Never before have we wasted such an astonishing amount of natural resources and human labor, never before have we extracted and exploited as much, and never before have we obliterated and poisoned such huge swaths of land to produce mostly… garbage.
While the article was pointed more towards jobs that don’t benefit society at all, this quote hints at an aspect of work under capitalism that I don’t see stressed as much as I see the David Graeber type bullshit jobs. Even if you are producing a type of commodity that a person could actually use for non bullshit purposes, a ton of stuff is produced that either is:
a useless grift that does nothing
a useful product deliberately hampered to extract as much money as possible from the user, or
a product that is only useful for helping the grifter grift.
This tendency of capitalism to produce useless shit is why I regularly disparage software engineering as a profession. If you’re a programmer looking for work, you’ll be lucky if you get the second category. There’s a very good chance your job will be to make something in category 1 or 3. Speaking for myself, my job is in category 3. I help make software that bourgeois parasites and their financial advisors use to manage wealth. It is a well known fact among my coworkers that the majority of the clients of the advisors who use our software is the giga wealthy. While I still get some satisfaction from making something that does something and solving interesting problems, there’s always a nagging sense that even the stuff I make that works well is societally useless. If the source code for my employer was liberated in a communist revolution, nothing with the possible exception of the financial simulation engine would even be worth keeping.
An example of the bourgeois society virus festering in tech companies that really struck me was learning about what React was being used for internally at facebook when it was first being used for something non trivial. The project that React cut its teeth on and strongly contributed to the direction it went was advertisements. That’s right: one of, if not the, most used javascript frontend frameworks in the world is where it is today largely in part due to how it helped facebook shove advertisements in people’s faces.
The fundamental problem is that personal profit is the singular metric used to decide whether something is worth doing or not under capitalism. Profit is then used as a proxy for public good, and obviously this idea breaks down very quickly because in reality profit is often directly at odds with public good.
"What’s your time worth to you? What importance do you place on your physical and mental health? And how many hours a week do you work? How much is that in a year? How much in a lifetime? Is it worth it? Do you feel like that’s a life well spent?
"You probably don’t and you shouldn’t.
…
"It’s a curious circumstance that capitalism, a system that supposedly promotes an efficient allocation of resources and discourages waste and idleness, is the single most wasteful socioeconomic system in human remembrance.
"Never before have we wasted such an astonishing amount of natural resources and human labor, never before have we extracted and exploited as much, and never before have we obliterated and poisoned such huge swaths of land to produce mostly… garbage.
“The misrepresentation comes from two faulty equations: GDP growth = happiness/progress & consumption = happiness/progress.”
While the article was pointed more towards jobs that don’t benefit society at all, this quote hints at an aspect of work under capitalism that I don’t see stressed as much as I see the David Graeber type bullshit jobs. Even if you are producing a type of commodity that a person could actually use for non bullshit purposes, a ton of stuff is produced that either is:
This tendency of capitalism to produce useless shit is why I regularly disparage software engineering as a profession. If you’re a programmer looking for work, you’ll be lucky if you get the second category. There’s a very good chance your job will be to make something in category 1 or 3. Speaking for myself, my job is in category 3. I help make software that bourgeois parasites and their financial advisors use to manage wealth. It is a well known fact among my coworkers that the majority of the clients of the advisors who use our software is the giga wealthy. While I still get some satisfaction from making something that does something and solving interesting problems, there’s always a nagging sense that even the stuff I make that works well is societally useless. If the source code for my employer was liberated in a communist revolution, nothing with the possible exception of the financial simulation engine would even be worth keeping.
An example of the bourgeois society virus festering in tech companies that really struck me was learning about what React was being used for internally at facebook when it was first being used for something non trivial. The project that React cut its teeth on and strongly contributed to the direction it went was advertisements. That’s right: one of, if not the, most used javascript frontend frameworks in the world is where it is today largely in part due to how it helped facebook shove advertisements in people’s faces.
The fundamental problem is that personal profit is the singular metric used to decide whether something is worth doing or not under capitalism. Profit is then used as a proxy for public good, and obviously this idea breaks down very quickly because in reality profit is often directly at odds with public good.
@CannotSleep420 @yogthos The original article (for those following along on Mastodon) is here: https://antoniomelonio.substack.com/p/your-job-is-useless
"What’s your time worth to you? What importance do you place on your physical and mental health? And how many hours a week do you work? How much is that in a year? How much in a lifetime? Is it worth it? Do you feel like that’s a life well spent?
"You probably don’t and you shouldn’t.
…
"It’s a curious circumstance that capitalism, a system that supposedly promotes an efficient allocation of resources and discourages waste and idleness, is the single most wasteful socioeconomic system in human remembrance.
"Never before have we wasted such an astonishing amount of natural resources and human labor, never before have we extracted and exploited as much, and never before have we obliterated and poisoned such huge swaths of land to produce mostly… garbage.
“The misrepresentation comes from two faulty equations: GDP growth = happiness/progress & consumption = happiness/progress.”
#economics #economy #FreeMarket #work #business #capitalism
Well said.
TIL about how React was first used by F***Book. Grrrrrr
This is the documentary if you’re curious. They talk about its use for ad flow at around 25-35 minutes in.