Player Piano (1952)
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
341 pages
I first heard about Kurt Vonnegut's novel
Player Piano well over a decade ago and added it to my (already then too long and now far too long) list of books to read. More recently, repeatedly finding it referenced in articles exploring the potential implications of AI on the future of work, I decided it was high time to dive in. (Shout-out to
Third Mind Books, which had it on the shelf!) I was surprised to find so much more to it than the association with AI.
Published in 1952, Vonnegut sets the story several decades into America's future. He imagines a third world war has occurred, during which America embraces a shift to a fully planned, highly automated economy to ensure smooth and consistent production of armaments. These processes and systems prove so effective in winning the war that they form the basis for the post-war economy, with engineers and managers becoming an elite class, broadly empowered by enfeebled politicians to run the country.
The novel opens a generation later, as further expansion of automation has dramatically increased productivity, obviating the need for most manufacturing workers, while comprehensive planning has limited the variety of products, dramatically reducing the number of workers needed for design and development. This has created a permanent underclass; the government requires them to work either on government organized infrastructure activities not able to be automated, or as part of the military, and covers all their needs directly, including food, housing and other products, plus a nominal few dollars per month for entertainment. The result is a kind of planned capitalism, in which
The government does not own the machines. They simply tax that part of industry’s income that once went into labor, and redistribute it. Industry is privately owned and managed, and coordinated – to prevent the waste of competition – by a committee of leaders from private industry, not politicians. (21)
The story centers on Dr. Paul Proteus, a plant manager for a major factory-works in the country. Though the son of one of the originators of the processes and systems that helped win the war and then completely reshape the American economic and social structure, Proteus becomes disenchanted with the depth and breadth of its implications, as large numbers of people have lost the meaning in their lives that work had provided.
For generations they've been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men – and boom! it's all yanked out from under them. They can't participate, can't be useful anymore. Their whole culture has been shot to hell. (90)
With continued increases in productivity further exacerbating the situation, he struggles with the age-old question of how to alter a deeply engrained system that, while ultimately damaging to social cohesion and cultural welfare, provides clear material benefit compared to what had come before.
On the one hand, the novel's characterization of the potential negative consequences of automation has perhaps even more relevance today, with the increasing capability of AI. Although Vonnegut emphasizes the effects of manufacturing automation in the story, he does also point at increasing computing power beginning to come for the jobs of ever higher-level managers and engineers. The future-of-work questions Vonnegut raises will clearly resonate for many present-day readers.
Other aspects of the story will, however, seem strange or, at best quaint, particularly for readers in the US. Yet they provide a fascinating look back at how dramatically the breadth of acceptable discussion in the US regarding appropriate social and economic systems has changed over the past seven or eight decades,
As one example: in a play put on for a select group of elite managers and engineers at an annual, self-congratulatory celebration of the success of their economic system, one of the actors plays “the sky manager,” a kind of rarefied sage. Presiding over a scrap heap of ideas, represented as shooting stars, he recalls how these ideas were once
proud and new [before] destroying themselves in a brilliant instant, [including] Labor Unionism … Rugged Individualism, Socialism, Free Enterprise, Communism, Fascism. (212)
In the present-day US, the idea that “Rugged Individualism” and “Free Enterprise” could ever be considered discredited and, in fact, as disreputable as “Socialism … Communism, [and] Fascism,” seems unthinkable – well outside the current Overton window. In the 1930s and 40's, however, the US had moved, in the wake of the Great Depression, toward a more planned economy, hoping to avoid the repeated economic crises of capitalism; and this shift only intensified during World War II to meet the needs of a wartime economy. So, at the point Vonnegut wrote the story, the continued transition to a much more highly controlled economic system certainly seemed possible.
In reality, however, the viewpoint Vonnegut refers to in the quote above – that people have been “built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness” – won the day, especially in the US. Decades of propaganda funded by business leaders created, in the years after Vonnegut’s novel appeared, a profound and dogmatic reverence for free market fundamentalism, as historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway describe in their thorough and engaging history
The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (my review linked to at right). As a result, Americans have become so deeply indoctrinated into a belief in free market capitalism as a natural and inevitable historical outcome that it now seems almost surreal that Vonnegut could have even imagined the U.S. developing an economy with such an expansive level of planning.
A second “shocker” from the point of view of the present-day is Vonnegut's representation of the lifestyles of the elite in the American future he imagines. The managers and engineers that lead society and coordinate the economy live better to be sure, in fancier houses and, effectively, gated communities apart from the masses who live off the state. But these elite are not focused first and foremost on their wealth; instead, they seem deeply imbued with a belief in the importance of the functioning of the overall system. Rather than begrudging the cost of providing the material benefits afforded to the masses, they, in fact, revel in their success at doing so through their work.
In our present-day world, with a
greed is good ethos widespread among the wealthy, many of whom seem monomaniacally fixated on keeping for themselves as much of their money as they can, Vonnegut's world of an elite willing to share the wealth seems like a fairy tale. Yet, Vonnegut wrote this story during
a more progressive period in the US, with the highest marginal tax rates over 80% and a broadly shared (if not with minorities) post-war boom. By the 1980’s, however, a belief among the elite that they
deserve to keep all or most of their wealth took hold, a view philosopher Michael J. Sandel describes and cautions against in his thought-provoking book
The Tyranny of Merit (my review linked to at right):
in market-driven societies, interpreting material success as a sign of moral desert is a persisting temptation [that] we need repeatedly to resist. (Sandel)
Related to this focus on holding onto wealth at a personal level, is its translation into political action. Vonnegut imagines a future in which elites fully support an economic-political system that provides sufficient material goods to the masses – business leaders, in fact, run that system:
the nation's … National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director, a position approached in importance only by the presidency of the United States. (2)
Again, a seeming fantasy in a present-day world in which the elite tend to leverage their wealth into political power in order to further benefit themselves at the expense of the majority, while ignoring the financial advantages they and their businesses have accrued from government spending in such areas as physical and educational infrastructure.
All that said, Vonnegut effectively captures the very real threat of increasing automation (and today AI) taking people's jobs, and the concern about what people will do in the future to find meaning. Through his story, he demonstrates that simply compensating people with material goods (or, more directly, money), while it may completely alleviate poverty, will not be sufficient; as Sandel points out in his essay mentioned above, it “will do little to address the anger and resentment that [arise from] loss of recognition and esteem [more than] diminishing purchasing power.” (Sandel)
Precisely this anger and resentment lie at the heart of Vonnegut's story, as the former workers – that is, the vast majority of the US population – have their material needs met, yet feel lost without work and “worry about what there is for their sons to live for.” (96) This concern provides the crux of the plot, as Proteus begins to recognize this problem with the economic system that's been put in place and which he is at the very heart of, leading him to become disillusioned with his part in it.
One can argue that for displaced workers, having their material needs satisfied opens possibilities for pursuing creative activities that interest them. But even taking such a shift as possible, it would require a dramatic change in our socio-economic education, away from work as providing social meaning to emphasizing creative pursuits. And for the first generation of people left without work, even if they are economically secure, the social indoctrination that has them equating productive economic work with a sense of purpose and meaning will be almost impossible to set aside, tending to lead them instead to reactionary outbursts, as witnessed in Vonnegut's story, in which one character notes:
Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it's sure to be a bloody business. (92)
Precisely this reaction to such conditions was predicted by Eric Hoffer, who wrote in The True Believer (my review linked to at right)
The present-day working man in the Western world feels unemployment as a degradation. He sees himself disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things, and is willing to listen to those who call for a new deal. (Hoffer)
Hoffer’s book came out just a year before
Player Piano, and one can imagine Vonnegut having perhaps been influenced by it. The chaotic run up to and evolution of the mass movement that develops in the story displays several of the characteristics Hoffer identifies: “the frustrated predominant among the early adherents;” they are “intensely discontented yet not destitute;” they subsume into the movement “the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence”;” and, crucially, they are “wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking” and have “a readiness to attempt the impossible.” All of this is reflected in both the rapid acceleration of the movement, as well as the way in which it quickly comes to overshoot the goals of its leaders, who lose control of its direction, coming to realize that their supporters demonstrate Hoffer’s thesis that one cannot “appeal to [a fanatic’s] reason or moral sense.”
Put all this together and Vonnegut's novel
Player Piano provides readers a fascinating look into not only the potential impacts of increasing AI, but also the dramatic cultural, social and economic shifts that have occurred in the US over the past 75 years. Come to the book for the former, in this present moment of angst about AI's implications and the uncertainties and the inability to predict what will come next; but explore the latter, which provides perhaps the more crucial insight: the present-day, dogmatic acceptance of free market fundamentalism and its
Winners Take All focus (to borrow Anand Giridharadas’ title, my review of his book linked to at right) was not an inevitable development, but rather the consequence of choices of a few wealthy elite able to convince the larger population to perceive their preferred economic framework as inevitable, and so to accept as unavoidable the damaging consequences for society.
Whether we acknowledge the damage resulting from the unquestioning belief of the elite managers and engineers in Vonnegut’s story regarding their system of planned capitalism, or that due to the equally unquestioning belief of our current elite in their system of unregulated, free market capitalism, we need to remember that these systems are choices, not inevitable, natural outcomes. And, as such, they can be remade to function more beneficially for a larger number of people. Pray that we discover and implement the appropriate changes before the descent into revolution, rather than after.
Other notes and information:
For a fascinating account of how contingent the development of our present-day capitalist system over the past millennium has been on human choice (in particular, the self-interested choices of a wealthy and so powerful rentier class, and the politicians across the spectrum who actively support them) see the excellent work of Sven Beckert,
Capitalism: A Global History, my review linked to at right.
Global capitalism was neither a natural state of things nor a straightforward undertaking – the restructuring of ever more parts of the world and of social life along a capitalist logic was, in fact, exceedingly difficult and took centuries to unfold. It took even longer to reach a state in which this peculiar way of organizing economic life seemed “natural” (Beckert)
Vonnegut seems to have anticipated by nearly a century the current collegiate NIL system. At one point in the story, the Cornell University head football coach worries about staying on-top:
Yale had floated a bond to buy the whole Text A&M backfield, and Penn had bought Breslaw from Wisconsin.” Later, preparing a letter to the alumni regarding the recent lack of funding from the administration, he considers opening with “Sportsmen … IS THE FOOTBALL BUSINESS AT CORNELL GOING TO BE RUN ON A BUSINESS-LIKE BASIS, OR IS THE BIG RED GOING TO BE BLED WHITE. … IN THE PAST FIVE YEARS, NOT ONE CENT HAS BEEN REINVESTED IN THE BUSINESS, NOT ONE CENT LAID ASIDE FOR DEPRECIATION [of the existing players as they age]. (272-3, capitalization from the original)
In yet another example of Vonnegut being far ahead of events, the government addressed the economic dislocation caused by automation through an approach that some are currently proposing be used with AI: tax AI use by businesses, in order to amass the funds needed to support those who lose their jobs; as Vonnegut writes in the story:
The government does not own the machines. They simply tax that part of industry’s income that once went into labor, and redistribute it. (21)
One could imagine this line from Vonnegut’s story – again written some 7 decades ago – as being replicated in some form in a future work, in the mid-21st century, looking back to our present day.
He … imagined with horror what the country must have been like when, as today, any damn fool little American boy might grow up to be President…! (120)
For even more examples of Vonnegut’s perceptive, almost predictive take on the future,
see other quotes from this book here.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
