Ribbon Farm: You Are Not an Artisan

This has been linked to in the past at Wenatchee The Hatchet but a few key excerpts seem worth quoting and linking to again.

The future of work looks bleaker than it needs to for one simple reason: we bring consumption sensibilities to production behavior choices. Even our language reflects this: we “shop around” for careers. We  look for prestigious brands to work for. We look for “fulfillment” at work. Sometimes we even accept pay cuts to be associated with famous names.  This is work as fashion accessory and conversation fodder.

We can think of this as conspicuous production, by analogy to conspicuous consumption. First-world artisan tendencies take this to a logical extreme.

When you subconsciously think of work as something you consume for pleasure, you end up with a possibly irrational (economically speaking) attraction to artisan work. Even those who don’t actually end up as artisans choose work the way they choose cars, jewelry or handbags, over-valuing things like resume-value and exposure-value.

...

What makes it worse is that in an economy based on a fiat currency, shareholder value maximization and deficit spending, the capacity to generate an income does not necessarily imply that meaningful work is being done, either in a subjective psychological sense (it helps you evolve rather than atrophy) or economic sense (net wealth is being created rather than consumed or harvested). You might even end up having to pay to do real work.

Since income being generated at an individual level is not a reliable indicator that work being performed, I prefer a different distinction: schlep work versus sexy work. If there is schlepping involved, it is more likely to be real work. If there are sexy elements involved, it is more likely to be conspicuous production pretending to be work.

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What unites all these trades [that are emerging in the information economy, as discussed earlier in the article] is that they accept roles based on kinds of schlepping that machines are bad at rather than insisting on work that humans like to do.


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And that might be the biggest tell of all, the sexier the job looks the less likely it is that that job involves real work.  There are things machines are bad at, and may always be bad at, that humans will need to do, but these things can often be tedious and decidedly anti-sexy.  But someone has to do that stuff.  The paperless office I was being told would emerge thirty years ago has not quite arrived.  If anything the sea of documents we must slog through has either remained the same or increased but what has changed is the water line that is some kind of informational sea level, the level at which our ability to sink or swim may depend on not needing to have our feet on the ground of what we used to be able to trust.  But that's just rambling, never mind that.