I did, indeed, find a disappearing artifact... It was the employee. I know I shouldn’t begin with an anecdote about Walmart. It’s like asking to fail, like asking readers to take your thoughts cheaply. Call them blue-light thoughts, even if they aren’t special. If, however, I tell you that I was deeply immersed in ethnographic research and found in the bustling theatre of Walmart some anthropological artifact of significance, maybe it would keep you just a moment longer. So, let’s stick with the latter explanation. I did, indeed, find a disappearing artifact in Walmart recently: It was the employee. Maybe my observation there will shed some light on a subject that is conspicuously absent from most of the punditry, policy-jockeying, and tired rhetoric of the contemporary moment. It was late and I was still up working on a project and needed some materials desperately. Walmart was the only place with doors still automatically opening at that hour. “Just get in and get out,” I thought to myself as rain-drops pelted me on my sleep-deprived head. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to this particular store, but enough times that I noticed something different. Half of the checkout lanes and the attendants working the registers were gone. In their place now stands rows of self-checkout kiosks. The same thing is true of CVS and Walgreens—both replacing the cashier, just as we have replaced the cash for something “more efficient”. I love technology and many of the affordances that technological advances offer us. You know the mantra by now: efficient technology enhancing lives. But, at some point common sense has to come in and say to all of us pubescent-techno-fiends, “This isn’t sustainable.” Not like this, it isn’t. Romeo and Juliet is a phenomenal story about love, but it isn’t a story of sustainable love. Our love affair with technology needs to be re-evaluated within the context of sustainability. The grand philosophical argument, something that is noble even if naïve, is that by automating all menial tasks, we can add better, higher paying jobs—like a game of economic Jenga. Ultimately we may win at this game, but not right now. When will our politicians and policy makers wake up to the fact that outsourcing to China and India isn’t our biggest problem; it’s just a current problem.
0 Comments
|
AuthorKyle McNease - Academic and founder and CEO of Prognosis Hope. Archives
October 2021
Categories |