Hello,
I just finished Incubus and purchased Taboo You. It took awhile, as I just moved and started a new job.
Have you written anything about automation and how it might destroy any of the last remnants of masculinity in society?
If the trend of replacing physical labor with robots continues, will society devolve into a caste of festive eunuchs ruling over machinery?
I know performing manual labor doesn't necessarily make you masculine in any traditional sense of the term, but blue collar jobs, if nothing else, seem to serve as a redoubt for that sort of man. But then I think that perhaps automation doesn't mark any watershed moment, but rather is yet another ratcheted-movement forward in the same direction society has been tending for thousands of years.
Thanks. This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. In the next 50 years, it seems that most, if not all, trucking jobs will be automated. And certainly, by then, even jobs such as stocking shelves will be gone (see Walmart). The only people in America who will be able to thrive economically will be those capable of high-level customer service. Mostly, it'll be design and marketing jobs. That'll be the top caste. Below it, just a pit.
Also, I heard on one of your podcasts with Lynn Lockheart from a few months ago that you were looking to do a bus tour of cities in New Jersey this summer. I'm originally from NJ, so I'd love to read about this. I'm willing to sponsor this trip financially if that's an issue.
Thanks for your time.
-BC
BC, thanks so much for these questions. As a nonfiction and fiction writer I tend toward the path of least creative resistance in both endeavors and explore the future exclusively in my science-fiction.
The trend towards loss of tradesmanship, of no longer working with your hands as a man, is a path to total emasculation and majority insanity. As it is, building and maintaining things are only surrogates for our real purpose, to interact with God’s world as he created it, not as we have reshaped it. The trades though allow us concourse with the inward and outwardly transcendent—that which is greater than us. Working in the trades is a weigh station in the measurement of one’s heavy heart on the way to Hel, and I mean it with a single l. Although we might no longer hunt, defend ourselves [already an actuality] or act socially as traditional or natural men of the past, to shape things with our hands is to at least retain some connection to the elder man of old, who was still able to engage in masculine life through making shelters [although in hyper-masculine societies this was done by women, with men engineering fortifications only], fashioning the tools and weapons of the hunt and of war and passing on his lore.
The once and future order that makes up our masculine borders, delineates our severe, womanly limitations, which outlaws self-defense, discourages procreation and promotes abomination in the form of mutilating children from male to shemale has us headed up the Meat Chute of Souls into a word which I suspect will be dominated by increased dehumanization in the so-called cause of humanity, of finalized emasculation in the so-called cause of society as we are reshaped into a hive mind. A clutch event will be the outlawing of private procreation, the corporate monopoly of human life.
In such a world a need for masculine actionists will remain in the form of organic security and law enforcement operatives, as well as military specialties for which drones and AI are unsuited and in prostitution and spectacle. In such a case, with the means but not necessarily the soul to strike a blow for freedom, humanity’s last hope from within—the most likely hope being a natural disaster that destroys our technology, as in Reverent Chandler and Malediction Song—will be a malfunction. This was the subject of Organa: The Malfunction of Tray Sorenson, a novelette from 2012 which I expanded to novella length in 2016.
The various weigh stations on our way down into a Hellish hive of a mother world, are explored in my short fiction collections Darkly and Night City.
The current plight of 80% denatured man is explored in The Daughters of Moros, This Design is Called Paisley, Menthol Rampage and Fat Girl Dancing.
For a look at how I am certain that some Deep State apparatus is hoping to do away with the none-management level classes, read Retrogenesis, which I wrote based on a verbal outline provided by Erique Watson.
A longer view of possible escape and rebirth of a human element from a hive earth is explored in the novelette The Consultant.
In total, the most comprehensive treatment of the possibilities implicit in current societal, masculinity, technological and dysgenic trends are addressed in the now 10-volume Sunset Saga, 8 of which have yet to be edited, so have an irritating number of simple typos. Tony Cox is currently working on proofing the million-plus word series, which does not have to be read in order. Until those 8 volumes are reissued I suggest reading Den of the Ender and God’s Picture Maker [the Dark-Eyed-Girl version] in that order.
Thanks for your interest in my thoughts on the future of masculinity. However, most such musings are contained in my fiction.
-James LaFond, 3/24/18
Books For Sale by James LaFond
The Complete Catalog by Lynn Lockhart
Night City: The Short Fiction of James LaFond: 2015-16
Organa: The Malfunction of Tray Sorenson
RetroGenesis: And Morning Came: The Thanatos Trajectory
There will be some jobs that will be automated, but not as many as people are afraid of.
For example, "robot" trucks running free on the nations highways are not going to happen in our lifetimes. If turning loose a 90,000 pound kinetic energy monster at 60 MPH is going to be done, it will be done AFTER:
1) I go to JFK airport and take my seat in an airliner.
2) The airliner takes off, flies to Heathrow in London, and lands.
3) It taxis to the gate and I get off ...
... and there was NEVER anyone in the cockpit.
Airliners are a thousand times easier to program for automated operation than are trucks. An airliner can ALREADY take off, fly to its destination, and land, while the pilot just keeps his hands in his lap.
But they will NEVER send an airliner off with 359 people on board completely unmanned, just as they will never send an unmanned semitrailer across the country, passing 56,000 people in cars going all directions on the way. As has been mentioned a day or two ago, once people realized that operation of unattended cars is the equivalent of a conveyor feeding people into a wood chipper, all this happy horseshit about countrysides full of robot cars will end, and it will stay in specific areas around cities with carefully marked and mapped roads, maybe ....
As far as robots creating huge unemployment, we've already faced and solved that problem, and we know the answer. A hundred years ago, 40% of this nation worked on farms, doing manual dog-work - pitching hay, milking cows, following a horse with a plow. Today, about 1% of the country works on farms, producing 50 times as much food as we used to.
Are there mobs of emasculated, out-of-work farmhands roaming the country? No ... they're building tractors, maintaining milking machines, developing more productive seed types, and processing the huge amount of food that the "robots" are producing.
What will happen when manufacturing jobs are automated is that the people who used to stand next to a lathe will be selling the product that the robot is making, or programming more robots, or delivering the robots products. We'll make 10 times as much stuff with half the people, and someone has to use it ....
"...they will never send an unmanned semitrailer across the country..."
You're wrong about this and we'll see it. The people with money in this country rule and they don't give a damn what you or any of us think. They will do what will bring them the most profit. The computer driven trucks will be less accident prone than ones driven by people because they never get tired and never make the same mistake twice. They'll make mistakes but once it happens to one ALL of them will learn not to make it again.