For many generations one of the surest and most secure ways for a mostly female slice of the workforce to maintain a comfortable lifestyle was to slog away in a repetitive, dull desk job at a dull, repetitive business. For the longest time the tools of choice were typewriters, file cabinets, and carbon paper. The technology shifted dramatically to bulky desktop computers, floppy disks, and printers roughly forty years ago, but the essential tasks of tracking, invoicing, and filing remained much the same for the longest time.
In exchange for a chunk of one’s life, you could tip-tap away on a keyboard, socialize (or flirt) with your co-workers, share birthday cakes in the break room, pass around envelopes to collect for special occasions such a wedding or baby shower, shop for a “Secret Santa” gift, gossip to your heart’s content, go out for lunch, and collect a solid, if unspectacular, paycheck that would allow you to live a reasonably comfortable life. Life might not have been great—but it was still good.
However, before we fully realized what was happening, those days vanished in a flash. An office culture that provided community, a sense of purpose, a reason to change out of your pajamas, and some economic security was (with apologies to Margaret Mitchell) gone with the wind.
These types of jobs still exist to some extent in portions of the economy that are insulated from the economic rigors (and rampaging artificial intelligence systems) of the real world—think academia, non-profit organizations, and government agencies—but tornados are now ripping away the veneer of comfort there too. Higher education, particularly the private liberal arts colleges, have been stunned to discover they have no longer have a role in preparing future leaders and workers because they cost too much and provide too little. The spigots of no-strings-attached federal money that allowed many non-profit groups to live in La-La Land have dried up. Ponderous and ineffective government bureaucracies across America have discovered that paying people loads of money to accomplish little other than produce reports chronicling their continuing failures of governance (while blaming others for the crime, debt, and decay on their watches) tends to anger taxpayers and voters who will try to withhold money; you can, of course, still pull a “Virginia Switcheroo” and blithely raise taxes through the roof after loudly promising not to during your election campaign, which will keep the cozy paychecks flowing to pay for the next endless round of pointless committee meetings, but this will work for only a little while longer (the end is nigh).
The sad fact that software now tracks our keystrokes, smart ID tags document our time in the restroom, and the time-consuming busywork has now been outsourced to artificial intelligence throughout the private sector makes it a lot easier to understand why the shell shocked and suddenly redundant are so attracted to the “warmth” of collectivism; their world has grown very, very cold—very, very suddenly. All the toxic mutations of Communism have, of course, long been proven to be economic and social dead ends, but if the world around you seems to have become frighteningly more uncaring and unforgiving (and incredibly lonely) over the past decade or so, it is understandable why people will cling to any crazy life raft in a storm.
Given that many office jobs now are increasingly likely to involve a desk on one’s own kitchen table, a sleeping cat for a colleague, and no-benefits gig work that is secure for only a few months, it is easier to understand why so many downtowns in American cities today are ghost towns lacking only the tumbleweeds; all those keyboard warriors are sitting at home in their slippers and working remotely—with a deep sense of being cosmically cheated as their only companion—because the world has now shifted back to what has been normal for most of the history of humanity: Work is actually work.
The odd, historically-unique, rapidly-closing window of sitting in an air-conditioned office, sipping coffee, and living a life insulated from the sharp edges of the actual economic world has largely vanished. The future will belong to those who string the power lines, till the soil, weld the ships, repair the trucks, pave the roads, install the ductwork, build the houses, fix the plumbing, care for the sick, work in the factories, drill for the oil, protect the public, sail the ships, cook the food, drive the forklifts, and do the other hard (and sometimes dangerous) work involved in keeping our world from collapsing. There will, of course, still be some shrinking islands of office jobs and (groan) lawyers in existence, but they will fight a losing battle against artificial intelligence that will increasingly come to dominate the paper-shuffling jobs in a world where there is much less actual paper to shuffle.
Most people crave security and predictability; 21st century America finds this to be in short supply, so lying politicians will build their careers on promising what they cannot possibly supply to those who are desperate and confused about why their degrees in Puppetry or Gender Studies have put them on the unemployment line. Ignoring the reality that work, sweat, sacrifice, and disappointment has always been the lot of the vast majority of humanity will not forestall the pain many will feel as the brief reign of the keyboard warrior sitting in front of a spreadsheet stumbles to an ignominious end.
As more hands get dirty in the decades to come, the changes in American culture and politics will track the upheaval in our workforce. Moreover, no smarmy demagogue or silly refusal to recognize a bracing new economic order that is transforming our nation and world by the minute will prevent this new reality from crashing upon us all.
Don’t bother learning to code (artificial intelligence will have that covered); learn to use a blowtorch, a backhoe, a jackhammer, a blood pressure cuff, or a winch.