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I think before anything, this is an example of a failure of the online left that came out of the Bernie campaign. You have a huge group of normies who are quickly approaching class conscious under their own terms and instead of adapting to this sentiment and winning over the workers on there, you honest to god have people who don't want a flood of new users onto this site. There are others who tried to interject and good on them, but the sentiment that you shouldn't go where the workers are is why I log onto this website every 3 months on a throwaway.
To answer your question
to justify moving to automating low level treat services
If they could, they would. The automation isn't there yet, won't be soon, and to adapt without having a class of people you have to openly oppress during exponentially more intense decline and withdrawal of the state, you'd need a UBI and capital can't get it's shit together enough for basic spending on roads.
This is also in the face of massive chip shortages and a shipping crisis that continues to build on itself. Even if the tech was there to have the sort of automation they threaten, and the capital was there to invest, there just aren't enough parts floating around. FF14 couldn't get a new server for one of the most profitable game of all time. I think I'll call Burger King's bluff on this.
If there is a near term massive culling of workers, they might blame it on automation or labor agitation but it'll absolutely be the result of the fed raising interest rates and dead capital / zombie firms finally being absorbed by big porky. Fun fact: half of those firms are in producing real, physical products which I'm sure will only help the rollout of the robots.
I've been suggesting HexBear to people in every Reddit IPO freakout thread on r/antiwork and I've been agitating over in the stock subreddits since the GME saga started. It's not fun, but it feels slightly more productive than my usual shitposting.
They don't need to make justifications for automating work, they're just going to do it. It was happening long before covid and the anti-work sentiment came around, and nobody cared about explaining why, they just assumed it was an inevitability.
As far as these articles go, I would say that it's more a case of brainwashed people genuine trying to come up with a reason for why this stuff is happening other than the obvious anti-capitalist conclusion. Not so much a deliberate hit piece to help explain companies' decisions to automate, but rather a liberal brainwormed attempt to rationalize it after the fact.
Am I overthinking
Yes.
People just fucking hate their jobs and love to talk about it; it doesn't have a cohesive ideology or direction because it was formed around the identification of a problem, not a solution.
Antiwork is understanding that work is a problem and that the things we accomplish with it are often better accomplished with other activities like play, which is a solution. People naturally want to help and learn at large, and the mode that we engage with tasks is the issue more than the tasks themselves.
this x1000
Automation is good the bad part is that the riches of automating things aren't shared amongst the workers and greater society
Place only exists as controlled opposition to vent off steam away from actual activism. Allow them to think they've won and they won't bother to actually do anything about it.
It's false consciousness 101. The ruling class knows (through past experience) that people will start to rebel if they abuse them too hard, and know how to safely take the pressure off.
there’s no way meaningful reform would be passed without organizing.
:astronaut-2: :astronaut-1:
Organizing online is basically impossible. You would have to dox yourself, which no sane person would do for obvious reasons. And even then you have to hope the people you find online live near you. The internet is a very limited tool for directly organizing.
Any worker position that can profitably be replace by automation, will be replaced by automation.
People will generally be pissed about customer-facing automation. They get over it when they realize they have no choice. People around here already know that those ordering kiosks have given McDonald’s an excuse to understaff their kitchens. But people still go to McDonald’s. Same goes for Walmart self-checkouts. People complained about them, but people still go to Walmart and use them
They already got rid of cashiers and there was almost no backlash, nothing more than boomers grumbling and then forgetting a week later.
The cheap and logical answer to that is to hire a single security guard of some kind. Security guards don't get paid very much, especially ones with jobs as easy and boring as "sit around as a deterrent to homeless people". It really only takes one or two employees to keep a theoretical automated McDonald's running. Maybe have someone there for the dual purpose of anti-homeless patrol and make sure the machines are still running.
The other solution, and the one to be tried first I suspect, is just don't bother caring and see if the customers actually leave or just learn to deal with it. Similar crap doesn't really deter customers from showing up. Good luck finding an employee in Walmart, for instance. And they seem to still be doing fine money wise, even if the service quality suffers greatly.
The liberal solution to that is to let the fascists take care of it and try not to think about it too much.
I get what you are saying, I just don't think it's as directly tied to automation specifically as what you have said implies.
more homeless people than you can chase off with the local police without massive violence.
Even boomers would push against that
By demanding the police beat the crap out of them and make them go somewhere else
When you're the only game in town all people can do is complain.
In my fantasy world...
The issue will be when the ordering kiosks start to go down. It will be worse for McD's than when the soft serve machines break. One machine goes down, it takes a hours/days to get a local contractor to start working on fixing it and now zero orders can be processed until replaced/repaired.
The Just In Time mindset will likely mean that there won't be kiosks sitting in a local warehouse, function checked and ready for immediate installation to keep the treats flowing.
No extra staff to switch from the kitchen/drivethru to manual cashiering and no staff trained on how to take orders in person because, why would time be spent training for a thing that a machine is supposed to do, right? And you couldn't even call in other workers who are off shift.
(If this could be done, it would have already been done.)
That... would be interesting to see happen in real time.
customer walks into McD's with all kiosks down. A 1800 number scrolls with instructions to call to place an order. Customer calls the number, gets somebody from a call center on the other side of the planet. Call center takes order and asks customer to say, out loud, their name, credit card number and three digit verification code. Call center issues customer an order number, verbally tells customer and sends a text. Call center then has to figure out which McD's to call to send them a text or, even more awesome, actually have to call a human being working at the McD's location to verbally pass on the order the order number
somebody else desperately trying to download the McD's app to bypass the malfunctioning kiosk but their cell data/internet is acting up
another person with the McD's app is finding that they have forgotten their account information but their phone's OS version is no longer compatible with the McD's app
Also, everyone keeps saying that if automation could be done it would be done, but why spend the capital to do it when you can depress wages for cheaper. If the wages go up a lot and quickly, there’s suddenly a change in the cost benefit ratio because it’s an action plan to resume quarterly growth that was disrupted by labor wage growth.
Because I'm 40 years old and I've been hearing that all the "unskilled jobs" are going to be automated away for the last 30 of them. The threat of automation used against workers is probably more useful than actually automating most of those unskilled jobs away.
Think about the McD's manager who's just standing in a McD's all by themself. The burgers are made by robot, the orders are taken by robot, the orders are delivered by robot. Why, its almost like the "manager" work can be automated away too.
Robotizing away white collar middle management jobs that were there to give hope to the petite bourgeois, just proletarianized them instead.
So, essentially, you're saying that automation won't happen because its not profitable? Because I'm pretty sure I made that point farther up the comment chain.
To some extent the tendency for profit to fall as a fatal condition for capitalism is a good and bad thing right now pushing for automation by and large has been carefuly avoided to not start an automation arms race that would lead to a quick drop in peoples condition which would be good but bad since the general left is maybe half way through the process of resurrection it could also be worse if its a coordinated slow roll out even then the sliver lining is this is again to be avoided as this process will theroticaly kill the system making it fail wildly but idk nfts as a thing tell me we are already failing catastrophic
the general left is maybe half way through the process of resurrection
This is incredibly optimistic
Definitely true in terms of the magnitude organizational capacity. Though in terms of timing, who knows? Weeks and decades
I saw some highly upvoted "not left vs right, us vs the elites" nonsense on there recently so yeah...
What we'll probably see more is that jobs will get harder as employers try to squeeze more productivity out of each worker and employers will start to engage in organized retaliation against workers who quit or under perform, such as blacklists, labor theft, etc.
I don't think there is a conspiracy going on. The media likes to talk about it because the labor shortage is in the public's interest and the anti-work trend is relevant.
media likes to talk about it because the labor shortage is in the public’s interest
why would the media like that?
The subreddit’s role in a successful resolution of the Kellogg strike was cited in a lot of mainstream media coverage. I assumed that was the catalyst.
is everything bad? is nothing good, ever? Does suckage permeate all things equally?
I wouldn't blame r/antiwork for an increase in automation. Companies when thinking of whether to automate will look at consistently low decreases in unemployment figures, other sectors adding jobs to the economy in the meantime to ease social unrest, and fuck knows what other related numbers to make the decision to automate their factories. Businesses won't do it all at once. The Antiwork subreddit will still be a scapegoat for the media to justify automation, but if it didn't exist media would do something like unironically take pictures of a retired grandma on medicare to dig up the welfare queen debate again. They would figure something out.
