‘Out of the current confusion of ideals and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity. The meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people’s work suddenly appears as what it is, and it becomes possible once again to think the thought, ‘Let me make myself useful.’
‘Even if you do go to college, learn a trade in the summers. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems or low-level “creative”. to heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.’
‘To begin with, we are accustomed to think of the business world as ruled by an amoral bottom-line mentality, but in fact it is impossible to make sense of the office without noticing that it has become a place of moral education, where souls are formed and where a particular idea of what it means to be a good person is urged upon us.’
‘“Expert systems” a term coined by artificial intelligence researchers, were initially developed by the military for battle command, then used to replicate industrial expertise in such fields as oil-well drilling and telephone-line maintenance. Then they found their way into medical diagnosis, and eventually the cognitively murky, highly lucrative regions of financial and legal advice.’
‘In the last thirty years, businesses have shifted their focus from the production of goods to the projection of brands, that is, states of mind in the customer, and this shift finds correlate in the production of mentalities in workers. Process becomes more important than product, and is to optimised through management techniques that work on a deeper level than the curses of a foreman. Further, though the demands made on workers are invariably justified in terms of their contribution to the bottom line, in fact such calculations are difficult to make: the chain of means-end reasoning becomes opaque, and this opens the way for work to become a rather moralistic place.’
‘We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power, with such devices as the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial functions. But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human understanding becomes possible (it is never guaranteed). The consolation we week in shopping serves only to narcotize us against a recognition of these facts, even while contributing to the Giant Pool of Money.’
