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[...] one night they'd had a serious division of views over Berlin. "I know what they ought to do," Grover yelled (he always yelled — at walls, at anything else solid that happened to be around -to let you know it wasn't you he was mad at but something else, something to do with the scaled-up world adults made, remade and lived in without him, some inertia and stubbornness he was too small, except inside himself, to overcome), "exactly what they should do." But when Tim asked what, Grover only said, "Never mind. The thing we argued about isn't important. But now we don't talk; that is important. When I'm home now they let me alone and I let them alone." [...]
It had been a year before, in the early fall, a little past the opening of school. Hogan had come over to Tim's house right after supper, and the sky was still light, though the sun was down, and they had been out in Tim's back yard shooting baskets. Or Tim was: Hogan had had this conflict of commitments on his mind.
"Afraid he'll start drinking again," Hogan said, answering Tim's question. "I'm taking this along" — holding up a carton of milk. "If he wants to drink, he can drink this instead."
"Gah," said Tim, who didn't think much of milk.
"Listen," said Hogan, "you never outgrow your need for milk. Let me tell you about milk. How great it is."
'Tell me about beer," Tim said. Being lately fascinated with the idea of getting drunk.
Hogan took offense. "Don't make fun," he said. "I'm lucky I went through that when I did, that's what my father says. Look at this guy I got to go sit with. He's thirty-seven years old. Look at what a head start I got on him."
this storyline is so funny
"Listen, what did you call us up for?" Hogan said. He was talking in an obstinate, rhythmic way that meant he was going to bust out crying any minute. "Why did you get in touch with the A.A. at all, if you were just going to get drunk anyway?"
"I needed help," explained Mr. McAfee, "and I thought they would help me. And they really helped, didn't they? Look at what they sent me."
"Hey," said Tim, and Hogan started to cry.
[...] It was as if Mr. McAfee too were broadcasting from somewhere quite distant, telling about things Tim would not be sure of in the daylight: a brother who'd left home one morning during the depression and got on a freight and disappeared, later sending them this one postcard from Los Angeles, and Mr. McAfee, just a boy, deciding to follow him there the same way, only that first time he got no further than Houston; a Mexican girl he'd been with for a while, and she used to drink some stuff all the time, a word Tim couldn't make out, and she had a baby boy who'd died from a rattlesnake bite (Tim saw the snake, headed for him, and bounced up out of the dream in terror, yelling), and so one morning she'd just gone away, like his brother vanished into the same deserted morning, before the sun was even up; and nights when he would sit by himself down around the docks and look off into the black Gulf, where the lights ended, just cut off and left you this giant nothing; and gang scuffles, day after day, up and down the neighborhood streets, or fights out on the beach in the summer's harsh sun; and gigs in New York, L.A., bad gigs with tenor-sax bands it was better to forget only how do you? [...]
"There's an address someplace." He went away. Silence fell on the line and it was right around then that Tim's foot felt the edge of a certain abyss which he had been walking close to — for who knew how long? — without knowing. He looked over it, got afraid, and shied away, but not before learning something unpleasant about the night: that it was night here, and in New York, and probably on whatever coast the man was talking about, one single night over the entire land, making people, already so tiny in it, invisible too in the dark; and how hard it would be, how hopeless, to really find a person you needed suddenly, unless you lived all your life in a house like he did, with a mother and father. He turned around to look at the man on the bed and there came to him a hint then of how lost Mr. McAfee really was. What would he do if they couldn't find this girl? And then the man came back and read an address, which Tim copied, and the operator wanted to know if she should try Los Angeles information.
"Then we're integrated," Tim said. "Hey." "Yeah. They don't know it, but we're integrated."
Then Tim's and Grover's folks, and even, according to Hogan, the progressive Doctor Slothrop, started in with the telephone calls, and the name-calling, and the dirty words they got so angry with kids for using. The only parent who was keeping out of it seemed to be Étienne's father. "He says why don't people stop worrying about Negroes and start worrying about automation," Étienne reported. "What's automation, Grovie?"
The argument I make in Smart Machines and Service Work takes a different tack altogether. I make the case that there are three primary reasons for the relatively insignificant impact new forms of automation are having on labor productivity growth rates in the world’s advanced economies. First, the types of labor processes many automation theorists suggest are vulnerable to replacement by smart machines in fact require an intuitive, embodied, and socially mediated form of knowledge or skill that even the most advanced machine-learning programs cannot master. This is especially the case with so-called “personal services,” the fastest-growing segment of today’s job market. These activities require in-person interactions between providers and consumers that pose technological, moral, and even legal limits to their replacement by machines. These limits are, I contend, reinforced by an even more powerful disincentive to automate certain lines of production: the prevalence of cheap labor in the advanced economies. When workers will take jobs that are poorly paid because nothing else is available, there is little reason for business owners to invest in expensive and soon obsolete machinery to do their work. In the pages that follow, I show that this prevalence of cheap labor, indexed by decades of stagnant wages for workers, is itself an effect of technological stagnation. Wage gains for workers depend primarily on prior gains in labor productivity, which in turn require elevated rates of business investment to develop and implement ever-newer technologies that will continually reshape labor processes. As I demonstrate in detail in Chapter Five, however, the u.s. economy since 1980 has demonstrated a steady decline in private-sector investment; since 2000, the downward trend has accelerated dramatically. This collapse in investment, occurring against the background of the rise of the tech giants, points to a still more profound disorder at the core of the advanced capitalist economies of North America, Europe, and Japan: a crisis of profitability whose roots lie in a decades-long expansion of what I call, following the classical political economists, “unproductive” labor.
[...] In 2007, only one of what are now called the “Big Tech” firms made the list (Microsoft); today, the top seven slots are occupied by such firms, the first five nominally u.s. companies, the other two, Chinese. Apple entered the list in the last quarter of 2009, as the “recovery” began, its market cap less than $200 billion. Today, holding the top spot, it is worth five times that.23 The iPhone was first marketed in late 2007, as the crisis set in. By 2014 Apple was worth half a trillion dollars on paper; a year later, three-quarters of a trillion. Throughout this period, its core products remained a set of “smart” devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod), an expansive network of retail stores, and a lucrative service-provisioning division. Its recent triumphs in equities markets, like those of its peer “Big Tech” companies Facebook and Google, have come despite very little innovation in either product development or organizational efficiencies. Throughout the crisis period, unlike firms across the economy as a whole, Apple has piled up profits; by February 2018 the company held cash reserves of $300 billion.24 Yet instead of investing these profits in product innovation or expanding existing capacity, Apple has chosen to spend an astonishing $210 billion since 2012 on stock buybacks, a full $100 billion of it in 2018, as a windfall from the $1.5 trillion dollar tax cuts passed by Congress flooded into their coffers. Many other cash-rich corporations followed suit. According to the Roosevelt Institute, corporations spent $3 out of every $5 of their net profit on stock repurchases between 2015 and 2017; some $1.1 trillion in corporate profits (with Apple leading the way) was spent on buybacks by the end of 2018.25
In the first half of 2018, as stock market indexes (especially the tech-heavy NASDAQ) blew through historical highs, a total of six companies, all usually lumped in the category of the “tech”—or, more broadly, the “Internet”—sector, generated a full 99 percent of the S&P 500 index’s gains for the year.28 The simple subtraction of the FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet’s Google), along with Microsoft, from the index would leave a group of 494 large-cap companies that have generated net zero growth in equity prices over the first six months of 2018.
Marx’s approach allows us to understand that the rising proportion of the labor force working in circulation and supervision represents an increasing cost to the system as a whole. This introduces an added complication to Marx’s theory of the tendency for the average profit rate to fall. What if a significant portion of the wage bill includes personnel who perform activities that do not produce value, as is the case with circulation and supervisory labor? Since these workers do not produce surplus value or, a fortiori, sufficient value to provide for their own reproduction, their wages must be paid out of surplus value produced by productive workers elsewhere in the economy, thereby drawing down the total surplus value available to capitalists for new investments. Since profits must be shared between productive and unproductive enterprises, the rising ratio of unproductive to productive labor represents an additional downward pressure on the profit rate. The increasing productivity of labor, in Marx’s sense of a rising rate of exploitation, must therefore compensate not only for the reduction in the total demand for labor relative to the capital mobilized, but for the increasing costs of circulation and supervision, as more and more labor is allocated to non-productive activity.
i noted a lot of stuff in this vein but i discarded most of it because tbh a lot of this stuff feels too academic and arcane for me rn. but it's well-written!