So, getting back to the problem with education...is it has nothing to do with the physical work of creating, building and maintaining a large scale industrial society. We're post-industrial right? So all we do is learn how to cop attitudes and sit around posing all day long in front of a computer. Papers come and go, phones get answered by machines, managers wonder around, and hopefully stay in meetings all day, somebody calls in a pizza order for lunch, and everybody dodges anybody who is working and that sort of finishes off the day. More of the same until Friday. It's all basically bullshit. Achievement? motivations? Work? For what? For Bush and Empire? For Capital?
I can honestly say that I have never, ever used a single thing I learned in school on a job, past ninth grade shop class, and tenth grade geometry---and I went to college for eight years full time.
If I try to imagine myself as an eighteen year old kid and then try to imagine what the future would look like, all I see is a big gray fog bank coming in off the Pacific. Nothingness to the horizon.
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One of the (many) reasons I stay technical, resisting all nudges from bosses and encouraging co-workers to become managerial, is that I have the opportunity to apply knowledge to problems, a basic human need I think.
In a previous post, I mentioned a friend who works with the JPL building probes (one of which is orbiting Saturn even as we speak). Yeah, I know people, his work doesn't add value in a strictly material sense and I think at least a few folks on the list would interpret it as being a 'distraction' from pressing problems and a waste of resources. But he gets to apply every last bit of book learning - and then some - he's ever acquired in his work. He's probably the only person I know who not only keeps old undergrad and grad texts but still refers to them from time to time (checking the Newtonian equations for example).
It's no surprise that he has a very definite idea of the future. Yes, yes, it's techno-phillic and not as politically astute as many would like but it's strong and real - at least to him.
I don't think it's an accident that the titanium strong bond between his training and his work and his life gives him such a holistic (if I can pull out such a word) idea of what's happening next.
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But of course, as you say Chuck in the wider society this deep feeling of mission and accomplishment is non-existent. To the in-crowd, Capital only offers well cushioned drudgery and numbness. To the outsiders, misery and relentless ridicule ('why can't you get your act together and be like me, a guy who's really doing nothing but has a lot of stuff and a big house?').
And you're right...where is the future in all this? Who has a feeling for what the future will look like?
Capital's vision is more of the same - only with flying cars, chatty computers (to sell us stuff) and a panopticon to track our movements. This sounds like someone's idea of hell to me - trapped in such a world, you couldn't wait for the sun to go nova and end the whole thing once and for all.
To tell you the truth, I only see certain speculative fiction authors dealing with this subject - the death of the future. I suppose it's called dystopian fiction but it seems like the restless and direction-less present to me.
But, taking the hopeful view, it's probably the case that new things are in their infancy, tucked away from our sight or so novel that even as we see them we don't know what we're looking at and fail to process and interpret.
Bruce Sterling once wrote, during the heyday of cyberpunk fiction, that something new was indeed growing and that it's moving, "with sinister majesty" across the face of the globe. He was referring to another sort of international order, built on the telecommunications grid Capital created but tuned to a different frequency.
Sometimes, I think I get a glimpse of this and other times I feel I'm right in the midst -- but it's fleeting and cannot be written about coherently quite yet.
.d.