[Gllug] Someone with a postcode database do me a favour please? Suspicious repeated disappearance of computer deliveries...

[M.Blackmore]

On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 22:52 +0000, M.J. Smith wrote:

> I've worked for various delivery companies and the calibre of staff in
> many of them has definitely gone down. 


I think there is a more endemic problem, and "we" IT professionals have
had a significant role in bringing it about too.

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?).

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). 

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 www.edge.org - 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?

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. 

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!

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... 

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.

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!). 

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!
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