I thought having deep skills in electronic design, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and software/computer engineering would safeguard my livelihood. Coupled with UX/UI design skills and product management skills, I thought my career would be bulletproof. Nope. It isn’t so.
Luckily, I thought innocently, having more strings to my bow would confer a modicum of stability and safety. If STEM skills weren’t enough, then perhaps trying to be a Renaissance man would provide a cloak of invincibility. I naively thought songwriting, music production skills, audio engineering and multi instrumentalist skills would protect me from being deemed surplus to humanity’s requirements. Nope. Wrong again.
Well, if all of that wasn’t enough, perhaps being good with words and images would allow me to carve out a protected niche in life. I thought I could earn at least a modest living from painting, drawing, designing and writing. No way. You’ve got to be kidding me.
Instead, everything in the economies I’ve lived and worked in has been asset-stripped, globalised, and financialised. In short, it has been stripped bare, to the very bone, to the point where nothing can function effectively any longer. Supply chains have been shattered and denuded. Co-dependent industrial ecosystems, supporting key industries, have withered and died. Essential services have been ‘profitised’. Gatekeepers have taken all the revenue. The producers, at the source of it all, don’t make enough to subsist.
We’ve been greeded to death, on purpose, by design, so that a self-appointed aristocracy can hoard wealth, beyond the reach of taxation, and live in outrageous opulence.
These days, investors expect corporate debts to be turned into dividends. Nobody builds capability or capacity for the long term. Nobody invests deeply in research and development. Nobody even invests in artist development. Returns must be harvested in ever increasing quantities, in the short term.
Nothing protects you from this any more.
You’re on your own.
I’m nothing if not a first class researcher and developer and a competent artist, in several different disciplines, to boot. There is no opportunity for those.
As a young man, I had hoped there was a place, somewhere on Earth, that would continue to value my best contributions. Sadly, I don’t think there is. Rather, asserting those skills and my experience has been a vicious battle, against intransigent people, for diminishing returns.
Being a rentier, or gambling on financial speculation, would have been far more lucrative, but required skills, values and cunning that I just don’t have. I still value integrity, ethics, and fair dealing. I like justice and equality. I don’t believe in supremacy or exploitation. I’m not cut out for a life in financial services or fintech.
Am I bitter about this? Damn right I am! Who wouldn’t be and why shouldn’t I be?
I’m sure everybody whose careers were blighted and undervalued by the manic political desire, above all else, to support the financial “industry“ (which produces nothing, but creams off a lot), is rightly entitled to feel embittered too. We lived in precarity, flirting with poverty, simply because our contributions to society were deemed as something less than the contributions of rent-seekers, landlords, gamblers, industry destroyers, swindlers and speculators.
The thing is this: We know the value of the contributions we made. We were simply never justly remunerated for them. We were immiserated by ideology, and that ideology has led the world to the brink of ruin.
Now that the world economy sits on the precipice of collapse, has there been a Damascene conversion, with political parties and leaders finally seeing the light and realising they must invest in people and knowledge to have a hope of survival, let alone a good life? Has there heck! They all talk about growth, without the vaguest clue about how to achieve it.
Government tax cuts don’t improve the living conditions of the world. Government investment in training, research and development does, so that we have the skills to solve the pressing problems and provide for ourselves in ways that don’t kill us all. There’s so much we still need to know just to avert our own extinction.
We could have been doing that for forty years, instead of inflating the casinos of the great financial capitals of the world. People were saying we should have invested in developing people the whole time. We knew neoliberalism would get us nowhere. For all those decades, there were enough skills to turn some utterly terrible situations, the result of cavalier industrialisation and blind capitalist zealotry, around completely, by now.
But we didn’t.
And many people’s careers and livelihoods were casualties.
And here we are.