to show off? when everyone can have a personal secretary in his/her pocket, the ability to have ones own living person will be a sign of money and similar...

Thinking about it, I just think of wage slave as what some 'rebel' from the 70s would call someone.

Like 'the man'

and 'Pigs!'

It's not like the cops really have any relationship with swine, its just that people don't like them.

I love this Cicero quote about wage slaves though



I can only assume he thinks that the only real people ruthlessly exploit actual slaves?

Well all that data doesn't enter itself! And there's a growing real life population of corporate wageslave programmers who handle small bits of larger projects without even knowing the end result.

Computers are becoming ridiculously easy to teach with each passing year and generation. The burger flippers of today will be the company database builders of tomorrow. I'm a print artist by training and even I can build a simple, crappy Access-based database.

not all that far from the truth if you ask me *g*

Been to Call Centres, I see.

i work in one, actually . . but i do second level tech support for 3 mayor ISP's and one bigger computer magazine in germany

My condolences.

nah, had worse jobs . . i don't get all that much money, but at least i get the working time i want . . i can actually plan my own shifts more or less *g*
the customers are dumb as bricks, but it's nice helping people . . and it's as close as i will probably get to my dream job too <.< . .

Heard that.

I can't do it any longer. Too many bad experiences and abuses.

I blame the USA, New York in particular.

poor you o.O
generally i am the one dishing out the abuse . . officially we'e only allowed to treat our customers with the same level of respect as they pay us . . official wording . . inofficial there's an addendum:"no respect from customer, no respect from us"

Yeah, we had to smile and grin through the whole thing, no matter the stupidity or rudeness.

It was... Bad. Let's leave it at that.

Which is why, due to Public Protection Laws, only SINless in 2070 are working Call Centres now. Because you can't be abusing actual citizens of a country that badly. (Hey, look, I brought us back on topic! YAY ME!)

you go can *g*

Well, that's one way money gets into the barrens.

Yeah, but the background count in those areas are NASTY!

Everyone who is saying "why do we have low end workers when drones/skillwires/software etc. can do better" is missing the point entirely.

It's not that we have all these jobs that need doing, and we're trying to find ways to fill them. That's backwards thinking. Even in today's economy, Many jobs are filler, created for the purpose of having jobs. The way it works is we have all these people, we need to find something for them to do.

An out of work person, isn't putting anything into the system. But that doesn't mean they are idle. They do things outside the system to exist, they build their own things without buying, they create outside economies and societies. That's energy going into things that aren't the corp, and may one day challenge the corp. Idle hands are the devil's tools, where in this case the devil is free systems. Only people with spare time contemplate alternatives.

So the corps create jobs to keep people busy. These people already exist, they must be controlled. The only way to do that is to make compliance a prereq for survival. So even though a job could be done easier and cheaper by a drone, the company still employs a person to do it so that person is dependant on them. Otherwise they might go start up a competitor.

The real question isn't why they don't put more people out of work, it's why they allow anyone to be unemployed at all. They need a small amount of people outside the system for the system to work. Firstly, they need something to threaten the difficult with. The barrens are allowed to exist because the wage-slaves are afraid of being thrown out there. But it is kept small enough and itself dependant so that it doesn't get out of control. What, you didn't think those gangers made all their own guns, did you? The barrens is a ruthlessly created theater of "look what happens without the corps in charge", a strawman anarchy created to prevent real freedom. The other reason is that the corps have uses for people outside the system. Yes, runners come to mind, but also as test subjects for things they can't do to their own people because of the bad PR.

That's one of the saddest thing about the corp system in SR. The technology to give everyone an upper class lifestyle, moving all the boring, menial and dangerous jobs to drones and programs, exists. Its just that, those with the choice deliberatly choose not to do that, to instead keep all the production for themselves while exploiting everyone else. Because you are only as rich as your neighbor is poor.

There are some jobs that are so inherently dangerous or taxing that it is simply cheaper to use up and throw away a metahuman laborer than it is to maintain a drone. Even with the illusion of health insurance and death benefits, there comes a point where the death of a human being is economically preferable to the destruction of a drone. And with unskilled labor, such as crop-picking and assembly-line work, it is possible to cut down wages to the point that it is actually cheaper to hire people than it is to automate. This is why so many Californian crops get picked by low-paid Mexicans instead of by machines designed to do that job and clothing companies prefer third-world children to robots.

Especially when you NEED hand-picking in certain circumstances.

Magic materials, anyone?

That isn't true in shadowrun. The cost of automation has dropped so far compared to wages that automation is significantly cheaper than today, even if your workforce is squatting in condemned apartments.

The big thing is that, in today's world, the average American worker is a single paycheck from being homeless.

For SHadowrun, you have to amp it up a bit further, with soul-crushing debt and a desperate need to stay afloat that they endure 70+ hour workweeks for 40 hours pay. Being jobless is even *more* frigtening, and teh media keeps hyping up how bad teh world out there is, if you're jobless, to keep you on the rat race treadmill.

Has a *huge* effect on CorpKids, natch, who're raised to never doubt "The Corp is mother, the corp is father" and can't even imagine life outside the cozy confines of teh walled community.

Drones still costs thousands of nuyen each, some hundreds of thousands, and good pilot software also costs thousands. If you pay some kid in Bumfuck, South America the absurdly large sum of half a nuyen per day to perform unskilled labor for 12-hours a day, a two-thousand-nuyen drone would have to last more than six years to just break even, and that doesn't even factor in maintenance and fuel costs. If your relatively high-paid Bumfuckian worker gets hurt on the job you just send him home and hire someone else, no cost to you. If your drone gets damaged on the job you need to fix it and if you can't fix it you need to expend more capitol buying another.

not me. I could lose my job and still live 1 or 2 years without having to find a new one. Of course, I'd also have to drop out of school

Didn't south america end up in some sort of eco disaster/enviromentalist takeover and is now functionally completely unusable? It's the same as people not outsourcing to somalia today.

That's a PA, and most people don't have them now...
...So having one is already a sign of wealth/power.

In most countries, you're already only a few paycheques from being homeless...
...And there are already stories of people being made homeless very quickly when they lose their job - earn 100k per year, live at that level [as you would], lose the job [for any reason] and be of a certain age or with certain skills and you'll be in big trouble before you can get another similar job [though job insurance may provide enough for a while].


SR is just our world, moved on a few decades [with wishful thinking, and ignoring things that don't fit into the worldview]

Hmmm...
...Unfortunately, that doesn't always work in the realworld.

Automation is almost always cheaper, and more productive for some tasks - for legal companies

For companies using illegal workers, price is never a factor, since they pay what they like and the worker has little choice apart from work or leave...
...And since many of the relevant workers are often low qualification, no language, in debt already, illegal and possibly immigrant, they don't feel as if they have a choice.

Anyone working for a legal company has protection, minimum wages, etc - though whether they can tell anyone about their situation and get help/compensation is another matter.

The issue with automation, however, is that quite often it will damage crops and reduce the harvest available.

A good example of this is Blueberries, where machines will damage the bushes, reducing future crops. The Corps take a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG view of things again, rather than the short-term view that they do today.

My view of the Shadowrun world is that if you basically take what is going on today, the fact that jobs are constantly outsourced to "3rd world countries" and the creation of people relying on the government for aid. Span that out and have unemployment rise dramatically, and then remove the governments ability to help people. In fact have people probably lose faith the moment they do something like wall off a section of L.A., because it is getting too lawless. When people no longer have faith in their government, and welfare is deader then dead who do people turn to for help? Many of the bigger corporations are basically their own soveren nation and they all want to stay that way. I think the only reason why most people have jobs is to stuff seats, and allow consumerism to run its course. The way I read into the world is that the corporate court holds the most sway in the world, if and when the corporations can agree that a situation needs to be "handled."

I mean there have been discussions about how SR3 is just a lot grittier then SR4, and in some way I agree. It seems to me that SR3 was when there were still tons of things going down in the world. The SR4 world seems like things have calmed down a little, and corporations quickly learned from their mistakes so they can tighten their control over the world.

I still think this old saying still holds true in this setting "Any society is only three meals away from revolution." People are stuffed into that job, because although it would be cheaper to use a drone, only using drones and agents would break the fragile gears of consumerism with a very large hammer. Wage slaves are create so that people can be completely dependent on the system. This allows the people in power to not only stay in power, but at the same time have these people who are ensnared by the system will defend it as it has become a way of life for many people.

Yes they have a crap job, and they are probably reminded on a constant basis that the company could find numerous ways to "cut costs" by firing the entire staff and be replaced by drones and r4 agents. Yet they know that the company cares about him/her, because they have decided to be kind for now to the lowly worker and allow them to keep their job... so long as he/she is willing to do whatever they ask of him/her. I'm sure the company also politely and gently reminds Mr. or Miss. Wage slave of that every five minutes. The corporation is your friend, and they care about the little guy, since governments are no longer able to help the downtrodden.... oh and by the way all your vacation days, sick days, and holidays are cut. Also we would really APPRECIATE it if you could come in on the weekends and do a little unpaid work as the company is going through some tough times, and unless we can all pull together as a team the company just might need to cut costs. We care. We really really want you to keep your job, but if you can't be a team player well then we would really hate to have to replace you.

So it's either obey and do whatever the corp asks of you, or get rammed by Bubba the love troll (abstractly speaking of course.)

'Tis true, but technology for picking improves all the time. There might come a time when a practicable drone-brain blueberry picker can strip a field in a day without crushing a leaf. Cybertech, after all, can produce systems that can be controlled precisely enough to pick blueberries; a more specialised "hand" using similar, single use tech might be very cheap. Mated to off-the-shelf image recognition systems and a multi-legged arthroform walker designed to tippy-toe between the rows, you're looking at potential efficiency far in excess of a human: no loss of attention due to fatigue and boredom; able to work 23/7 (with an hour's downtime for maintenance, daily).

Which highlights a source of error in the calculation of relative worth of the fifty-cent-a-day illegal indentured servant vs robot picker: there is an assumption that a mechanised solution will replace a single human. This is not usually the case with mechanisation/automation. The drone I've outlined above could do a whole gang's work.

On the whole, wageslaves still exist because people prefer to work with other people, and the end customers are people, so your salesforce are people who work better with people backing them up as well as the automated systems. Now that dog-brains are more chimp-brain, the next generation might not feel quite the same way, but still there's the "Got to give them something to do" argument. When I hear on the news that Zimbabwe has 80% unemployment, I try and imagine Birmingham (a major city in the UK) with 4 out of 5 of its workers sitting around doing nothing, and I can't. "Unemployed" just means "hustling to get by". Fetching bush meat or firewood in from the countryside counts as "unemployed".

So in the "everything is drones" view of SR in the '70s, the proles slob around at home being fed bread and circuses by the corps to stop them revolting, and the lucky ones get the jobs that the rulers want to be done by humans: creative and social.

And in the "people are drones" view, the proles do make-work at Corp premises and are too tired when they return to their bread and circuses to do anything but veg.

In my lexicon, wageslaves are victims. It takes someone special to wrench themselves out of the rut they've been driven into and take the leap into the unknown that the corps work so hard to make look unattractive. Those special people run the small outfits and the shadows.

And I though I was the one with the dire perspective of the future. But I guess you are right.
It requires alot of wishful thinking that the world is still such a nice place as it is in SR in 60 years.

The Corporations were able to tighten their hold on things after Crash 2.0, certainly... But there's still lots of grittiness.

It seems cheerful, but that's only because that's an AR Overlay of what really is going on. The infastructure is breaking down everywhere except for the main Corporate-Held Areas (And the Rich, of course!), with no one noticing in a AR/Sim haze going on (Even worse than just the Sim Haze of 3rd Ed!). So there's not even any attempt to shore it up.

Soon, something's going to break, and there's going to be a BIG snap.

Hey, look, I have campaign ideas!

As well, things like the Technomancer Riots are proof that control isn't as tight as thought, even if that was nipped in the bud quickly. But, look at the cost of that single world-wide issue.

Things are building up to more, my characters can feel it in their bones...

I was more saying that there is the illusion of safety, but although the runners know things are going down I feel that most people have no clue whats really going on in the deeper shadows of the world. Corporations control the media, and the media tells everyone that everything is fine.... now look down at the floor for a few seconds... ok you can look back.... no wait still look at the floor. Keep... ok now you can look back up.

Also on a side note if technical phone support was replaced by agents with "chimp brains" I think on the whole it would be a huge improvement.

I still say that Call Centres are now locally operated places filled with SINless.

Actually, I'm going to make that a series of adventures.

on the topic of AR/VR/sim haze, someone should take a look at episode/part 4 of mnemosyne:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemosyne_%28anime%29

that episode is set to about 2025, and show people with small headsets attached to one ear. they are basically drooling in the streets because they live their wishful life online, also known as 1.5 (with 2.0 being online and 1.0 being real life).

there is also the opening of syndicate wars, where a person fitted with a chip that fails, suddenly have the british suburbia with a friendly cop replaced by a urban area with cop in riot gear. the first being just a illusion put in place by the chip.

Aside from the US where the working class continue to get the shaft and vote in the people who shaft them (presumably because the working class are morons, I can think of no other explanation for blue collar factory workers thinking that GW bush shares their values, or indeed shares their anything at all) and africa because no-one cares about them (apparently, see: The Congo) quality of life has actually improved hugely across the board for everyone monotonically for quite a while now. You have to actually assume that all current trends are broken to end up with SR4, which seems unlikely. Realistically we'll probably end up sitting pretty sweet in 2070 aside from some sort of asteriod strike style apocalypse. Most places are even making noises about climate change and air pollution these days.

well the very concept of cyberpunk is rooted in 80's usa. most specifically the "rust belt"...

So what you're saying is that legitimate businesses such as Nike shoes never outsource to countries that have no minimum wage and highly permissive child labor laws? That's good to know.

There are places in the world where there aren't any good drug crops to support the local farmers, no local economy to speak of, and insufficient land to provide for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. There are places where the average child has to choose between starving to death and selling penny blowjobs to men who think that fucking a virgin will cure their AIDS.
And in those places, the corps are the good guys. They're not exploiting child labor for below-subsistence wages, they're giving kids a third choice when before their only options were prostitution and death and paying substantially more than the well-below-subsistence national mean. The corps are still the good guys providing the best for their workers; they're just doing it in such a piss-poor economy that they can have a comfortable profit margin.

Note teh use of 'average' up above.