Civil Commotion

Remember: Y’all are no damn good.

At dinner with a friend a few years ago, I ventured that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence would endure for millennia. Reflecting on the lunacy of the Evangelical Right, however, and that whole sick shape-shifting pastiche of closely-related nutjobs now known as the alt-Right, I added that I thought it quite possible that it would not be the United States that projected those noble ideals into the future.

I had, then, no idea that the hunger for a benevolent strongman was so acute, or that the collective ignorance of, and disdain for, the First Amendment was so widespread. That the contempt for education, and anti-intellectualism, were so deep-running that a cartoon character like Betsy DeVos could actually be nominated for Secretary of Education. That our indifference to the fate of our cities was so comprehensive that Ben Carson could actually be nominated for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. That the most important positions in an imminent administration would be filled by ex-generals with nicknames like … “Mad Dog.”

That soon gays, and Muslims, and Jews, and Jains, and women, and blacks, and Mexicans, including children, would be accosted by howling morons in the public streets and told they had no right to be where they were.

Or that the stimulus for these national disgraces would be the election of a gaudy, preening buffoon and serial-liar like Donald Trump.

Though Trump supporters — 1984-like, or Joseph Goebbels-like — serenely insist that Trump won the popular election, there is not a scintilla of objective evidence to support that claim. He lost the popular election, and lost decisively; according to the current count, by almost 3-million votes.

There is still the courts, and the press — and just wait till the suckers he tricked turn on Trump. If the party hangers-on who comprise the Electoral College prove too cowardly to do their plain duty, there remains an immense — and certain to grow — reservoir of clear-headed Americans of goodwill who love their country’s ideals and understand the threat Trump poses, who recoil from the relentless dishonesty and relentless self-aggrandizement, who are aghast at the prospect of a 3-card Monte dealer with a good line of patter setting-up shop in the Oval Office.

Donald Trump’s scamming will collapse when it is time to deliver on the promises, as scams always do. Right now is probably the high-water mark for Trump, as good as it is ever going to get; from this point forward the tide is likely to run in only one direction — out. We, the People, will still have to do our part, though, will have to confront the lies, the expediencies, the inevitable depredations upon the Bill of Rights.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The Founders could hardly have been plainer: They did not imagine a people who bow and scrape before an Invisible Wizard who lives in the sky, and they did not imagine a people who dance attendance upon a strutting peacock. They envisioned a country of free, two-legged, self-governing citizens — and that vision, the great achievement of The Enlightenment and the beating heart of the great liberal democracies, will soon be challenged as never before.

History is now.

It’s easy enough to identify the death of the Abrahamic faiths, and the corresponding cultural changes, as an engine of much of the world’s discord. Less discussed, though just as consequential, is the digitization of industry — Industry 4.0.

Put simply, more of the world’s work, and record-keeping, has been automated. Several years ago I visited a 3-story factory just a few miles from my home which had no more than a half-dozen people on duty, though it was operating 24-hours a day at top production.

Any rote task can be automated — and will be. It may be cheaper today to move work to Mexico, but that will inevitably spur wage increases there; when wages increase enough, it will be more cost-effective to build a factory that needs just a very few people. Inevitably, necessarily, unavoidably, manufacturing employment is going to continue declining, no matter Donald Trump’s bellicosity.

At this exact moment, there are platforms all over the world pumping oil with nobody on board; they are visited every couple weeks by a technician who does some minor, routine maintenance. What is more, there is now an initiative to build oil drilling rigs which don’t need roughnecks. Crops are harvested by combines which rely on data from satellites to decide which row is ready to be picked; if Farmer Green Jeans is on board, it’s only because he’d rather sit in the cab than sit on the couch with his wife and watch Dr. Phil. Laborers are being replaced by robots and, globally, tens of millions of jobs are going to be lost over the next few decades.

Even professional services such as engineering are being automated, with computer programs now performing hundreds of calculations in a twinkling. What is more, thanks to coding the heuristics formed by experience, engineering judgment can be duplicated. No kidding: I have read of the data from subsurface soil investigations being analyzed, and design recommendations prepared, wholly by computer.

Robots have performed surgery under the direction of a doctor hundreds of miles away. Today, routine cardiac procedures are performed by doctors who watch a computer monitor far more closely than the patient in front of them.

All labor, even professional labor, is being automated; the next generation of factories and office equipment and shop tools is being designed to eliminate people. This is not science fiction; it’s happening today.

And why not? A computer or robot will work continuously without complaint, without trips to the restroom, without coffee, and for years with no further capital investment. Repetitive motions don’t cause health problems for robots. Robots don’t come in hungover, and they produce the identical product again and again and again …

The millions of jobs lost to automation is just the beginning; there are tens, hundreds, of millions more to go.

We are headed, right now, toward a world in which the only people who work are boutique craftsmen, entertainers, and the people who build, program, and maintain the machines.

We need to spend more time thinking through the social and governmental implications of that, and less time worrying about how to punish Carrier et. al. The simple fact is that a solid majority of people are ill-suited for the technical work of the future. What is going to become of them? Are they going to be allowed to starve to death? They’ll kill the technicians and destroy the machines before that happens. But there isn’t going to be any useful work for them, either. What is the world going to be like when only 50-, or 75-, or 100-million people are needed to do the necessary work? How will goods be apportioned?

As I’ve said in the past, we are living in the midst of a truly epochal change in philosophy and technology, and the world is going to look a lot different when we get to the other side of it.

That guy who walked into a D.C.-area pizzeria and started shooting? A Tarheel.

A North Carolina man was arrested Sunday after he walked into a popular pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington carrying an assault rifle and fired one or more shots, D.C. police said. The man told police he had come to the restaurant to “self-investigate” a false election-related conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton that spread online during her presidential campaign.

[ … ]

The restaurant’s owner and employees were threatened on social media in the days before the election after fake news stories circulated claiming that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were running a child sex ring from the restaurant’s backrooms. Even Michael Flynn, a retired general whom President-elect Trump has tapped to advise him on national security, shared stories about another anti-Clinton conspiracy theory involving pedophilia. None of them were true.