So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 28)
Happy Monday night/Tuesday morning (depending on what time it is when you read this email). At the start of the work week, what better time to settle in with a paragraph about the vague unease of the American workplace?
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Back in 1996, I was apartment-hunting with another recent West Coast emigre, and she was holding forth on the uselessness of HTML: "Web coding is to the 1990s what stenography was to the 1950s," she said. I thought this over, noticed the roomful of engineers doing their best to automate the tedious process of bracketing every <i> and closing every </b>, and set about diversifying my skill set in a hurry.
Nearly twenty years on, designer Dan Saffer assesses the survey of the commercial design landscape and comes to the same conclusion. Thanks to computer-aided design and rendering, a lot of the iterative work in design is now effortlessly automated. His advice for anyone who wants to continue working: You future-proof yourself by ensuring that the kind of work you do cannot be easily replicated by an algorithm. This means cultivating the ability to offer the kind of analysis and query-framing that computers can't do on their own yet.
Meanwhile, the Economist notes that this iteration of a technological revolution "is disrupting and dividing the world of work on a scale not seen for more than a century. Vast wealth is being created without many workers; and for all but an elite few, work no longer guarantees a rising income."
So what? The job market shifts of the last recession -- in which clerical and administrative jobs were permanently eliminated -- are the new normal. Expect fields like radiology, meteorology, and education to follow suit as skill sets that used to be taught to people are captured and cheaply reproduced via technology.
Who cares? Things like clerical and administrative jobs used to be an avenue by which bright but unskilled workers gained entry into a new workplace or industry, then began a climb up the ladder. KeyCorp president and CEO Beth Mooney got her start that way, then crafted a career path that led to her managing a bank with $90 million in assets.
When technology eliminates jobs that offer entry into white-collar work, it eliminates opportunities for socioeconomic mobility. To be fair, technological revolutions also introduce new opportunities for economic mobility -- the IT pro who was a high-school dropout with a knack for network troubleshooting -- but when the Economist is getting antsy about the concentration of wealth and paucity of meaningful and lucrative work, it's time to pay attention to vulnerabilities in the job market. And to consider whether you want to bank on a new artisan economy where things like human interaction are business assets.
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Another widening gap, according to CityLab: renters versus home-owners. Unsurprisingly, most homeowners said they feel more financially secure that renters. That former Fed chair Ben Bernanke can't get a refi shows how conservative the lending market has become in some mortgage classes. The actual, bigger picture comes down to this: Millennials are hosed because they usually have more debt and smaller net worth than previous cohorts, which mean they're not exactly a loan officer's dream client.
So what? The housing gap is one indication that Millennials' "delay into adulthood" (as some social scientists term it) will have short and medium-term repercussions: People who don't buy houses don't buy stuff, and buying stuff is what makes the American economy go. But for the long-term repercussions ...
Who cares? Nearly 84% of U.S. Millennials want to own a home, a stat that likely causes sociologist Katherine Newman some agita, “because [home ownership] going to be out of reach for so many of them.” This so-called "Millennial Wealth Gap" will have long-term implications beyond rent vs. own: This may be the first generation that will have a substantial percentage of its members left vulnerable to rising rents and eviction in their declining years -- and few will have the traditional options of using their house as a way to amass wealth or finance their future.
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After those downer summaries, let's turn to some pop culture talk. The fall TV season has been slowly unrolling and I have to tell you, Black-ish is worth watching for Lawrence Fishburne alone. Just as I never suspected Andre Braugher was a god of comedy until I saw him on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, so did I not realize Fishburne is incredibly funny.
Also, I'm so sorry but I was unable to make it through the pilots for A to Z or Manhattan Love Story.
I made it through Selfie, but only because my horror and/or my love for John Cho kept me rooted to the spot: If you're going to remake My Fair Lady as a sitcom, the only way it doesn't come off like a misogynist's fevered fantasy is if you include the sharp commentary on classism and Eliza's inherent dignity in the face of a society that refuses to recognize her personhood on the basis of gender or class. Selfie manages none of this and instead punishes its protagonist for actually believing in America's beauty-industry complex. I'm giving it two more episodes to see if the show's seething contempt for women abates in the next few episodes, but otherwise, UGH.
As for Gotham? I have my opinions, but I'm holding them in reserve until The Flash debuts and Arrow returns, and then I'll assess the state of the DCU on TV in one go.
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Have you seen any new shows you'd like to suggest? Any you're hoping die quickly? Tell me via email or Twitter. Always let me know what you think about So What, Who Cares? If you really like it, tell a friend to subscribe.