuck in a house in a depressed area or (b) old. Or both. Ezra Klein links to this Washington Independent piece by Annie Lowrey that details the difficulties older workers have in getting hired.

There are structural reasons that the unemployment crisis is hitting older Americans so hard. Older workers are more likely to be underwater homeowners, unable to sell their house and move away. They often have highly specific marketable skills, and seek positions more selectively. They also often have skills rendered obsolete by the recession, in outdated trades. But too often, employers illegally presume that older workers will be harder to train, more likely to leave for other positions, less productive, less technologically able or less willing to move — and do not hire them for those reasons.

I worry about this a lot. I work in an industry (magazine publishing) that is notorious for age discrimination. Also, as a PhD dropout who was "overqualified" for most of the entry-level jobs I had to apply for, I can readily remember the frustration and futility, the despair -- and this was when the economy was recovering robustly. I ended up having to spend a lot of time in temp agencies, proving my ability to alphabetize and to open up files in Microsoft Word. I felt like a useless piece of garbage, unwanted by society because I made the error of extending my education until I reached 30, and I wondered when the time would come when they would send me to the soul-renewal chamber like in Logan's Run. How much worse must it be for those laid off in a downturn because they are older and draw more benefits and better salaries and ruled inefficient relative to younger, less demanding workers.

Whenever the economy undergoes a structural shift, it seems that older workers will be disadvantaged without remedy, since they will have outdated skills and will be subject to uncorrectable discrimination. Lowrey notes that "policy experts fear that age discrimination in hiring, compounded by the recession, is a problem without a solution. Individuals can bring cases against individual companies, but discrimination is virtually impossible to prove, even if it is easy to see as an aggregate phenomenon." So even though the trend is obvious at the macro level, micro-level concerns make it difficult to change. (Sort of like the problem of inadequate demand in the economy generally.) Thus we have a Logan's Run economy, concentrating unemployment among older workers while making them scapegoats for the runaway deficit that is "stealing from our children." Perhaps the Republicans who stonewalled the jobs bill should stop pussyfooting around and tell these older workers to just go die.

Consuming the idea of productivity (4 March 2008)

Every now and then, usually in moments of aimless procrastination, I get drawn into Lifehacker, Gawker Media's blog about how to be more productive. It's full of tips and software downloads and to-do lists and it's uniformly cheerful and perky, but I'm pretty sure it's doing nothing to improve anyone's efficiency. It makes productivity into a fun fantasy to indulge in: Wouldn't it be great if I was one of those people who need to install a keyboard-command application launcher, because I'm so diligently and relentlessly multitasking that I can hardly dare to spare a few nanoseconds away from typing to move my mouse? Wouldn't it be cool if I was the sort of person who learns 10 new foreign words a day courtesy of a daily podcast I have in my hyperorganized personal podcast-processing portal page? Wouldn't I be a hero if I were the type to label all my emails and have them file themselves automatically so that I could spend more time tagging interesting sites on the Web and sharing them through one of the several hundred social networking platforms I've become affiliated with? And that's not to mention all the pseudo-productive hobbies I get to daydream about by browsing around Lifehacker, like putting together a Linux machine that runs all open-source software and retagging all my iTunes files with release dates, album covers, lyrics, and genres.

It's absurd -- the site provides numerous solutions for the same problem, creating the new task (which it will offer a helpful solution to, I'm sure) of having to evaluate which time-saving strategy is best. And the site is updated so frequently that to keep up with it is extremely inefficient (though it does offer specialized feeds so you can cut down the flow). If I truly was concerned with being productive, one of the first things I'd do is forbid myself from reading Lifehacker.

It may just be semantics, but when I think about it, I find something repugnant about "hacking" life. As if life itself weren't enough, and I should be finding shortcuts to preempt its flow, programming myself to be less life-like.

Productivity is not the abstract end in itself that the site makes of it -- it's not a prêt-à-porter product. When devising means to be more productive, obviously it matters what your larger, more meaningful goals are. But productivity for its own sake allows you to forget that you may not have larger, more meaningful goals -- a common affliction in capitalist societies that devalue the meaning of work and make leisure a kind of compulsion. In other words, productivity is another mask for convenience, which is really just consumption efficiency presented as quantitative hedonism.

Paying people in work (11 April 2007)

In the course of my reading recently I somehow ended up on some anarcho-capitalist blogs and stumbled across a link to a 20-year-old article from Theory and Society called "A Capitalist Road to Communism." The authors, Robert Van Der Veen and Philippe Van Parijs, take the Marxist recipe for a society worthy of humankind and argue that socialism may not be a necessary historical stage on our way there. I found it interesting in light of the confused ideas I was trying to express about productivity the other day. The gist of the most idealist Marxist vision of society is that work will become so meaningful to people that they won't need to be motivated to perform it by material gain. In fact people will be "paid" in the ability to work more, as work itself will be the essence of a person's fulfillment -- work will have become "life's prime want" to use Marx's description (which Van der Veen and Van Parijs cite). In the most utopian vision of society, productivity gains, which are necessary to fulfill material wants, will be effortless to achieve, since work itself will grow ever more meaningful, and people will be ever more dedicated to its completion. (The only way this would be possible is if technology improvements had advanced to the point where all drudge work could be automated, performed by robots or something -- this quickly turns into science fiction.) The distinction between work and leisure would disappear, and altruism would be indistinguishable from self-interest (and the sky would always be full of rainbows and it would rain lollipops every Sunday).

Anyway, if that's the goal, if improved productivity accelerates us toward the time when we are all liberated from exploitation and alienation via our grubbing after our material interests, then what sense would it make to stage silent slowdowns, to retard productivity as a way to trip up the bosses extracting it from you? Why would it be a worker's instinct to find ways to subvert productivity, as De Certeau, for one, seems to suggest in The Practice of Everyday Life? One way to look at it is this: Subversive nonproductive actions on the clock are a way of extracting more wages (when increased productivity suggests they are due -- theoretically the percent increase in productivity should eventually provoke an equivalent bump in wages) in the form of time or office supplies or internet access when the cash is not forthcoming in one's paycheck. But in Marxist theory, the point when workers begin to work against the system -- when their working conditions are so perverse and contrary to their interests that they become intentionally unproductive -- is the point at which socialism (workers' collective ownership of the mean of production) is supposed to become a better arrangement for society than capitalism (which pits individuals against each other in exploitative arrangements that suddenly no longer serve the common good through the workings of the invisible hand Adam Smith posited). If you are a true fellow traveler, you can perhaps see in these petty moments of office rebellion -- IMing at work all day long, stealing reams of paper, etc. -- the first inklings of socialist revolution. The same goes for the the alleged epidemic of workplace boredom -- a sign that the current social relations of production have outlived their usefulness.

Here arises a conundrum: the capacity for boredom seems to run counter to the self-motivation a socialist system would seem to require. If workers are going to be more productive under some scheme of self-management, then they would need to be able to supply themselves with meaningful tasks -- they would be in a position to see what needs to be done and do it on account of its own needfulness. If boredom is a consequence of having that impulse thwarted, that's one thing. But it often seems that people grow bored not from having their natural incentive to get things done thwarted but from having grown complacent with being told what to do. One's internal initiative atrophies, and one waits for one's orders while reserving the snarky right to complain about them. Boredom is at once a symptom and a cause of the workplace alienation problem socialism is supposed to solve. Theoretically, socialism removes the parasitic management class, but what will become of us if the managers vanished and left behind the bored, scratching their heads, no longer able to motivate themselves to accomplish anything without management's contrived blandishments?

Capitalism, of course, offers entrepreneurship as the next step for thwarted, bored workers -- they can become their own boss by starting their own business. (This, according to a Danish guy I met on vacation, is the beauty of America. "Do you do your job better than the other guy?" he asked me, over and over again. "Then you start your own business! It's so easy! The American dream!") If the management class ever withers away like the state is supposed to, will it be because enough workers will have embraced capitalism to the extent that they feel obliged to become entrepreneurs? Should the aim of technology be not only to provide a material surplus sufficient to fulfill everyone's basic needs but to enable more small business and independent proprietorships? Is the future of socialism a bunch of 1099s?

Perilous productivity (6 April 2007)

When drops in productivity (the measure of how much you get out of what inputs are put into production) are reported in the media, usually the stern, glum assessment reads something like what's found in this piece from last weekend's WSJ by Greg Ip:

The U.S. productivity boom that began in the mid-1990s is showing signs of running out of steam. If it proves more than a temporary lull, slower growth in productivity -- that is, output per hour worked -- could lead to slower growth in living standards, more difficultly paying for the baby boomers' retirements and a greater risk of inflation. Inflation fears would make the Federal Reserve more reluctant to lower interest rates.

This conforms to the conventional view of economists and is essentially a matter beyond argument, something built in to the very definitions and analytical tools of the profession. No one roots for less productivity any more than they seek to pay more to get less, or buy high and sell low.

Some gains in productivity come from technology -- the 1990s saw the implementation of computerized networks for communication, logistics, inventory control and data processing, and this obviously allowed workers to become far more productive than they had been, despite the endless distractions the internet spawned as byproduct. The productivity boost of having Internet access in offices yields the free time workers can waste reading blogs and watching awesome videos on YouTube like this one. But ultimately, productivity increases come from the sweat of workers' brows, as this post serves to remind us:

Take poor productivity, for instance. The very tone of the phrase, “poor productivity,” strikes me as negative spin. When was the last time you got a new job? How much did your new employer pay you? Most companies want to pay their employees the least amount of money they’re willing to work for. This isn’t because those companies are devious cheapskates; it’s just the basic idea behind having employees.
Poor productivity is the same thing in reverse. Employees are extracting the most amount of money from the least amount of work. This is a bad thing? Why? The time and energy you save just from being inefficient are like money in the bank. After all, time is money. Wise employees turn a profit by paying themselves in time.

This echoes the ideas about workplace tactics that sociologist Michel de Certeau recounts in The Practice of Everyday Life -- workers make the best of an exploitative arrangement by staging invisible slowdowns, stealing supplies, loafing, using company time for personal projects, taking sick days for vacation, and so on. One might argue that these abuses are expected, built into the unspoken employer-employee contract to vent pressure that might otherwise build up as company profits mount while wages remain stagnant. The relation of productivity to wages evokes the question of what purpose management serves: It often seems that management's job is to maximize productivity while disguising the wage discrepancy -- in fact management's productivity would seemingly be defined by the extent of that discrepancy.

The productivity slowdown makes me somewhat skeptical of pieces such as this one from the Guardian, which frets about workplace boredom.

"Boredom is a protest when the job doesn't seem part of who you feel you are," says Rob Briner, professor of organisational psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. "You feel negative about the organisation and lack job satisfaction. It is a risk when you are not being told what your job means."

Read between the lines of that, though, and you come away with the fact that often boredom is a choice, not an imposed condition, a product of unreasonable expectations about the nature of institutionalized work. You expect to define yourself through your job, but then also wait for the manager to supply the definitions. By changing the rules or hiding the logic behind various tasks, managers are just carrying out their mission of masking the true value of anyone's contribution and suppressing disruptive individuality. Any efforts at making work meaningful cannot be imposed from without, by someone higher up in the hierarchy.