NEETS Not in Educatiobn Employment or Training is growing. Jobs don’t pay enough to sacrifice all that time. 4 day work better. No opportunity to advance.
The Atlantic.com, 122224, “Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out”: Sources – American Time Use Survey shows people spending less time hanging out with friends, in all categories, especially teenagers. Jean Twenge, psychology prof San Diego, sourced U.Mich “Monitoring the Future survey of teens. Explanations — 1) more time with screens, tv and smartphones, alone but communicating with others, 2) too busy, but unconvincing data 3) Putnam’s erosion of social infrastructure. Community is where people keep showing up church, community centers, youth sports fields, the office — all working, even that last, with hybrid and remote work. Summary: face-to-face rituals and customs replaced by screen-to-screen technologies. This correlates with more depression (sadness & hopelessness), especially for young people. Teen anxiety and depression took off around 2012, when 50% of American’s owned a smartphone, had front-facing cameras, and became virtually mandatory. Harvard Study of Adult Development, the oldest longitudinal study on happiness and wellbeing ever conducted, simply concluded that good relationships are the key to happiness. Problem attributed to sprawling built environment, decline of church, social mobility scattering people, fascination by spectacle and catastrophe. Screens replace physical world experience with digital simulacrum that absorbs time and attention. We are pushed and pulled toward more aloneness.
Robert Putnum: social capital — loss of social networks of trust and relationships, fraying of social fabric, within and between communities. This is cause of polarization, globally and locally. Loss of social capital produces sub-par growth, stalling social mobility, epidemic of loneliness, crumbling communities. Social capital needs to be added to human, physical and infrastructure capitals. Social connectivity unlocks opportunity for social mobility (Raj Chetty). A 10% increase in “trust” boosts GDP by 1.3-1.5% (UK study). Social capital is single best predictor of longevity. Social cohesion reduces crime and antisocial behavior. Trusted institutions are more effective (Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, Simon Johnson).
Christopher Lasch: “The Culture of Narcissism”p.64 “liberated” personality: charm, pseudo-awareness, promiscuity, hypochondria, protective shallowness, avoidance of dependence, inability to mourne, dread of old age and death. Narcissism is best way to cope with tensions and anxieties of modern life. Social conditions bring this out, to varying degrees in everyone. It’s transformed the family, next generations, and historical continuity. Weakening of social ties reflects narcissistic defense against dependence. “… the degradation of work makes skill and competence increasingly irrelevant to material success and thus encourages the presentation of the self as a commodity;… it discourages commitment to the job and drives people, as the only alternative to boredom and despair, to view work with self -critical detachment. … By refusing to take seriously the routines he has to perform, he denies their capacity to injure him. … he conveys… the impression that he has risen beyond [daily life].”p116
“It is not perhaps monotony and routine in themselves that take the enjoyment out of work, for any job worth doing entails a certain amount of drudgery, but the peculiar conditions that prevail in large bureaucratic organizations and increasingly in the modern factory as well. When work loses its tangible, palpable quality, loses the character of the transformation of matter by human ingenuity, it becomes wholly abstract and interpersonal” p. 125
Overall deficit of joy.
Mankind is alienated from nature. Our world has been dehumanized. Mankind is no longer involved in nature and loses his emotional connection with natural phenomena. Nature used to speak to us and the emotional energy derived from this connection has been lost.
Our world has been cleansed of the superstitious and irrational. But the inner human contains this primitive side and by denying it we alienate ourselves from a part of ourselves. Prejudices, skepticism and intuition are dismissed as invalid.
Perhaps more fundamentally descriptive and characteristic of society’s adolescent restructuring than its diametric reorientation is its liquification. A caterpillar dissolves its structure in the pupa stage, and from the soup of its former self rebuilds what will later emerge as a butterfly. Like a catarpiller entering its pupa stage, the accustomed structure and order of things is dissolving around us, to make the possible the emergence of a new more refined order and structure. Industrial age social structure is liquefying as the bonds that formerly knit communities geographically and tied people to place and to their neighbors dissolve. At the same time, waves of telecommunications now circle the planet, connecting people virtually and knitting a new globalized social fabric. Matter has place; information flows. When solids liquefy, heat loosens the bonds between neighboring molecules and they float seemingly disconnected from each other. But higher-order systems such as meanders, standing waves, and vortices (as well as storm patterns and weather) appear and take on a certain life of their own, tying molecules back together, but more loosely and in larger meta-structures.
Analogously, human society, its local geographical bonds dissolving, becomes increasingly laced with waves of information and world culture, linking us globally as we disengage locally. [1] We have become more separated from our neighbors and more connected to the world. Technologies transform how people relate to each other, empowering them with vastly more control and opportunities in their individual worlds, shrinking time and distance, and integrating the planet into a unified system. Beginning with radio and telephone, but accelerating with television, mobile phones, and the internet, telecommunications now connect billions on earth, extending the range of individual awareness globally.
At the same time technologies isolate people physically from their neighbors. The automobile culture after WWII uprooted life across America, wiping out much of the mundane interaction among neighbors, which creates a sense of community. Suburbs grew anonymously, nuclear families dispersed far and wide, and local communities lost their cohesiveness. Even if one stays in one place, one’s neighbors or employer move or disappear. Individual identity both diminished vis-à-vis the local neighborhood and expanded to the range of the car and then much further with the rise of mass air travel. We gather around the Starbucks coffeehouses of the world, in search of a familiar anchor, a place to linger and belong, connected to the internet, yet miles away from the person at the next table.
While individual ties to place and community have loosened, so have loyalties at work. Until the early 1960s, in North America and Western Europe and other leading developed societies elsewhere, employers and employees expected to spend a lifetime together, and the “organization man” gave over much of his life and identity to his employer, who in turn paternally provided through a life-long relationship into retirement.[2] Nowadays, people work numerous jobs over a lifetime, quitting some and being reorganized or let go from others, and employment is less secure. Starting in the 1950s, the mom and pop stores with intimate ties to the local community began succumbing to more efficient nationwide franchises with little loyalty to either workers or community. Now with globalization, multinational corporations relocate factories across the globe as labor and market conditions change, and capital itself sloshes around the world with no tie to people, place or purpose. This loosening of the bonds among people, jobs, capital, and place is a metamorphic liquefying.
On the flip side, while ties between employers and employees have loosened, ties between people and their work lives have tightened. Especially in service industries, many consumers seek 24/7 access and availability, on weekends or when either party is away on vacation, and to satisfy such demands many professionals strive to oblige. Text messaging, telephone and e-mail go with us always and everywhere as does an internet connection to our work, all in our pocket smart phone. It’s only the physical workplace to which our ties are loosened; the relationship to our work has tightened.
Curiously, notice that waves propagate longer and further in liquids than in solids or gases, and that liquids are thereby better at storing and transmitting information. Liquids sense and register every big and small event in their environment in the form of waves, faithfully carrying the record through time and across distance. The glass of water on your dinner table picks up every word. Liquid-like in another way, insofar as the phase transition from solid to liquid requires a discontinuous input of energy, our mobile and electronically connected lifestyles in the information age are markedly more energy intensive than were lives in the industrial age.
The liquid state is an information state, evidenced by how whales can communicate across vast distances. The glass of water on your dinner table picks up every word spoken and stores it, for a time. Like waves in water, digital information flows across a worldwide sea of electrons and an information society is a liquid society.
While H20’s molecular structure remains constant across different states, the properties of ice, water and vapor differ markedly. Similarly, one’s understanding of contemporary human society may be off base if examined through models grounded (or lenses ground) in times past. One might hypothesize that the liquification of society and breaking of ties among individuals and between individuals and their employers might add to widespread feelings of insecurity, rootlessness, and loss of identity and that societal restructuring in the information age might increase rather than ameliorate what we vaguely call alienation, a hard to define or measure drag on the quality of life, a detraction from aggregate happiness. Is alienation, a term coined by Marx in the context of manufacturing and factory labor, a concomitant feature of either or oth oppressive industrial and/or untethered information age society? Might societal restructuring in the information age to address and ameliorate the problem, thereby developing society in a positive direction at minimal material cost?
When people feel rootless and floating are they suffering from a lack of brotherhood and community feeling, the third Enlightenment value along with freedom and equality, and is this a structural problem in modern life? What is brotherhood, community feeling, rootedness and connection? What is alienation?
How can society’s relational structure improve? In broadest terms, if society can find a way to enable more folks to reach their potential, to live out full lives of freely directed self-actualization, then whatever human vitality wasted in alienation and depression will be reduced and collectively human society’s life will improve, at perhaps minimal material cost.
Brotherhood as Understood Philosophically.
Quote Kymlicka – still much debated by philosophers. Conversely, eliminating or reducing this alienation would greatly expand economic well being, at perhaps not great cost. All manner of communication technologies, social media and smart phones would like to fill that niche. What does it mean to connect. What is community. Brotherhood. Fraternite.
Brotherhood is the third value, after Freedom and Equality separated – Tory’s and Whigs, … history of conflict between Freedom and Equality.
Philosophy is largely silent on the subject. Brotherhood can arise from nationalism and identification with the nation. It can arise from identity with any of a number of groups, from local to global, from real to virtual. What is brotherhood?
Steiner: Brotherhood in Economics, Equality in Rights/Politics, Freedom in Cultural Sphere.
Loneliness: https://www.ft.com/content/fd6f8a29-03cf-4a5f-9ffe-afdfdf359b52?desktop=true&segmentId=7c8f09b9-9b61-4fbb-9430-9208a9e233c8#myft:notification:daily-email:content (Financial Times 052724)
Bauman:
the transition from material to immaterial work, the reality of insecurity and the phenomenon of the great migrations, with the social consequences that are visible to everyone.
3To this, we must add globalisation, which began with the economic expansion and the acquisition of world markets by the large multinationals, and has turned out to be a powerful engine of the process of de-localisation of power that can demolish the already fragile system of representative democracy. Moreover, we must not forget that the affirmation of new technologies determines the prevalence of immaterial labour, together with the development of communications at a worldwide level.
4Among the major recurring themes that in Bauman’s ideas and which have been consolidated in a clear vision of society, we can find the same great insight into the liquidity of the modern world, which involves the breakdown of the relationship between politics and power, considered to be central to the crisis of nation-states, and the evolution of the idea of community, in light of the introduction of new technologies, to which Bauman attributes a large part of the responsibility for the social change taking place.
Alienation from a Systems Theory Perspective.
AI can help clean a house, drive a car, write a school essay, help read a CT scan. It can also promise to be a good friend. But MIT Professor Sherry Turkle advises drawing a hard line on artificial-intelligence applications on that last one. Turkle, a pioneer in the study of the impact of technology on psychology and society, says a growing cluster of AI personal chatbots being promoted as virtual companions for the lonely poses a threat to our ability to connect and collaborate in all aspects of our lives. Turkle sounded her clarion call last Thursday at the Conference on AI & Democracy, a three-day gathering of experts from government, academia, and the private sector to call for a “movement in the effort to control AI before it controls us.”
“We have come to expect more from technology and less from each other, and now we are so much further along this path of being satisfied with less,” said Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.
Technology can change people’s lives and make them more efficient and convenient, but the time has come to shift our focus from what AI can do for people and instead reflect on what AI is doing to people, said Turkle during her keynote address. Social media has already altered human interactions by producing both isolation and echo chambers, but the effects of personal chatbot companions powered by AI can lead to the erosion of people’s emotional capacities and democratic values, she warned.
Restructuring institutional bureacracies to unleash maximal human flourishing through work.
Observation: We’re definitely experiencing society’s structural liquification, by numerous measurements. Liquification is phase transition in physical space. But is it metamorphic in a living sense? Is there a maturation aspect to it? Is it alive, does it have a life cycle?
Observation: As a case study of the boundary between business and government, take the example of the post office. At one level it is a collective good if there is someway to reach another by mail. Private companies have entered the arena, and pick off the most lucrative parts — package delivery. Amazon is showing the way. But no companies are vying for first class mail. First class becomes a collective service, part of government’s infrastructure provision. Apparently package delivery can be sold off, or better outcompeted away. Privatization should be selling off state assets to the highest bidder; it should only provide those services that both collectively agreed to be desirable and private enterprise won’t do. And at what cost. Eventually first class mail will disappear, like newspapers. But magazines will persist because people like to hold a magazine. Printed newspapers and first class mail, two material substances that circulate and connect us by a thread, are disappearing. We are untethering from the physical surroundings as we journey into the digital and fantastic. This is liquification at the physical level. We these services curtailed we loosen the physical bonds that connect us. We are liquefying, when global society is viewed as a system with a structure. Structure is the business of our age.
[1] See for example Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life, (Cambridge: Polity,2005). Bauman’s concept of Liquid Life differs from my concept of liquid society, however. His is much more developed, detailed and applied to a particular kind of life, what he calls a “liquid life”, whereas what I have in mind is a metamorphoic change of phase, a liquification of bonds, and this would include all types: family, loyalties, place and job. What I have in mind becomes a rootless alienated life. For Bauman I believe he sees a liquid life as something desirable. Maybe we are both right.
[2] William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man, (Garden City: Double Day, 1957)