The elites will force everyone to work – the handicapped, women, immigrants, refugees, mental patients, senior citizens, the young, middle classes, lower classes – everyone. This while the portion of ‘fungible’ or “work that’s worth actual money” work rapidly decrease. Politicians will keep doing the same thing over and over, and it’ll get worse and worse.
Not really. It’s much simpler and much much worse.
People are very predictable, and behave according to models. These models have been charted out quite well, the last decades, and only get better with automation and algorithms. People revolt, protest, unionize, strike, etc. predictably. People exposed to hardship organize predictably. Organization is regarded by moneyed interests (think tanks mostly) as a form of disease or keloid formation – once people are organized it takes decades and billions of engineering consent to lull them in to complacency again. Right now we are extremely de-unionized, de-organized and individualistic. Atomized. We experience personal benefit from going through society individualized or “politically secular”. This has been engineered. Unions and collaborative grassroots entities are regarded as “icky” and “vulgar” now. Grassroots NGO’s are for losers, commoners, the vulgate, radicals.
The future has a fairly predictable arythmatic of steadily increasing (frog in warming water) disempowerment of all people. This has two benefits – it “liberated” more resources for elites, empowering them more and making further engineering consent even easier. The other benefit of castrating the common person from her money is that it reduces consumption rates, which is quite desirable in terms of real climate consequences. If we are all dirt poor we will damage the environment less and consume less, right?
There is an eminent desirability to a high tech, libertarianized, corporate centered dichtomy between the vulgate (or precariat) and the elite. It’s instinctively meritocratic to the self-aggrandizing elites. They will conclude it’s only natural. A bit like how fat cat Trump gets through the day licking his own tangerine fur.
The elites know there will be less work, So it is a careful culinary/alchemical process to slowly increase what’s perceived as necessary “austerity” (punishing the victim, meritocracy, etc.) while slowly adding salt (more prisons, more civil servants, more camera’s, more war on terror, more police, more intelligence services, more praetorians), to the point where the rock ends it sideways movement because dock. That point is now predictable and it’s a glacial but very much charted out trajectory.
It involves people being fed, yes, a very basic, extremely spartan participatory society (if you losers don’t change diapers of old people they’ll develop gangrene, whatever, figure it out, not our problem). It means all public service work will be rationized as well, and completely unpaid. It means rationing in every other avenue of life – vacations, sex, travel, food/energy consumption, etc. Stuff like meat once a week, because ISIS. Because the children. Or whatever the flimsy 1984 excuse they’ll think off next. Fortunately we’ll have amazing legalized drugs, awesome porn, spectacular 3D headsets and stunning 3D movies. Yanno, panem et circenses and that sort of overwrought cliche’s.
YOU NEED TO WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND the reality this will work. People who do not already instinctively realize this will persist in watching “cooking with the kardashians” and doze on. You CAN NOT wake people up who will only end up experiencing unpleasant cognitive dissonance when they start waking up. It’s like pushing a wet mattress up a garbage chute.
In 20-40 years in western Europe we will have, “snow crash style” all leveled out at a median quality of life not quite dissimilar with what’s now enjoyed in Rumania or Bolivia, Poland or Greece. Let’s say about half our current. And there it will stabilize, while statisticians still talk of “economic growth” and the benefits of democracy and modernity.
I am sorry for the bad news, but it has become almost as causal as spilled milk under the bridge.