Forget Techno-Optimism: We Can’t Innovate Our Way Out of Inequality

[marmar]

from In These Times:



Forget Techno-Optimism: We Can’t Innovate Our Way Out of Inequality
Hillary Clinton’s former ‘senior advisor for innovation’ sees our Uber-ized future through rose-colored glasses

BY CHRIS LEHMANN


Toward the end of his 250-page hymn to digital-age innovation, The Industries of the Future, Alec Ross pauses to offer a rare cautionary note. Silicon Valley may have incubated all the wonders and conveniences one can imagine—and oh, so many more! But for the international business elites looking to remake their emerging market economies in the Valley’s gleaming, khaki-clad image, there’s some bad news: It can no longer be done. A “decades-long head start” has granted too great a competitive advantage to the charmed peninsula along the Northern California coast.

Not to worry, though! On-the-make tech globalists can still make a go of it, provided they’re prepared to embrace “specific cultural and labor market characteristics that can contradict both a society’s norms and the more controlling impulses of government leaders.”

Stripped of the vague and glowing techno-babble, this is a prescription for good old-fashioned neoliberal market discipline. Everywhere Ross looks across the radically transformed world of digital commerce, the benign logic of market triumphalism wins the day. When Terry Gou—the Taiwanese CEO of Foxconn, the vast Chinese electronics sweatshop that doubles as an incubator for worker suicides—plans to eliminate the headache of supervising an unstable human workforce by replacing it with “the first fully automated plant” in manufacturing history, why, he’s simply “responding to pure market forces”: i.e., an increase in Chinese wages that cuts into Foxconn’s ridiculously broad profit margins. And you and I might see the so-called sharing economy as a means to casualize service workers into nonunion, benefit-free gigs that transfer economic value on a massive scale to a rentier class of Silicon Valley app marketers. But bouncy New Economy cheerleaders like Ross see “a way of making a market out of anything, and a microentrepreneur out of anyone.”

When confronted with the spiraling of income inequality in the digital age, Ross, like countless other prophets of better living through software, sagely counsels that “rapid progress often comes with greater instability.” Sure, the “wealthy generally benefit over the short term,” but remember, kids: “Innovations have the potential to become cheaper over time and spread throughout the greater population.” ...............(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18754/alec-ross-techno-optimism

[HughBeaumont]

1. Have I NOT been saying this all along?

To be sure, Ross raises some vague concerns about how, for example, the runaway growth of the sharing economy drains workers of job security, healthcare benefits, pensions and the like. He avers that “as the sharing economy grows … the safety net needs to grow with it,” but, much like his politically savvy boss, he offers nothing in the way of policy specifics besides the inarguable yet unactionable truism that if the sharing economy “generates enormous amounts of wealth for the platform owners, then the platform owners can and should help pay for added costs to society.”

Does no one get that not only do the wealthy NOT want to employ us (but strangely enough, want us to keep buying their products . . . . search me how THAT works . . . ) but also do not want to have anything to do with paying for a safety net or Guaranteed Minimum Income? In fact, swaths of them are really, really, REALLY campaigning hard for "build the moat, close the drawbridge" domestic policy of austerity and "rugged individualism".

Because cutting off all resources and income will TRULY motivate the poor to get themselves out of the awful life they'll experience! RIGHT?? ISN'T THAT HOW IT WORKS?? Again, logically explain to me how someone with no money would be able to purchase a degree or resources they'll need for "innovation", much less pay their bills in the meantime. But it's worked before . . . with someone . . . we might or might not have heard of . . . so naturally, it has to work for everyone.

Right?