Don’t believe me?
Go get your own coffee for once, from the nearest rainbow clad Starbucks you can find. Go at noon, and see how many SkipTheDishes drivers show from the time you get into the store to the time you leave with the caramel macchiato. I get it. There’s not whips and manual labor. Just whipped topping on top of the coffee and some beck and call servitude that makes sure the underpaid minority that is employed, brings the white women their fraps. Go to Wendy’s, next, and see the same lineup of servants. Headed dutifully to the store at the sound of a bell on their apps, to fetch Baconator's for the middleclass that know, sharing a slave service with one thousand people, beats owning a thousand slaves and all the needed infrastructure and resources to do so.
We still have slaves, they just have flexible hours and mobility. But make no mistake, as horrible as I can make the treatment of service workers sound, I'm still on the side of the fight that want’s them gainfully employed and providing for themselves and their families. Because I actually care for the poor. Because none of these service level employees can afford the service level replacements that will be bought instead of keeping them on the payroll. And that replacement will be a robot.
All a robot amazon driver needs to be is bite proof for the dogs and as accurate a driver as the flesh and bone one was with the GPS. It will never sue the company for getting bit by the dogs and can’t be sued for not registering that the obstruction on the road was a child, not a pothole. They’ll paint the robot car hi vis yellow, blame the victim, and fire the immigrant either way because all that car has to do is be cheaper than one year of the wage slaves wages. At which point the cost line goes down on the graph and the shareholders will all but demand, or be presumed to demand, the higher cost human resource to be demoted to amazon customer, from employee.
“Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?”
”For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.”
Luke 10:36, John 12:8 KJV
If everything goes according to the plans we aren’t a part of, or have influence over in our secularized culture, we are about to have a bunch of suddenly poor people who look as foreign as the Samaritan did to the Jew. People promised a new life and new opportunities here in Canada, only to receive a new form of poverty at the hands of the newest machines.
There’s a reason we got an easy to read book about how to treat slaves, in Philemon, and a reason why most of the evangelical world was scared of the implications of what a book about the treatment of slaves could mean. We adeptly pivoted away from the chattel slavery comparisons of the deep American south and forgot that one of the unfortunate but predictable realities for the poor, is to become a slave. And that how we treat the poor and slave might coincide with the grace of Christ and his expectation of our behaviour. Because If Jesus meant what he said about the poor, it would necessarily mean that modern slaves would line up beside the modern poor as well.
And in all this complication and concern for the plight of the poor and how to properly sell perfume as a church, we are adequately kept busy enough to not notice the modern slave class’s impending doom. And briefly, We find ourselves as busy as Martha, and as calloused as the Jew and the Levite all the same. Because these poor slaves are Hindu’s who are exponentially more different to us Christians as the Samaritan was to the Jew and Levite. Or they’re Muslims and oppositionally different to us and the Jews and Levites. What we find ourselves in then is a well orchestrated chaos. That mixes the abuses of tech against the poor, with and against the benevolence and mercy of the faithful. So that most courses of action that we could take, betray a moral value we would otherwise not compromise on. You could free these slaves by adopting the robot, but it does make them poor. You could employ the poor by forbidding the robots to work, but it essentially enslaves them.
This is what sin and brokenness look like. And not dealing with these issues as if they were sin and brokenness is what causes the angst you currently feel. The tech titans need to stop what their doing and repent. Sacrificing all the market share they could have made by the commodification of laziness, to a a God who can forgive sins. Their workers, also need to repent and find Jesus as a God who knows what it’s like to be born into poverty and to live in heavenly wealth and power. And the Christians stuck in the middle need to repent of where they got stuck in the middle, even if they didn’t get completely stuck. And all of them need to find themselves in church the next Sunday. The rich should be giving to those in need from the poor (1 Tim 6:17-19) and the poor should be serving as if their money was worth more than it actually ever could be (Mark 12:41-44.) And the Unbeliever needs to become a believer, and we all need to be looking forward to a day where there is no deliveries, no KPI’s, and no payroll, and no slaves but unto Christ ( Romans 6:15-23.)
That last verse came from a letter sent to a slave owning empire on the tell tale signs of decline all the same. They had less robots, and less apps on their phones. But they still had the poor, the way we have the poor. Almost as if Jesus knew how that works.
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9 KJV
No comments:
Post a Comment