Way-out, Saturday party-time, plist-type open-ended question....grounded in Puritanism maybe?

[alice wellintown]

Isn't this too simple? That is, the argument that its all down to Big
Business profits and damn Everything and Everybody elese? Sure it is.
There are thousands of other considerations and ignoring these is
rather foolish. We cannot accept the benefits of Big Business
technologies without accepting the moral imperatives and the aesthetic
forms that come with them. Sure. And puritan themes are not
scientific.

But, here are two fairly obvious things to consider. So, the Big
Business soap, the washing machine, made life easier for those who
were condemned to do the laundrey (the powerless and poor, most of
them women). The major changes that Big Business technologies have
produced are most evident most in the social distinctions they tend to
eliminate. Because Big Business place emphasis on standardization,
because its immediate objective is effective work, it makes of a
culture, standardization and puts great emphasis on the generic. Like
the Army, it seeks to make us uniform. So equlity, while not its goal,
is its result. The invisivle hand of Smith was made a Visible Hand, as
Chandler explain. Or, if you prefer a modern phrase that omits much of
the moral tones of Smith, the world is flat because Big Business
technolgies are, again, not bu design, but by nature, deomcratic.

Second, the goal is more leisure time or the freedom of other human
capacities. So, if one is not scrubbing a rich man's drawn down by the
river side, well, one might be making up a blues tune for the ages.