27
Phantom Industry - Part 2 Of 3
Category: Uncategorized3. Once the Dust Had Settled Once More
When it was all over, and the shock wore off, and the tragedy of the 400,000 dead was somehow accepted, America found herself in a state of mindless euphoria. Some years later, the fog lifted, revealing a new challenge and a new and amazing field in which folks could now make a living.
Computers looked very promising at first, the way Ford’s assembly line had looked promising half a century earlier. Some economists objected, realizing that just as Ford’s innovation had done millions of laborers out of a job, so would the computer relieve (interesting word) clerks of their occupation (a lot of whom would have been factory workers in a different epoch: the rapid proliferation of so-called office jobs was the first postwar echo of Roosevelt’s New Deal, distorted and hardly inspiring, even though pencil pushing is easier, to be sure, than bridge and railroad construction). Then someone had the bright idea to let the democratic (or was it Communist?) principle take over: share and share alike. Instead of replacing a thousand workers with one mainframe machine and one operator, why not give each of them a terminal? Later on, the concept was further developed by introducing every clerk to his or her own Personal Computer. Every dozen clerks required a technician to maintain their computers for them, and every five technicians a supervisor to oversee the maintenance and attend to the employees’ morale.
The difference between the New Deal and this was that computers, when all is said and done, offer just one type of activity to those who wish to be useful outside of the production of basic staples. Called upon to solve the problems of many, the new industry quickly hit the limit of usefulness and continued to expand into the murky area where production is replaced by something called, in lawyers’ lingo, work creation, ceasing to be a genuine industry and attaining phantom qualities far quicker than the economists, who always need a century or two to adjust to new ideas, expected.
The long-awaited new era took hold painlessly and smoothly. Unfortunately, while inaugurating it, its advocates (or those at the helm, or whoever the hell’s job it was or should have been to provide justification and encouragement) neglected to toss in some new standards to go along with it. The code of ethics created specifically for the Age of Industry and inapplicable in any other era still prevails today. Relics of an epoch long gone by are still present in every aspect of our quite modern, and quite different, lives.
Each new epoch inherits some of the previous one’s customs and mores. Feudalism cheerfully adopted aspects of slavery. The Age of Industry gladly accepted the slavery and the clan mentality from the feudal lords. Nevertheless, every historical interval should have its own notions of such matters as honor, propriety, courtesy, education, and so forth. Throughout history, each epoch knew enough about itself to be able to face facts when the going got tough. Except ours.
4. Defining Factors
Our epoch appropriated the Industrial values and mores in toto simply because, what with all the wars, revolutions, bootleggers, Al Capone, atonal music, corny paintings and cornier politics, affirmative and alternative action, and what not, it did not have enough time to work out any new standards. As a result, we still view ourselves as members of Capitalist society.
Nothing could be further from reality. A child of Industry, Capitalism concerned itself mostly with production of goods. Look around you, city dweller. How many people do you know who actually produce anything tangible? We are told repeatedly that our generation has witnessed the Informational Revolution. How many well-informed people live in your building? We are told that the service sector is vital to our economy, but the idea that 20% of the population producing and delivering the goods (not really - a great deal of the goods is actually produced outside the Republic, in places that can be called industrial or democratic only in a coquettish context) while the remaining 80% are involved, in one way or another, in the service sector is, well, absurd. A master who employs twenty laborers and eighty servants is not bad or inefficient, he is a madman.
The Phantom Industry is, apart from other things, aggressively anti-Capitalist. It resents competition and finds the idea of private enterprise distasteful. The truly enterprising spirit will seek to increase the quality of his product to get ahead of the competitors. The Phantom Industry idea of good business is to increase the promotional campaign’s mesmerizing effect by pasting up the entire world with vulgar advertising. Traditional businessmen seek to create new markets for new products. The Phantom Industry seeks to bleed the already existing markets dry. A good farmer knows when to give a section of his land a rest for a while. Like land, markets sometimes require respite. Instead of giving them a rest, the Phantom Industry forces them artificially to function by increasing the amount of advertisement. Opening their zombie wallets, millions of brainwashed zombies purchase zombie products with zombie money. The zombie CEO smiles at the zombie shareholders, and somewhat obsequiously they smile back. It works.
It might be possible to prove that the current state of affairs is somehow okay, just as it was possible 150 years ago to prove that slavery was somehow okay, if it weren’t for the fact that the service sector employees, who are busier than an average nineteenth century tycoon ever was, working long hours to provide the so-called services, weren’t so burdensome - not to the economy - after all, the economy will restructure itself around almost anything you toss it - but to the ecosphere and the stock of natural resources that cannot be replenished.
Whoever committed us to the automobile culture - Benz, Ford, or Robert Moses - could not possibly have envisioned the resulting mess. The initial idea was to shorten the gainfully employed citizen’s trip to the workplace to ten minutes. As soon as mass production of cars took off, though, cities began to spread out to compensate for the private car’s considerable speed, and the congestion did the rest. Instead of an hour’s walk to work, it is now an hour and a half’s ride, with the hapless rider stuck in a ridiculous pose behind the plastic steering wheel, inhaling fumes and getting more disgruntled by the minute. Because most car buyers tend to purchase on credit cars they cannot afford (credit, incidentally, is a way of mortgaging one’s freedom), the merest scratch or dent on his “vehicle” can depress them for months, marring even the ridiculously few vacation days the Phantom Industry still allows them to take. In larger cities, in addition to the auto traffic, millions of people use trains and buses, shuttling between home and workplace. While immeasurably more fuel-efficient than the automobile, our urban mass transit is overburdened by millions of commuters whose work could just as easily be performed from home or, for that matter, not performed at all. Millions of offices across the nation are illuminated and air-conditioned every day. Bulky airplanes (fuel efficiency be damned, the guzzlers’ methods of burning fuel have not been improved in more than half a century, they are still the aluminum barrels filled with kerosene they were fifty years ago) roar into the skies, carrying Phantom Industry employees to conferences that, for some flimsy reason, cannot be conducted over the phone. Thousands of hotels receive guests who are neither tourists nor explorers. Business travelers (Phantom Industry, for the most part) outnumber tourists in the air - five to one? Seven to one? Because the service sector is anything but an exciting place to be and hardly more than a sinecure masquerading as business, the average clerk’s self-esteem does suffer a great deal.
Case in point: What does one tell one’s children when they ask what their important-looking parents do all day? The truth, i.e. nothing meaningful, is hardly a good reply when you’re facing your own kids or the mirror. “You wouldn’t understand, honey. It’s too involved,” is something one will fall back on sooner or later. Most children vaguely suspect that anything too involved must be meaningless. Inexperienced and lacking in basic knowledge as they are, children are known occasionally to possess, and make excellent use of, unfiltered wisdom. No matter. Sooner or later the little buggers will learn! They are, after all, future employees of the Phantom Industry. Today’s education standards, computer games, and sanitized television shows will leave them unfit for anything else.
Case in point: However skeptical and naively sarcastic they may be, our children already know, and are resigned to, the fact that the most important thing in the world, in the short run, anyway, is to have a job. The entire rentier class has been stigmatized to a point where a fairly well-educated and amicable person is reluctant to admit he or she has no permanent occupation for fear of being ridiculed as a useless freeloader. The great downfall of art can be at least in part attributed to the fact that the once glorious group of individuals who did nothing all day but attend exhibitions, visit the opera, and read books has all but ceased to exist, leaving all artistic and semi-artistic matters to the ill-informed and corrupt whim of Phantom-Industry sponsored critics.
Case in point: The personal computer has been bought by, and is put to good use in, every school in the nation. They have yet to figure out how to use it as a teaching tool. Some of the banners and clip art look real cool, though.
Unreasonably loud, absurdly inflated, firmly entrenched in every civilized country on the planet (while the so-called developing countries dream of it and are oftentimes quite murderously jealous of those who already have it), the Phantom Industry requires astronomical amounts of energy to sustain itself. It is a wonder how Islamic dictators, who own most of the energy sources, still manage to keep all of the resulting wealth to themselves instead of sharing some of it with their subjects. The current state of affairs benefits them, not us. If we used the resources sensibly, they would not have the money to buy our weapons and technology to threaten us and their own people with. In that sense, they are far more pragmatic than the Western leaders.
5. Peak Oil.
Needless to say, none of this Phantom Industry stuff would be possible without oil and its close philosophical relative, natural gas. There are indications that we may be running out of it. Alternative sources of energy are only possible with the oil-based infrastructure already in place. They are offshoots, by-products of the age of oil. Back in the Nineteenth Century, Dmitry Mendeleyev, the creator of the Table of Elements, said, “Burning oil is tantamount to using cash as firewood.” The dramatic consequences of the looming crisis might fill churches around the globe with new converts who currently find the idea of faith unworthy of their sophisticated attention (”What does God do for me?” - i.e. what services does He provide?), but it is doubtful they will make anyone realize that certain things could have been prevented.
This article by Ricardo Torres is part of Everything You Need to Know to Cope with Today’s Reality, a collection of essays by Mighty Niche authors.