<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8">
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.16.1">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<BR>
On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 22:52 +0000, M.J. Smith wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">I've worked for various delivery companies and the calibre of staff in many of them has definitely gone down. </FONT><BR>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR>
I think there is a more endemic problem, and "we" IT professionals have had a significant role in bringing it about too.<BR>
<BR>
I read a very good essay on an email list sometime last year or so which blamed the rise of the short term work job, with people lacking stability of employment and changing every couple of years, being a primary responsibility factor in the low quality of work being done by most people. What's the point of investing time and emotional and physical effort in mastering something, when some money grubbing suit who can't be bothered a stuff about oldfashioned social "personal calibre" factors like loyalty, committment and pride in a job, just gives everyone the heave ho every 2 years so they don't build up employment rights, or are reorganised to hell and back again into different roles? It was a very convincing argument backed up with a lot of survey data and showing how globalised capitalism was essentially devouring its own base in the pursuit of short term profit margins (remember Keynes and net aggregate demand?).<BR>
<BR>
The fall of the unions is a symptom of how a generation were hoodwinked out of generations worth of struggle heritage due to the excesses of one section of the union management over a decade or so which had itself sold out on the social objectives that underlay the origins of working class organisation at the beginning of the industrial revolution - in essence Thatcher and Reagan were the figureheads fronting up US neocon con artists who fooled a generation to absorb values totally in contradiction to their best interests (and the planet as a whole as we career towards doom). <BR>
<BR>
Excellent place to mine information on the neocon con job is the Post Autistic Economics movement (now renamed something - real world economics?). Classic essays on their website of relevance to anyone working in IT, which has been very much the enabling technological force behind the corruption of the social reproduction sphere by psychotic/psychopathic corporations and the people who run them and control them. We should be aware of the implications of our professional actions at their deeper levels... in the same way that scientists and engineers have some degree of responsibility for what they do in the social and ethical spheres. There is no such thing as technological or scientific "neutrality" - that was beaten to death a century ago and was still being beaten to a pulp in the 60s and 70s by philosophers and historians of science and technology (one of my masters was in history and social studies of science and science policy nigh on 3 decades back). That's one of the things I like so much about the uniqueness of the free software (dare I say open source too?) movement - it came out of nowhere by surprise and embedded so many deep collaborative and generous gift economy features and I wonder if when ecological and resource and economic meltdown finally coincide how much such a cultural phenomenom will or could come to our aid. I utterly astonished that so few sociologists and political commentators have picked up on it in any serious way, and the few things I have seen have simply failed to "get it" due to an inability to cover the two cultures of technology and social movements. About the only place on the web where the Third Culture has any life is <A HREF="http://www.edge.org">www.edge.org</A> - well worth checking through and reading up on back issues, lot of bigbrain scientists and technologists hang out around there. How many people have come across it yet?<BR>
<BR>
Thomas Jefferson issued a very heavy warning about what would happen if society and political bodies allowed corporations to have any permanence way back in the 1790s or so (and he was most definitely a classic liberal free marketeer, using liberal in the proper economic sense): that they would eat the heart and soul out of society if allowed out of control as a product and outcome that came from the essence of their very nature. <BR>
<BR>
They should only be brought together by statute for limited durations to meet specific projects that couldn't otherwise be met without pooling of resources and competencies. I can't seem to find it now on my hard disk, sure I saved it somewhere... perhaps a job, finally, for Beagle to do for me! Never used beagle before. Trouble is it might be in the old Amipro word processor format, or even before that in Wordperfect, or Wordstar, or PCWrite (still my favourite word processor that old shareware dos program - anyone remember it?) or even perhaps in that superb but market stillborn freeform database called Idealist (a tragic loss to computerdom that was, so much could have flowed from it), so I wonder if those saved anything in any recognisable plain text format within their file formats (well PCwrite certainly did, all formatting in pure ascii codes). Hmmm, search on "Jefferson"... I don't think I'll live long enough if I search on corporation!<BR>
<BR>
I've been meaning to pull my various postgrad courses stuff and notes etc. off that sort of obsolete format into something like opendoc (darn, whats that called now, the ratified standard, xml?) or a pdf file for years, while I've still got a computer that can run dos/win95 available! I'm not sure if I've even got a dos disk anymore ... and if I do heaven knows how long a floppy lasts as readable... <BR>
<BR>
A couple of things were well received in their "world" at the time and decades ahead of their time i.e. I've been proven right by developments and was about the only person - in one case THE only person - making the arguments about futurecasting the social and economic outcomes based on technological potentials. I was one of the victims of Thatcherism's "social cleansing" in the intellectual and policy spheres being vulnerable without tenured positions etc etc. so I get something of a sour satisfaction by being proven correct, although I didn't like the world I was forseeing and has duly arisen... especially now that I've got a young family (when I'm in my mid 50s so won't be around too long to help them *if* I make it 'til they are 18 even, having poor health) and what the world they are going to inherit is going to be like in 20 or so years. Not nice I think.<BR>
<BR>
Anyway, there were a lot of us went that way under the horrendous arrogance and sheer malevolent viciousness of the Thatcherite agenda, unprecedented since the 1700s in British politics, and makes Blair at his worst seem like a rank amateur when it comes to nepotism and paying off the cronies (he paid in peanuts and fancy names - they paid off in entire economic sectors and the overall structure of the total British economy tipped up and shaken southwards into the pockets of the City!). <BR>
<BR>
At least I didn't end up a DHSS clerk! Perhaps I ought to screw up the courage to put stuff on Wikipedia and see how they fare, but that feels like a very exposing step!
</BODY>
</HTML>