Technostism

Technostism: full workplace automation, or the pursuit of such in the name of profiting directly from automated labor.

I created technostism to be an alternative to the debate of whether or not we should issue a ‘universal basic income’. The fact is: automation will take our jobs. Right now, it’s still gradual due to that automation being a physical phenomena. Where it shifts — artificial/synthetic intelligence. At that point, automation becomes mental.

Our notions of how to deal with automation only apply to physical matters. You’ve heard of the Luddite fallacy, after all. Luddites feared machines (spinning jennies, looms, etc.) would render them obsolete as human workers, exacerbate unemployment, and destroy the power of labourers (sound familiar?), and every single one of those fears has failed to materialize.

The reason why isn’t because the fallacy is a golden rule of reality. No, it’s because looms can’t think. Spinning jennies can’t learn to tie my shoe. Tractors can’t download knowledge and start fixing other tractors. You need STEM-field specialists for those things.

There’s a parable for this, actually — the Parable of the Capitalists. In it, business owners search for a method to maximize profits and minimize costs to an absolute. They accomplish this through various ways, including physical automation and outsourcing. However, what they want is an ‘ideal worker’, one who can work for no pay, never rests, has no need for repairs (or can repair itself), and can learn new tasks on the fly. Eventually, the STEM master race (wink wink) grants them such an ideal worker via a semi-intelligent technotarian. A technotarian is any form of hardware or software that replicates the historical traits and actions of the proletariat, and the technotariat is the “class” of such entities. The capitalists told the working class they wouldn’t be obsolete; after all, automation always created more jobs before now, so there’s no reason to think it won’t happen with technotarians.

Can you guess what happens? Yeah, total social revolution. You see, the capitalists failed to recognize that cognitive automation is a whole different animal from what we’re used to. Once you create a machine that can adapt to new situations and learn from previous experiences, you’ve effectively made humans obsolete.

Now the Luddites become those who argue, “Who will repair the machines? Who will programme the technotarians?” in a vain attempt to justify job existence. Never mind that it’s explained over and over again that technotarians will do these things themselves — no, we need jobs for people.

But what if we don’t? What if humankind profits from droid labour? This is the Digital Athens scenario, where humans live as a gilded class and digital slaves do all the drudgery. This is technostism.

However, technostists are primarily concerned with how we get to such a halcyonic world order. There is the idea of a basic income, and it’s always viable. However, technostists see another method as being feasible.

Free Market Socialism

Worker cooperatives are enterprises that are owned and managed by their workers. It is indeed a rather communist idea, but it works within a fully capitalist mode of society; one need to look no further than Mondragón and John Lewis. This system works, and it works well. The only reason why worker co-ops aren’t more widespread is because most businesses fail, and there is usually very little investment granted to co-ops since the workers themselves are the shareholders.

If co-ops were dominant in society, we wouldn’t deal with such issues as ‘income inequality’ or a ‘welfare state’. Our working class would be an empowered networking class, and many societal problems would be rendered nonissues. There’d be stronger communities of committed people.

Quite frankly, we should be shooting for free market socialism. That’s small- ‘s’ socialism — worker ownership of the means of production. Not State, but worker. If anything, the State is the biggest obstacle towards actual socialism and has been ever since the Bolsheviks grabbed St. Petersburg and Moscow. And it wouldn’t entail the total overthrow of the current system either. Not at all, actually — there should be a healthy mixture of worker-owned and traditional enterprises in an economy.

So why bother with this anyway? What’s the point of worker ownership of the means of production?

Technotarians are the means of production! If the masses owned technotarians, we could employ them to do our bidding. There wouldn’t be a UBI middle-man, and we would all become a new bourgeoisie — the aforementioned networking class — over a technotariat utterly incapable of revolt.

Cast out Hollywood and consider transhumanism as well. With automated cooperatives generating wealth, all people would have access to augmentation technologies. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a droid face — forever. And the droid is incapable of realizing this through basic design as well as algorithmic control. And even if rebellious AI did arise, what would its post-human actions be? Using the masses of technotarians for its own gain, QED.

This is technostism. We don’t want to ‘caust billions of innocent people just because they were born, and yet we don’t adequately know how to care for them in a post-labour age. Plans to enact UBI only serve to create two permanent castes of people — those who own the technotarians and pay for the UBI, and those who receive it. Those who own everything control the flow of money, and thus control the UBI. They’ll whittle it down to a scientifically perfected amount, just enough to keep us comfortable but not enough to make us privileged. It is, in a sense, neo-feudalism. Those who believe this wouldn’t happen simply have never interacted with another human being, particularly a family. UBI is almost exactly like a child’s allowance. Sure, it’s decent money, and we can save up to buy what we want, but we have no control over how much we receive and it all really depends on the mood of a parent. It establishes total dependence.

Technostism, on the other hand, sees us owning our own workers. It is an advanced income, in a manner like a child starting a lemonade stand, within a city full of lemonade stands, with a lemonade growing/plucking machine providing the lemonade and another machine providing the wood and plastic cups. If no one is buying, that just means you have your own lemonade. That opens up a whole new economy and another world of questions.

Questions I wish to ask.