Gongol.com Archives: February 2021
February 23, 2021
The technological evolution of work
One stable fact about change: The jobs themselves will change, but the problem sets we uncover are extremely good at filling the voids and putting people to work doing new things.
(Video) The Los Angeles Times does a pretty good job of covering the essential Daft Punk tracks you ought to know, but it skips their underappreciated seminal track: "Digital Love", which triggers the mental picture of an 80s sitcom.
A worthy debate: Who's the central cast on TV?
Noah Smith argues that "media in the 80s and 90s tended to focus a whole lot on working-class people", while RJ Lehmann counters with a long list of shows about rich people. Many of the best-remembered sitcoms of the 1980s were explicitly about what we'd now call creative-class households -- "The Cosby Show", "Too Close for Comfort", "Growing Pains", "Family Ties", and even "Benson". That's what made "Roseanne" and "Married With Children" so unusual: They explicitly rejected the kinds of bourgeoise norms so often seen elsewhere, even when a show wasn't notionally about the professional class. The 1970s may have been more fertile ground for that "working-class" aesthetic. One can even find evidence of a sort of transitional phase in the very late 1970s, when shows like "CHiPs" and "Emergency!" centered on high-status working-class occupations.
