How we became the Eloi

A disturbing new economic allegory suggests that modern workers have become the “Eloi” of a technofeudal system designed to extract wealth, time and security from the many, writes David Higginbottom.

IN 1895, HG Wells It was published Time MachineA speculative tale about a distant future where humanity has split into two distinct species.

The surface was inhabited by Eloi: beautiful, delicate and completely passive creatures who spent their days eating fruit and playing in the sun. Beneath the ground lived the Morlocks: savage, subterranean tinkerers who maintained the machinery that kept the surface world running, tending with quiet efficiency what amounted to the largest farm in human history. The crop was humans.

For more than a century the story was read as a clear Victorian warning about class division. The idle rich are handed over to the Eloi; the working poor are turned over to the Morlocks. But if we update the allegory for the 21st century, a much more chilling interpretation emerges.

What if the Eloi weren’t idle rich people? So what if they are us; What if it’s a modern, exhausted, gig economy workforce? What if the Morlocks were not oppressed workers but elite masters of a system of economic exploitation?

Stolen promise of fun

economist in 1930 John Maynard Keynes He famously predicted that within a century technological progress and productivity gains would be so great that the main challenge for humanity would be figuring out what to do with our free time. He made a prediction 15 hour work week.

Keynes was half right. The productivity gains he predicted were achieved, and then some. We made the machines. We automated factories. We digitalized the world. But the 15-hour workweek never came. Instead, we are working longer, harder, and with less security than we have in decades.

From where? Because, starting from the 1970s, under the leadership of the USA, a profound change It happened in the global economy. For the first time since then Industrial revolutionproductivity and wages are separated. The economy continued to grow, workers continued to produce more per hour, but their wages remained stagnant. Almost all of the gains of this huge technological leap have been captured by capital.

Australia managed to delay this calculation. Prices and Incomes ReconciliationCentralized wage setting and a strong union movement kept the productivity-wage link largely intact throughout the 1980s. But when Australia dismantles these institutions (by deregulating the labor market, privatizing public assets, and Washington Consensus It joined the rest of the world on the same downward path throughout the 1990s and 2000s. When the separation occurred, it was rapid.

We became Eloi. But unlike Wells’s creatures, our passivity does not stem from empty luxury. It arises from frantic, endless busyness that produces nothing we actually have.

We subsist on a diet of digital distractions and synthetic comforts, consumed between bouts of invisible labor. We are people who generate vast amounts of data and attention, but the platforms we run belong to someone else. We didn’t choose this crazy existence; It was designed for us. We have lost the real free time that allows humanity to thrive—time to think, organize, and live—because the productivity that was supposed to purchase that time has been stolen.

Extraction architects

If we are the Eloi, who are the Morlocks?

They are not savage primitive people. They are the architects of extraction. They operate on pristine, temperature-controlled server farms, in the boardrooms of Big Four consulting firms, and in the opaque networks of global tax havens. These are economists’ Yanis Varoufakis He calls out to his masters.”technofeudalism”, platform owners who no longer rely on capitalist profit, but on “cloud rent”.

When you use Amazon, Googleor FacebookYou are working for free. You generate the data that trains their algorithms and targets their ads. As Varoufakis points out, we have returned to serf status, contributing to the wealth of a new ruling class with our unpaid digital labor alongside the paid labor we do to survive.

In Australia this extraction is as follows:Dating Game”, economists Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters. This $11.6 billion In annual fossil fuel subsidies. This Intercity toll roads that have forced taxpayers to pay corporate rent for decades. This is the privatization of public assets where profits are kept by a few and risks are socialized by the many.

The Morlocks do not produce value; they take it out. They are rent seekers who have perfected the art of siphoning off the wealth of both public and private citizens.

The machine works exactly as designed

When Reserve Bank of Australia If it raises interest rates to fight inflation caused by global supply shocks, it is not making a mistake. He operates a macroeconomic machine like the neoclassical model designed to protect the Morlocks at the expense of the Eloi.

Like Thomas Piketty he showed it too landmark empirical studythe rate of return on capital has historically exceeded the rate of economic growth (r > g). When central banks pump money into the financial system quantitative easingMoney flows into assets (home, stocks, corporate bonds). While the wealthy class reaps gains, wage earners have to deal with the resulting inflation.

And when this inflation hits, the neoclassical machine demands that the Eloi pay for it through higher interest rates and engineered unemployment.

We are paralyzed by a system that is said to be a hard science, a collective blindness to the slow erosion of our own economic security. Just as the Eloi ignore the disappearances of their peers in the night, we watch as the middle class is hollowed out, work becomes casual, and our wealth is siphoned upwards, and economists tell us that’s exactly how the machine works.

take back the future

The tragic fate of Wells’ Eloi was that they had gone beyond the point of no return. Their intelligence and desire to move had atrophied from disuse.

We’re not there yet. But the warning stands. A society that allows the gains from its collective productivity to be monopolized by a few is a society headed for destruction.

To change course, we need to reject the neoclassical machine that legitimizes this conclusion. We must look to alternative frameworks such as Functional Finance and Modern Monetary Theory, which recognize that a sovereign government has the capacity to finance full employment, build public infrastructure, and eliminate rent seekers.

As Dr Bronwyn Kelly argues in these pages, the tools to build a truly public good economy already exist. We must demand the free time that our productivity has already paid for.

The machines have arrived. Wealth was created. The only question remaining is whether we will let the Morlocks harvest it or will we eventually take it ourselves.

David Higginbottom is a member of the coordinating committee. Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN) and coordinator of the Make Peace Our Priority campaign (mpap.au).

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