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Coupland is talking backstage at Konica Minolta's Spotlight Live event on the future of work in Berlin this week where he was a star speaker. He says the collapse of the idea of a job for life means his generation, Generation X, and later ones think very differently about work than those born earlier. "They don't perceive [a job] as being a guarantee of long-term security – that's the profound difference, he says. "There was a point when the idea of the job for life disintegrated. Now no one has any expectation of lifetime employment."
Work as we know it is coming to an end, he told the audience in Berlin, as cloud-based technologies and ever-faster download speeds are making the office obsolete. Our working days are becoming interspersed with leisure and home activities. We will need to learn to adapt to a freeform schedule, which will present a psychological challenge to those who crave structure. But Coupland believes we should not mourn the loss of the traditional office routine.
"The nine to five is barbaric. I really believe that. I think one day we will look back at nine-to-five employment in a similar way to how we see child labour in the 19th century," he says. "The future will not have the nine till five. Instead, the whole day will be interspersed with other parts of your life. Scheduling will become freeform."
Nine-to-five sounds great to people whose employers expect them to work 80-hour weeks...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 07 2017, @04:04PM (1 child)
The sad thing is the need to know something real and the opportunity do use it professionally has been so deeply abstracted away from American society (and perhaps others--can't speak to that) that more and more people like Coupland are drifting away into the fairy ether, thinking that shit automagically happens at the tap of an app. They don't witness the hard work of faceless thousands to fulfill their wishes, therefore those people don't exist and their labor and skills mean nothing. And this proceeds in a hermeneutic cycle until the chief product of people like Coupland is whine.
It ties into the discussion we had a few days ago about the value of an MBA. It's bad for everyone except the holder of the MBA because they have no idea how to do anything real. The dramatic shift of global wealth into the hands of such people has stained government, private enterprise, and every other collective endeavor to the point where nobody put in charge or holding decision-making power has any faintest clue how to do anything real, and retreat in ever tighter gyres into a self-reinforcing fantasy-land like Coupland's.
It also ties into the discussion we had yesterday about the 'death of the laptop,' whereby the premise was that people don't need real computers anymore because they have smartphones. Naturally the consensus on Soylent, comprising engineers, scientists, and other techs, who actually know how to do things and do real work, was derisive laughter at that callow assertion. Again, it's reality becoming so divorced from those with power, money, and a platform that they can say stuff like this with a straight face.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 08 2017, @08:13AM
It's called externalization.
Like how Trump personally makes an extra $100k for every club membership at Mar-a-lago for the cheap price of $3.2M every week to the tax payers to fly him there. It's a pure $100k profit from his perspective.