Technology and Our Core Values

[Crazy Eddie]

The Jetsons:
Father - working man in a factory, under an annoying boss.
Mother - housewife.
Two kids.
They are NOT geniuses, rich, etc.

Not rich? A single-family household with a car and two children subsisting on a SINGLE parent's income (a father in a middle management position at that)? Just their income status makes the difference between the Jetsons and around 80% of American families right now; no wonder they live in a condo on the top of a giant pole.

By the standards of their society, they were a middle class "working " family.

I'm not so sure. And maybe this is just the cynical part of me talking, but I half expected that somewhere beneath all the floating buildings the "normal" cities of past centuries were still there, inhabited by a peasant class of half-assed wage slaves who did all of Spacely's hazardous manual labor.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Newtype Alpha,

What's wrong with running call centers, complaint hotlines, helping people buy the right kind of stereo system or greeting customers at WalMart?

Why is that demeaning?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Newtype Alpha,

What's wrong with running call centers, complaint hotlines, helping people buy the right kind of stereo system or greeting customers at WalMart?

Why is that demeaning?

Because for the most part, the work is stressful and the pay sucks.

On the other hand ANY job is pretty respectable if you get paid $20 an hour to do it.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Newtype Alpha,

So you're saying it's demeaning because they don't get payed enough for the task, not the task?

 

[scotpens]

. . . I'm not so sure. And maybe this is just the cynical part of me talking, but I half expected that somewhere beneath all the floating buildings the “normal” cities of past centuries were still there, inhabited by a peasant class of half-assed wage slaves who did all of Spacely's hazardous manual labor.

Sounds as if you've seen Metropolis a few too many times!

And yes, by mid-1960s standards, the Jetsons were supposed to be a cartoon 21st-century version of a typical middle-class American family. Not wealthy by any means.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Newtype Alpha,

So you're saying it's demeaning because they don't get payed enough for the task, not the task?

I'm saying its demeaning because the extremely low level of pay reflects the perception--mostly, by prospective employees--that the people who hold these sorts of positions are people of extremely low value who don't deserve decent compensation.

Put that another way: a new employee who gets his own office and a secretary on his first day of work feels like he has been hired into a position of relative importance. Five floors down, the security guard who doesn't even get a uniform until he's been working there for two weeks develops the impression that he's at the bottom of the pecking order. They're both probably right.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

. . . I'm not so sure. And maybe this is just the cynical part of me talking, but I half expected that somewhere beneath all the floating buildings the “normal” cities of past centuries were still there, inhabited by a peasant class of half-assed wage slaves who did all of Spacely's hazardous manual labor.

Sounds as if you've seen Metropolis a few too many times!

Never seen it. Actually, I had in mind what happened at Cabrini Green five years ago: developers built new highrise apartments for luxury condos literally on top of the skeletons of decrepit housing projects.

And yes, by mid-1960s standards, the Jetsons were supposed to be a cartoon 21st-century version of a typical middle-class American family. Not wealthy by any means.

I guess that kind of sucks for us, then, since middle class by 1960s standards would be relatively wealthy by ours.