September 11, 2011—Close Reading

"Are jobs Obsolete?"

In this commentary, Douglas Rushkoff proposes an idea that he himself knows won't be taken lightly,  but he proposes it in such a way that a reader feels he's coming from a rational place of mind. He proposes that the unemployment crisis of today isn't today's real issue—restructuring society around something other than employment is.

Opening with reference to the endangerment of the USPS, Rushkoff explains how digital technology has hurt the unemployment rate for a long time. He shares the fact that "there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day...even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high," going on to report that banks are demolishing foreclosed homes. He uses this information to make his point: We have everything, but no longer an appropriate means of distributing it. Moreover, his presentation of this information also tells us how wasteful we are to protect the agricultural sector of employment. Rushkoff continues with a brief history of how the modern notion of employment came to be, focusing on how before the "advent of the corporation," people worked for their value and, now they work for their job. With only this information, one feels as though their job today is of no value, it's just filler, and all society keeps trying to do is sustain the filler.

Rushkoff makes some precise word choices for his argument; much of his diction relates humans to pieces of outdated technology, but not in a way that implies he feels that way about humanity. In the first sentence he mentions the "replacement of working humans" by digital technology. The word "replacement" pertaining to people produces an image of human hands being switched out just like a faulty piece of machinery. Rushkoff later refers to taxi-drivers as being "render[ed]...obsolete," like analog cameras by digital point-and-shoots. But he gives the impression that this isn't how he sees humans, it's how the current employment structure does, enforcing his idea that the employment structure is broken.

Finally, Rushkoff's perhaps most critically utilized technique is the rhetorical question. He opens his idea with "since when is unemployment really a problem?" and when addressing how society sees the use of technology as something taking work away from people in the goal of cheap efficiency, he asks, "Isn't [that] what all this technology was for in the first place?" In using questions rather than statements, Rushkoff is presenting his theory in a gentler, more inviting-for-consideration way. He's letting the reader ask themself about the problem; the reader is not simply being told a blatantly new concept. With rhetorical question is also how Rushkoff connects to the humanity of the issue, asking, "Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with 'career' be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?" This allows a reader to first explore within his or herself the good that could result from a alternatively-organized society before making his own propositions.