SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the work-like-a-dog-/-fingers-to-the-bone-/-nose-to-the-grindstone dept.
Mary’s story looks different to different people. Within the ghoulishly cheerful Lyft public-relations machinery, Mary is an exemplar of hard work and dedication—the latter being, perhaps, hard to come by in a company that refuses to classify its drivers as employees. Mary’s entrepreneurial spirit—taking ride requests while she was in labor!—is an “exciting” example of how seamless and flexible app-based employment can be. Look at that hustle! You can make a quick buck with Lyft anytime, even when your cervix is dilating.
[...] It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news. Fiverr, an online freelance marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur”—as its name suggests, services advertised on Fiverr can be purchased for as low as five dollars—recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust.” One ad, prominently displayed on some New York City subway cars, features a woman staring at the camera with a look of blank determination. “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”
[...] At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear. Human-interest stories about the beauty of some person standing up to the punishments of late capitalism are regular features in the news, too. I’ve come to detest the local-news set piece about the man who walks ten or eleven or twelve miles to work—a story that’s been filed from Oxford, Alabama; from Detroit, Michigan; from Plano, Texas. The story is always written as a tearjerker, with praise for the person’s uncomplaining attitude; a car is usually donated to the subject in the end. Never mentioned or even implied is the shamefulness of a job that doesn’t permit a worker to afford his own commute.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 24 2017, @03:13PM (7 children)
Is that saying we've overpopulated?
I see two basic futures for humanity. 1) Endless cycles of overpopulation followed by war, famine, and epidemics. Or, 2) we curb our greed and competitiveness, keep a lid on population, and enjoy lives of peace and plenty. The second can be done. The first is harsh and cruel, and stupid evil, but was workable so long as we didn't have the power to really mess up the world. Now that we do have that power, the first option just doesn't look viable any more. If that's the road we take, our future may be a very short one.
I see the macho, ostrich head in the sand. authoritarian conservative as blindly pushing us all in the direction of option one. Many of their policies inadvertently slow population growth by putting a lot of pressure on the masses so that people feel they can't afford more children. But that only delays the reckoning, and if they get their way, all too soon they'll have us all in a corner where war or famine are the only options left. It's the best explanation I've thought of for their seemingly contradictory policies towards women and children. No abortion, no contraceptives, yet no help to care for the children their policies force on us.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @03:34PM (4 children)
In order to achieve a robust society, that society must be allowed to evolve by variation and selection, a process which is best implemented as a free market: Individuals must be allowed to make bets on what they think are the best ways to exist; through this competition of ideas, society as a whole is actually cooperating to find solutions to its problems (nobody knows what the best solution actually is), including solutions to problems that nobody even knew existed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @03:43PM (2 children)
War is peace, love is murder, idiots are insightful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @04:01PM (1 child)
Honestly, I'd like to know.
Are you just being cute, or do you really not comprehend the point that OP is making?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @09:40PM
I was being cute, but also trying to highlight the inherent problem with OP's idea. Competition is not cooperation, I understand the point but it only works in an ideal scenario where humans are good and productive members of society. It is a offshoot of the misguided "the strong survive the weak die" and the US is a prime example of how that concept totally fails. When you pit people against each other you often end up with someone on top, and they dictate the rules. There is no way some bootstrapper is going to pay his employees a fair wage if he doesn't have to, and the greedy sociopaths are often the ones that end up with wealth and power because they pursue it single-mindedly. Then these horrible human beings are able to disproportionately affect politics, or use their money to destroy competition.
So I call bullshit on competition == cooperation. It is a load of crap with some idealistic rationale as to why it would work.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 24 2017, @08:32PM
There's friendly competition, and destructive competition up to total war. The first is good, the second, not so much.
We ought to take care to keep the competition friendly, and I fear we're not being careful enough to make sure we don't end up starving and desperate enough to reach for the nukes. If Climate Change gets really bad and cuts our food supply significantly, before we can adjust, we may be in that kind of hurt. But now the US government is controlled by a bunch of climate deniers. Let us hope they prove to be irrelevant, and the US can respond sensibly to Climate Change in spite of them and whatever petty obstructionism they can mount.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Friday March 24 2017, @09:02PM
Option two doesn't strike you as authoritarian? It is the One Child Policy of Red China, where abortions were forced on women.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 25 2017, @12:38AM
Or, 2) we curb our greed and competitiveness, keep a lid on population, and enjoy lives of peace and plenty.
That "greed and competitiveness" has created a developed world with negative population growth among native populations. That's right. Capitalism (and associated policies like female education) has solved positive population growth for over a billion people in the world. 2) is the better answer than 1).