Labor

I am still eating my early morning breakfast when I hear the quick tapping from Nayna’s room. She is working the keyboard of her laptop, all ten fingers fly across the keys in that ideal manner which I never mastered, not even close. Here, serious work is done, student curricula, nursing newsletters, e-mails back and forth. Shortly, I too, will sit in front a keyboard, this time it won’t be for education but for design and construction, I will pay bills and send invoices this way, move pictures and store records.

 

Then, a little later, James will come and fire up his machine and then spend the day in front of a keyboard as well. So would William if he had an assignment for drafting today and he would, through keystrokes, get objects and details on paper from which things could be built.

 

The lady at the bank hits the keyboard when I deposit money, the lady from whom Nayna bought her new  car the other day, administered the transaction mostly via the same 43 or so keys. Bankers, lawyers, doctors, researchers and even mechanics spend endless hours entering and processing data this way, an effort that seems unified, standardized, equal to all and never requiring any sweat, no matter if two or ten fingers administer a task solely dictated by the abstract signals sent by the brain. Eyes, brain and hands are involved, the rest of the body pretty much sits idle. At the end of the day, the screens go dark and all that is left of the toiling are magnetic traces on a small disc, as if nothing had ever been done. When we leave for home, our workspaces might look cluttered but dead and there isn’t anything to look at, even less to feel that could make us proud of the day’s work. No ploughed field, no baked bread, no piece of furniture, no cast metal, not even sawdust. Nothing at all.  All work has just been virtual, present first in our mind and now in that of the machine. We trust that it can be deciphered once the machine is powered up again.

 

It is clear that 100 years ago work was not performed this way and those who would have hit the hammers of mechanic typewriters then would have been but a few and not overly highly regarded. It isn’t reported whether Einstein in his patent office had to fill forms and carbon copies via typewriter but it is amply reported that those who lived from writing, authors and poets, that they didn’t think too well of mechanizing the creative process, just as today some authors still reject the ease of change and manipulation granted by the computer.

 

It seems that those who have work, spend their day massaging the keys, and those who work with their hands, have none. General Motors went bankrupt, the largest US company to do so ever, a manufacturing giant whose demise tells us more than that the American automobile is not competitive. It tells us that the most progressed and industrialized nations in the world aren’t really industrialized any more, that manufacturing is going the way of farming, where a mere 6% of the population can apparently produce enough to even allow for agricultural exports. The President says, we cannot allow GM to falter, the same way every president before him has subsidized the farmer because, supposedly, we couldn’t allow our agriculture to falter. Indeed, if we didn’t grow our own food or make our cars and machines, not even our TVs and telephones, how could the nation survive or remain grand? Is it enough to just administer, coordinate, be creative, design and provide logistics? Just entertain and move things along? Just the process, not ever the product? Is this the fate of progress and the necessity of a globalized economy, that labor not only gets done where it is cheaper but is increasingly unnecessary? Or is this all a gigantic error, which we will realize and regret when we will wake up from our one-night stand with the planet and its resources in which we never considered the long-term consequences?

 

What will our children’s children think about this generation of keyboard hackers who stare day and night into monitors and screens of many sizes and barely ever see what used to be called the real life? Will they be doing just more of that or will they return to tangible, physical and more holistic activities? Will they, also, have to get the body “exercised” in sweatshops where their labor is fed into useless machines that make nothing and where those who want to sweat the most pay the most instead of receiving a wage?

 

With the planet in peril and almost all industrial nations in recession, with pundits gossiping about the immorality and excess of variably over-production or under-production as the culprit, with millions of skilled workers and farmers out of work because they don’t have the simple skills of keyboarding and computing in their repertoire, will our time be seen as a colossal dead-end that almost killed the natural environment, the human instincts and fine senses and with them the arts, or will our time simply be a transitional period out of which comes more enlightenment, more efficiency, better processes and in the end a homo sapiens that is freed of the need to produce and make what she eats and uses?

 

In the midst of this time and with the nose to the grindstone, barely able to fathom the ever faster acceleration of change, few will know an answer to these questions. If the past is a teacher at all, mankind will continue the trajectory which began when humans were expelled from paradise. This I understand to be the moment when we were condemned to become alienated from the natural cycle, to subjugate nature and to preside over it rather than be part of it. So we exist, self conscious, self aware and in an ever present danger of destroying ourselves while projecting futures in which we have mastered the valley of necessity or at least the toiling to meet the needs and look out from ever taller heights of knowledge and understanding to a new paradise, where it will be full- time cogitare and barely any laborare.