Douglas Rushkoff: Are Jobs Obsolete?

Occupy Wall Street Demands Meaningful Careers

"There is a crisis of meaning in the world of business," says Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. "The global nature of both capital flow and financial lock-downs in the 21st century - as well as an increasing sense of the urgency and scale of issues like global warming - has caused some business leaders to question old assumptions about value which now seem decidedly stale."

Dan Pink and Douglas Rushkoff Revisit Career Incentives

Martin isn't the only one with an eye on this problem. Dan Pink, author and one-time speech writer for Al Gore, explains in an RSA Animate that for any occupation requiring even a modicum of creative thought or skill, traditional monetary incentives have consistently proven ineffectual.

In a somewhat radical synthesis of the above ideas, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff asked us recently to consider whether or not jobs are obsolete, given the rapid mechanization of the first-world workforce and its consequent disillusionment at the hands of the economic bottom-line.

Occupy Wall Street Signals Crisis in Meaningful Work

Occupy Wall Street and associated global protests have created a stage for this disillusionment to express itself, acting as counter-cultural blowholes for the alternative press and permitting individuals and groups to collectively interrogate the status quo. Megan Erikson discussed this in "The Crisis of Meaning in the Millennial Workforce" in BigThink. (19th Sept. 2011. 22 Jan 2012).

One of these so-mentioned individuals is Charles Eisenstein - a Yale graduate in Philosophy and Mathematics - who in October of 2011 wrote a seminal paper titled "No Demand Is Big Enough", dissecting the desires and anxieties of individuals who make up the Occupy movement. He believes participants are "practicing new forms of non-hierarchical collaboration, peer-to-peer organization, and playful action that someday, maybe, we can build a world on".

Call for Purposeful Employment

The idea of the job isn't going anywhere, but neither is it comfortably static. A rallying cry of the Occupy Movement seems to be a demand for purposeful employment: work that doesn't simply allow one to put food on the table, but that recognizes and challenges human capacity. A similar cry is for an economy that, at its very foundation, accounts for and strengthens the many interrelationships between nature and humanity.

Fixing the growing problem of unemployment will not be an easy task. With the World Bank's warning of yet another global recession fresh in our minds, Rushkoff reminds us of the big picture and the long-term when he cautions us to "stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save."