Technological advances are destroying your happiness, and your community

I saw a post on Instagram recently that got me thinking. In it, it showed a man holding a green mini-leaf blower that seemed to be capable of blowing a ridiculous volume of leaves out of an alleyway. People were praising this new invention as being the pinnacle of productivity and efficiency, but I was watching this video and shaking my head.

What happens when we push technology like this that is supposed to make our lives easier? And no, before you ask, I’m not just talking about mini-leafblowers here. I’m talking about all technology. What does it lead to? What is the end result?

After I buy this new tech marvel, does my life really end up any easier? I suppose at home it does. If the technology is only for me to use and I am my own boss. But Technology like this isn’t just confined to the home, is it?

Employers will immediately snatch up any tech that will improve their employees' productivity, no matter the cost. But do the employees actually benefit in any meaningful way from this exchange, or is it just a windfall for the employer?

In a true utopian society (far from the wasteland we are currently trying to survive in), tech advances can do a lot of good. Imagine being able to produce your necessary parts or accomplish your assigned workload in mere minutes and having the rest of your shift to play on your phone, watch movies, read and support other authors on Medium, possibly open a book. These are things societies should aspire to.

A future where people don’t work but pursue their own interests, their hobbies, their dreams. But is that society ever really possible? I mean, honestly, do I ever really expect that people are going to allow their employees to sit around on the job and relax AND get paid for it?

The answer is a resounding no. At least, not in American culture anyway. In other cultures, certainly. It is reasonable for you to hire someone to perform a job and, after they have performed the job, for you to pay them and allow them to go on their way. But America hasn’t been reasonable with most of its workers for quite some time.

Here, most of our citizens work and are paid by the hour. The wealthy elite may draw salaries, but that is not the average American’s experience. So if you are given tech that ‘makes your job easier’ and increases production, what does that mean for the hourly worker? It means the task that ordinarily would have taken you all day and two co-workers will now take thirty minutes.

And the sales pitch these tech overlords are selling of “this will make life easier” and “you will have more free time” ends up looking very different for the average employee. Instead, the moment they are finished with their work, they will be assigned another task (likely a lot worse than the original one).

And what about that worker getting help? Well, that’s not going to happen with this tech. A job that ordinarily required three workers can now be done with one. Or, to put it another way (a way the tech industries want to avoid because it exposes an inconvenient truth), the advanced technology robs those other two people of a job.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Consider my mini-leaf blower example. With this tech, you could do fifty acres in maybe an hour all by yourself. A job that would have been maybe an all-day affair if you had a rake and a few coworkers. But guess what, that means you have seven hours of your workday to spare. You think your employer is going to pay you to sit around and relax? Not in America!

So he has you cleaning his house next. A job he was going to hire a maid for, but why hire her now when you have extra time? So now we are down three jobs. You finish cleaning his house in an hour (thanks to tech like a dishwasher, laundry machine, AI-powered vacuum, etc) and now he needs someone to wash his cars. He was going to hire the local teen to do that, but again, he has you now, thanks to tech. So now we’re down four jobs.

And on and on it goes. You can see how technology, sold as something to improve all our lives, has made the average American miserable and destroyed entire communities. But let’s not blame tech because Musk and the other tech billionaires say not to. As I said, this would be different if we lived in a utopia where employers weren’t constantly seeking to use and abuse their workers, but this isn’t a utopia; it’s an American Wasteland.