Seth Godin: the end of jobs (which isn't a bad thing, necessarily)

Super-monster-seller-author-blogger-everything guy Seth Godin joins the long list of characters who have given up hope entirely. No, I don't mean that they are huddled up in front of their DVD player, sucking down pint after pint of Ben & Jerry's while watching The Princess Bride on a loop until God eventually kills them out of pity. I mean the type of giving up hope that means you believe that this "recession" is here to stay, because it's not a recession, it's the end of an era. It seems that Seth no longer believes in jobs in the model of the industrial age: lifetime employment, a boss, 9 to 5, black lung, repetitive stress injuries, the normal deal we have come to associate with active economic life.

The other recession, though, the one with the loss of "good factory jobs" and systemic unemployment--I fear that this recession is here forever.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

There's a race to the bottom, one where communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world's cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win...

Factories were at the center of the industrial age. Buildings where workers came together to efficiently craft cars, pottery, insurance policies and organ transplants--these are job-centric activities, places where local inefficiencies are trumped by the gains from mass production and interchangeable parts. If local labor costs the industrialist more, he has to pay it, because what choice does he have?

No longer. If it can be systemized, it will be. If the pressured middleman can find a cheaper source, she will. If the unaffiliated consumer can save a nickel by clicking over here or over there, then that's what's going to happen.

Pass me my eighth pint of Jerry Garcia, it's the swordfight between the Dread Pirate Roberts and Iñigo Montoya! Sorry, I mean Seth doesn't view this future as especially dystopic:

I'm not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn't look like a job, not a full time one anyway.

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Being a translator and interpreter, I would like to point out an issue with thinking about the world in terms of "jobs." If you speak multiple languages, you realize that the English word "job" does not translate very well into French, Spanish, German, Japanese, or anything else. This is because the word itself comes from the 1550s English term a jobbe of work, a piddling little task as opposed to a more regular position. Some etymologists suspect it is related to the term gobbe, "a big wet disgusting hunk of something." It wasn't until the 1600s that the word was recorded as a regular type of labor, and even then it was not an especially honorific term. Remember that most wealth in those days came from position, not talent or hard work!

If somebody told you that "big wet disgusting hunks of dishonorable labor" were no longer available, would you be upset?