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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Capitalism Steered Innovation Toward Social Control Rather Than Technological Wonders
http://www.alternet.org/economy/155750/why_don%27t_we_have_flying_cars_how_capitalism_steered_innovation_toward_social_control_rather_than_technological_wonders/_640x525_310x220
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promisegiven to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eightiesone that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, were left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.
Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emergelike cloning or cryogenicsended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?
We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we havent moved even computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected wed have reached by now. We dont have computers we can have an interesting conversation with, or robots that can walk our dogs or take our clothes to the Laundromat.
***
For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as were constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created flexible work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.
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How Capitalism Steered Innovation Toward Social Control Rather Than Technological Wonders (Original Post)
xchrom
Jun 2012
OP
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)1. K&R
nashville_brook
(20,958 posts)2. k n r
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)3. k&r
redgreenandblue
(2,088 posts)4. Problem is we haven't figured out gravity yet.
Flying cars, warp drives, tractor beams, big time space-travel. Just a few of the things within our reach if we could control and reverse gravity the way we do with electromagnetism. It's not at all clear whether it is possible even in principle though.