Technological unemployment: Difference between revisions

The British invented all important sports. Even downhill skiing. (Americans: your “important sports” are all close derivatives of things the British invented years before: rounders, netball and rugby).  But this article is not about imperial bragging rights. There is a reason that the British invented all sports, and that is because the British invented the industrial revolution, and that changed the working dynamic for the ordinary stiff forever. It was humankind’s first brush with technological unemployment. Suddenly manual labour was not subsistence work. It had a schedule. Machines could do the grunt work. Humans could operate the machines, in shifts, and the great steampunk economy could schedule people’s labour and ''give them time off'': official “leisure time” beyond essential periods of rest, recovery, nutrition, washing and so on — free time to not think about the factory, and do whatever you please.  

And humans like to play games, don’t they.

Figuring out what to do with your free time is a problem everyone wants to have. Being full of industrial workers suddenly having this happy problem, we should not be surprised that the British came up with do much organised sport at about the same time as the industrial revolution was presenting the problem.

 

And there’s the rub: activities that emerged to occupy our extra time have value — obviously, or we would not do them — and that value will eventually generate its own industry. What was leisure becomes ''work''. And work evolves around it: agents, event organisers, broadcasters, marketing, equipment manufacturers — suddenly that leisurely bash around at the links on a Sunday requires two and a half grand of Callaway clubs, the same in polo shirts and silly trousers, 10 grand membership, and you need to go to work just to afford the clobber to play an occasional round.