[47440] in Cypherpunks
Re: A Modest Proposal: Fattening up the Proles
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Weller)
Wed Jan 17 22:04:10 1996
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 18:46:10 -0800
To: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
From: stevenw@best.com (Steven Weller)
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
Tim May:
>(Ironically, I brought up the new book, "The Winner Take All Society," at
>the last Cypherpunks meeting. No time to discuss it here, but it confirms
>my strong belief that we are heading for a economy in which a shrinking
>fraction of workers have really valuable things to contribute, and a
>growing fraction of the population does not. I had not recalled the
>authors, but Strick had a battery-powered laptop and Metricom wireless
>modem, and ran an Alta Vista search from where he was sitting: ROBERT FRANK
>& PHILIP COOK, The Winner-Take-All Society, New York: The Free Press.)
See also _The End of Work_ by Rifkin. It chronicles changing work patterns
from agriculture through mass manufacturing and the service age on to an
uncertain future. Lots of interesting numbers and "look what is already
happening" statements. It also shows that the changes are inexorable, just
as the decline in agriculture based on human and animal labor was.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Weller | "The Internet, of course, is more
| than just a place to find pictures
| of people having sex with dogs."
stevenw@best.com | -- Time Magazine, 3 July 1995
