“There will never be any more Jobs… The time of mass jobs is over.” This is the baseline manifesto of my podcast shero Korinth Starr: and it was written in 1994… as part of a back-story to the Jonker Memorandum. It was a world process in progress that created a debilitating edge to liberation in Zanzi… where I live.
The phrase threads through the story, which many of you now know to be a podcast Sci-Fi crime based cyber serial about how the world ends and what happened afterwards. It has now been running on my site nicholasjakari.com for nearly a decade.
When I woke up this morning the first headline I saw when I switched on the TV… was: “Cyril Ramaphosa* is running out of time.” For dealing with what he thinks of as an “economic crisis.”
Since some of my readers may not know whom I’m talking about: Cyril Ramaphosa is President of the southern Afrikan country… Zanzi… where I live. We are a place that has the developed/developing world’s highest rate of unemployment at 29%.
Unofficial sources suggest that the real rate is over 40%… and technically includes me. In fairness it is also one of the lowest rates of unemployment in Afrika… a continent not noted for accurate rekord keeping.
Every President since liberation has talked about “creating jobs” and willfully failed to do so… So the “crisis” is already 25 years old… Some crisis. A huge amount of money has disappeared however so it is presumed that the place is regarded by its new ruling class as expendable… More money has vanished than the late Mr. Rhodes could have dreamed of in his fondest love of riches… It was/is however more lavishly redistributed to friends and family of lucky winners in the lottery of life.
It has truly been a great age in the history of lootage [sic].
So the idea of “Running out of time” suggests an endless track with the future way down the route. In that regard there is no such place. It is not a real place… So the headline is simply stating an imaginary Idea.
Is it Timeout…? If so, for how long? Is that the wrong question or statement to link to time? Who knows?
What i do know is that Twenty-five years AGO I wrote a [FICTIONAL] Electioneering promo for my S/hero, Korinth Starr’s [fictional] election manifesto speech, in my fictional podcast story The Jonker Memorandum. *
I had her stating that: “There will never be any more jobs… the time of jobs for the masses is gone… Basic Pay is theirs by right.”** I didn’t make up the 4th Industrial Revolution… Toffler’s ‘Third Wave’ that announced it, was long underway… I was writing about its arrival as far back as 1976.
There will never be any more large-scale jobs… Left wing politics rightly or wrongly wiped out the mass scale demand for human labor… And replaced it with Machines. We humans are in an evolutionary phase of our existence. We are entering a period that may be described as post-human… the only thing that can stop it is some form of proto nuclear holocaust that takes us back at least 12500 years… when enough of us survived that catastrophe to rebuild… and to even start that, took 6000 more.
There is no thing that this president or any other kan do, to “Kreate” large-scale jobs… And the present, recently re-elected, government’s almost exclusive obsession with stealing all the money [or turning a blind eye] means that even old fashioned long neglected konstruktion work will inevitably be replaced with 3d printers doing the work [as is projected for Dubai 2030], should anyone here ever get around to building anything again on a mass scale especially given the [ironic] absence of easy credit… again.
The patient [the country’s economy] is in a coma; and the life support system has been mislaid… And may have been stolen, and sold for scrap. What I am writing here could also be true for a global system: that is presently stagnating in a world of negative interest rates, a level of global debt that makes 2008 look like a small overdraft: and an over-supply of fiat currencies that have rendered all previous economic theories temporarily [perhaps] obsolete.
It is time to be truthful…
Tell them the truth, I say. Mr. President.
Mr. President, tell them all: “If they are not in our team then they can’t be called unemployed… Because: they don’t exist. Only our team and our cadres exist. The numbers are wrong. So there.”
OK. That is facetious. [Incidentally one of only two regular words in English in which the five vowels follow each other in their classic order].
In the interests, I believe, in fairness: What kan he do that has not already been done, over the past quarter century. Talk, talk and more, endless, talk. If talking was paid by the word we would be wealthy.
What is done is done. There is no remedy from the past.
In the meantime the New President has been shown to be, perhaps, just another inept wannabe Oligarch… intent on a Rentier purpose.
Perhaps [again] I have been one of those few who have been right for the past… Twenty-five years… Or more korektly: my Shero: Korinth Starr [the elder] for whom I wrote the lines: was right.
Mr. Yang’s pitch is that the time to think Universal Basic Income [UBI] has arrived. What I’ve suggested as a backstory, as a writer of fiction… He sees that it must be fact… I write from the future so I have known for 25 years that UBI is the future.
And why shouldn’t it be?
He has taken a long promised idea that has been around a lot longer than me, that I’ve been floating as fiction [maybe fact] for twenty-five years… Basic Pay. “Ours by Right”.
Mr. Yang calls it “The Freedom Dividend”. I too think of it as a freedom dividend… So should President. Ramaphosa. In other words like me Mr. Yang believes that The future is with Basic Pay:
Could he be right? I wrote it originally, so I say welcome to the team Mr. Yang… You are my candidate for President of the New World. I also believe that seemingly alone so far I UNDERSTAND HOW IT MUST BE FINANCED [of course I write fiction… Still… Even fiction contains truths].
Now we, the People, need to claim that right for all of us while we still kan. And in thinking about this we need to think forward not the past… for everything we know about economics and work is based on a mass employment past… That time is over. The future for humans is Atomization… PostNeoCottage if you like. As a long term TaiJi practitioner I prefer to think of it as Yin moving into harmony with Yang [Pun not intended].
How to manage that on masse kan only be solved through the “Freedom Dividend”.
Loves ya all.
!NiK
** The Jonker Memorandum a podcast cyber serial about how the world ended and what happened afterwards, to be found on nicholasjakari.com