Blonging for Freedom/ Businesses without Workers

Blonging for Freedom ? ~ ⁂ *

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I've just read Cory Doctorow's A World Without People and I came out a little disappointed.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love reading his essays (and fiction!), but I feel that sort of disappointment when at some point in the essay I get a feelling he will raise some point I wish would reach a wider audience, and then he doesn't.

In this case, it was the contradiction in capitalists' wet dream of fully automating their businesses, running them without workers.

Capitalist theory has it that the source of profits and capital growth is the extraction of value from workers, who produce value; it's exploiting workers by paying us less than the value we produce.

Without workers, there's no value to be extracted.

What the wet dreamers don't seem to get, or maybe don't want to believe, is that automation doesn't produce value: machines only transfer their own value to what they produce throughout their lifetime.

Under capitalism, machines will be priced that way, as those who make them figure out how much they can charge for them: about as much value as they will produce.

There's no room for exploiting machines and extracting value from them.

So the wet dream will turn into a painful nightmare for those who actually try to make it real.

I won't be very sorry for them, but I'm baffled by the recklessness.

Now, I also get that this won't stop the rollout of GenBS automation. As Doctorow puts it, that GenBS (I refuse to refer to something without understanding as AI: intelligence and understanding are synonyms; these have no regard for truth, so they are bullshit generators, GenBS for short) can't do your job won't stop a GenBS salesperson from convincing your boss to replace you with a GenBS that can't do your job.

The likely outcome, until the bubble bursts spectacularly, is that lots of workers get replaced, but a few are retained with skyrocketed "productivity" as they operate the automated value transfer from the machines to the products. Those workers will have to be exploited to an extent we haven't seen before, because all of the value extraction of the business will depend on the value they produce.

This reasoning presumes that we live under capitalism.

Varoufakis says our economy is now dominated by technofeudalism.

Is that enough to change the economic fundamentals to the extent that value extraction no longer depends on workers?

Sure, dominant technofeudal lords exploit their customers and suppliers alike, and enshittification practices are a favorite of theirs.

But value has to be produced in order for it to be transferred and extracted. However astronomical the value humankind has already produced, it will eventually run out if we stop producing value, and the alpha plute won't be able to extract any further after getting it all.

Don't they get it?

Do they even have a plan?

Can we hope for a spectacular implosion?

As for workers...

It may suck for a while, we'll have to learn to assign fair value to human labor, and to cooperate in building a humane economic system, but once we do we shall be fine.

So blong,