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Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting piece at CNN.com asking whether the economy of the future will be set up in such a way that jobs as we know it make any sense at all.
The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?
Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance.
In considering what an economy has to look like, Rushkoff tries to imagine past capitalism and communism into a different way of looking at economics going forward – which sort of ends up looking like the economy of the United Federation of Planets, where everyone’s basic needs are provided for but you have to do creative work to obtain status and other things you might want.
Ultimately, I’m not convinced that Rushkoff’s solution works – it suffers a little too much from what I think of as “information class myopia”, in which writers about technology, who spend most of their days involved with gadgets and electronic media while creating intellectual property for a living confuse their own experiences with universal ones. These pieces rear their heads every now and again when people ask questions like, “Why do we need a post office? I always text!” while proclaiming ubiquitous, frequently used technologies like the phone and email dead simply because they don’t use them that often as texting, Twitter, etc. Rushkoff doesn’t usually suffer from this syndrome, but I think his concept in this column does.
That said, I think Douglas Rushkoff is a pretty brilliant guy, and while I may not agree with where he’s going in this column, I do think he’s absolutely right to think about the future of our economic systems. I think he’s absolutely right to point out that now might be a good time to completely reconsider what we value in terms of work, employment, and career, and that we need to figure out what the technological and social changes of the past few decades mean for those concepts.
It’s important to remember that the economic systems that we live with today won’t last forever. As technology changes and innovation continues, so too will the very nature of what the economy is will evolve. Paradigm shifts like the rise of the corporation in the late Middle Ages, paper money, free labor and central banking, among many others, all came about as a response to particular political, social and technological pressures, needs, and problems. And as times change and different technologies and social needs come to the fore, economic institutions and rules will change accordingly – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes at the behest of government and sometimes whether government likes it or not.
It’s not far-fetched to imagine that the nature of employment and entrepreneurship may well be very different a century from now than it is today. Indeed, they may not even be recognizable a century from now. That’s because economic institutions and ideas aren’t natural laws – they’re practical tools that are always evolving.
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