The idea of a distributed network being capable of producing much of what we require capital-intensive large-scale factories for today is quite heartening, and looking more like reality every day. My only real hope is that I can get in on the fun and quit the wage slavery before I’m too old to enjoy it.

It’s the attitude of The Major in Suarez’s “Daemon” novels: the present system is the only way to produce a high standard of living for so many people, and blah blah woof woof, but the average person is an ingrate who doesn’t want to know what goes into his sausage and prefers to live in a world of rainbows and kitties. The soccer mom driving Hannah and Emma to piano practice in her SUV takes her pink-ass suburban lifestyle for granted, without ever stopping to thank the military torturers and death squads that make it all possible. Gotta break eggs to make an omelet, etc., etc., etc.

Such people display a remarkable lack of reflectiveness on just how contingent the present model of organization really is. There is a wide range of possibilities for organization given the basic material and technological realities at any given time (e.g. the rival decentralized craft and centralized mass-production alternatives for integrating electrically powered machinery into manufacturing a hundred years ago). The real difference in “necessity” concerns, not the requirements for a comfortable median standard of living, but the requirements for supporting a superstructure of Little Eichmanns. For them, “No Other World is Possible.”

One paragraph in particular stood out to me given my own experiences with working for a large corporation:

Telofski overlooks the possibility that in many cases insidious competitors are in competition, not with corporations as such, but with their management. In such cases, the empowerment of management at the expense of other stakeholders may result in a degradation of efficiency. It’s frequently been found, for example, that high degrees of self-management and profit-sharing, and reduced inequality and authoritarianism within the workplace, increases overall productivity. But while such reforms are very much in the interests of the productivity of the organization, they’re also very much opposed to the material and power interests of management. It’s frequently in management’s interest to get a larger piece of a smaller pie. But in every case, Telofski assumes that any interference with “standard business practices” as defined by cowboy MBAs will result in a loss of efficiency.

My employer is quite fond of reminding us of all the bounties they bestow upon us – without us actually having asked for any of them BTW. I got so frustrate with my own boss the other day after the usual propagandizing that I blurted out “There’s one thing they’d never grant us in a million years: autonomy in our work.”. He quickly changed the subject after that.