August 15, 2007

• How has your family background influenced the way you see the world?

  Growing up in the lower middle class of a minority family in an area that is primarily white populated but which was undergoing a transformation into a more diverse environment positioned me to perceive more clearly the inequities of the American society. Most importantly, I came to the conclusion that most of the inequities I was seeing stemmed not so much from wealth but from knowledge.

  You can perceive the impact of having professional resources that one can draw from in extended families. The children in those families tend to have different expectations for what is possible in their lives than those children who have never had a role model to look up to who worked outside of blue color positions. In addition the children of college educated parents with college educated relatives tended to be more prepared for schooling in general than those whose parents were not. This did not always transfer into making those children more successful in the long run. Indeed, often those whose parents were less well off sometimes I observed were more ambitious and thirsty for knowledge, but even so they were at an observable competitive disadvantage that always struck me as unjust.

  Both of my parents are college educated, professionals but beyond my immediate family there are not a lot of professionals in my family and almost none with the higher levels of income. None who have PhDs and few Masters degrees (and those being recent developments necessary for career advancement, not planned moves from the start). No Lawyers or Doctors.  And no one who attended a tier one college or university, or even tier 2 I suspect, until my generation. And many were blue collar workers in the manufacturing industry at risk of losing their jobs as a result of technological enhancements. So as you can see, I grew up somewhat inbetween. Many more advantages than most people ever have, but still with a noticeable perspective disadvantage. Many of the ways in which others can and do lead their lives never seemed all that real to me because no one I interacted with lead a life like that so the possibility of me living that way seemed more like a silly and childish day dream than a real possibility. I also remember how many little tiny things that everyone seemed to know while I was in school that I just didn’t know. The world was just a little bit bigger for most of my classmates than it seemed for me.

  This one component I mentioned, the number of people in my family and their friends who have lost their jobs and been screwed out of pensions and retirement funds due to the simple crush of human advancement had another big influence on the way I see the world. It instilled in me a profoundly cold perspective toward the argument that such and such a change will “cost jobs”. Because the hypocrisy of those who stood by and let tens of thousands of unskilled workers lose their jobs and did nothing to even try to stop it but will now argue that it is essential that we make laws and regulations to protect their particular industry from undergoing the same fate makes me ill. How many people are homeless right now because we did nothing? How many of their children turned to drugs and are now in jail because we did nothing? And we’re STILL doing nothing. Every day more and more jobs are being replaced by ‘more efficient’ means of production.

  So yeah every artist, writer, and computer programmer can lose their job and have no way to make a living because computer technology replaces them with a superior means of transfer of knowledge and information. I don’t care. Every teleservices industry in the US or rote programming farm in the US can go out of business because their work is out sourced to India and China and I won’t care either. It will be no different than replacing clerks at a grocery store with automated machines that do the same task. If we are going to get upset at one, we should get equally as upset at the other.

  Perhaps I sound like I am against innovation and advancement. No. Nothing could be further from the turth. If anything I am a technofile. But if I am to believe in these advancements, believe that they are for the better, I am going to believe in them consistently. And that means we should privilege the most advancement these technologies can bring us, even if that limits our own ability to earn a living. Even if I who only have two skills, writing and programming should find myself unable to make ends meet as a direct consequence of technological advancements that make copyright law obsolete, that will be a small price to pay for a world where all the artistic  and intellectual achievements of all of humanity are equally accessible to all human beings on the planet. We just have to think carefully about how to make other ways for people to survive, if we care enough to do so.

  Most people think this position is arrogant and cold and cruel and somewhat stupid, but it is at the heart of how I perceive the world and it was created as a direct consequence of what I have seen while growing up.

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  • 11:39 am
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