Having read the rest of your piece, I have to agree that Lanier lacks the context of understanding to make sense of what is going on overall.

Lanier picked a ridiculous comparison and then blithely went on.  Others have pointed that out, some with ridiculous comparisons of their own.

I brought it up because it is characteristic of the assumptions Lanier bases his thinking on and because he never backs it up.

Yet, the question of whether we are reducing employment through the Internet and what kind of employment we are creating with it are important questions.  They will not be answered by such silly comparisons though.

Solar IS Civil Defense

Metatone:

new industries have not arisen that provide mass employment the way the old ones did

it's the coming age of leisure, innit?

there's a field a mile from my house, where the farmer grows barley, oats or wheat. one day on my way home i saw the thresher at work, so stopped to chew the fat with the old boys. they told me that field, when they were children, took 10 days to two weeks to harvest for ten people, working even by moonlight to get in the sheaves before the first storms of late summer.

now the thresher does the whole thing in 45 minutes!

yet how many social planners are thinking about what to do with all those workers' energy?

ditto the industries outsourced to cheap labour countries...

i don't see any longterm solution barring a 'citizen's wage', an acceptance that relaxation and leisure do wonders for quality of life, and that work can be many things other than your 'job', especially if said job does not exist...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

As Galbraith pointed out in The Affluent Society (yes the same book again, it is a great book, everybody should read it), already in 1957 that society produced everything needed, indeed great effort was needed to create all new wants that more production could satisfy.

He also pointed out the already existing solution: the growing New Class that don't really do production or farming, but instead do intellectual labor and is handsomely rewarded for that. He also notes that there is nothing to prevent the New Class to keep growing, indeed it makes society better for the inhabitants of the New Class, increases competition for manual laborers which drives up wages, and also lessens the strains ever expanding production.

What we are seeing now is not the disappearance of jobs, it is the disappearance of good jobs. They are good because good conditions were enforced in an era of full employment. Todays new jobs are created in an era of purposefull high unemployment which means crappy conditions for newly created jobs, and of course continued high unemployment (because that is a feature, not a bug).

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