IVIV (1) There Will be Computers for This

[Michael Bailey]

>>>  Unions have had a heroic historic role in democratizing the US economy,
>>> but [...]
>>
>> Agreed, which has nothing to do with computers.
>>
>> David Morris
>

Nonetheless, I'm not inclined to completely dismiss all the points
alice made, nor the
invocation of Mumford and Marx, and probably Jameson comes in there
somewhere too.

Different technology does change people's lives.  So I see an agreement
there, although David and alice differ on exactly "How" it changes them.

The kind of emotional pitch that won workers to a cause when they're
carrying hods or something, isn't as likely to appeal to literate folks who sit
in front of a computer, nor are they likely to be able to last long on
a picket line
against strikebreakers.

But that sort of action is unlikely anyway.
--check it out: if the *workplace* is distributed but *capital* is still
concentrated, the rank and file whom my company calls "individual contributors"
face different obstacles to organizing. They might not even know who
each other are... and good luck enforcing any sort of dread on the employer's
part of a strike action, since the scab pool is ubiquitous and undetectable.

People who get excited about co-operating rather than competing are your
natural unionists.  Those who get tickled about having a big pile of money are
your natural capitalists.

The way I see it, it might even be genetically determined.  Which type of person
somebody is, to me, is less important than having an ethos that
selects nonviolent
means of achieving ends...

but in reference to organizing in a cyber environment, the GNU/FOSS movement
seem to have a lot of useful clues...

anyway, curving back towards the zeta function of the thread,
while alice illuminates some of the negative implications of Pynchon's
statement "someday there will be computers to do all this", David's more
inclined to celebrate the fact...
I have a foot in both camps, I guess.


-- 
"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the
revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world
declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism." -
Martin Luther King