Men var är nu våra flygande bilar, våra kupol-städer på Mars? Våra kraftfält, traktorstrålar, våra hoverboards?
David Graeber, antropologen som bland annat har skrivit Debt har en rätt elak analys i The Baffler från i våras. Långläsning!
Innovationskraften har, skriver han i essän Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit sugits upp av … administration:
”If we do not notice that we live in a bureaucratic society, that is because bureaucratic norms and practices have become so all-pervasive that we cannot see them, or, worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.
Computers have played a crucial role in this narrowing of our social imaginations. Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world’s population into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities turned us into part- or full-time administrators. In the same way that university professors seem to feel it is inevitable they will spend more of their time managing grants, so affluent housewives simply accept that they will spend weeks every year filling out forty-page online forms to get their children into grade schools. We all spend increasing amounts of time punching passwords into our phones to manage bank and credit accounts and learning how to perform jobs once performed by travel agents, brokers, and accountants.
Someone once figured out that the average American will spend a cumulative six months of life waiting for traffic lights to change. I don’t know if similar figures are available for how long it takes to fill out forms, but it must be at least as long. No population in the history of the world has spent nearly so much time engaged in paperwork.”
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,
The Baffler 19, mars 2012
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