The chapter begins with Paul Proteus concerned about impressing his colleagues and bosses but ends with Paul Proteus seeing Finnerty's point of view and seeing the ridiculousness of the entire system. Paul's wife, Anita, is not happy.
Paul's presentation to his co-workers is about the first and second Industrial Revolutions. The first one, he says, devalued muscle work. The machines created were much more efficient than man's muscles could ever be. They were stronger and could work longer hours. The second Industrial Revolution devalued mind-numbing, repetitive labor. Machines could now take over all the rote tasks with far fewer rejected units than a factory worker bored by the job and concerned with other aspects of their life, which left them prone to making mistakes. He doesn't get into the potential of the inevitable third Industrial Revolution because the checkers tournament against the machine at the end of the chapter puts a spotlight on that.
Paul is the Ilium Works checkers champion and it's tradition to play incoming engineers to defend his title. This year, the new recruits have brought in a checkers playing computer to beat Paul. At first Paul wants to concede, knowing that any machine built for a specific purpose will inevitably be better at that purpose than a human counterpart. But his pal Finnerty encourages him to play and makes bets with everybody there that Paul will win. Which he does because had seen, looking inside the machine, that it had a loose connection which causes it to catch fire. Finnerty's confidence wasn't that a man could beat a machine but that a machine will break down under the right conditions. I mean, a man will too! But a machine does it immediately and with lots of smoke and fire.
Everybody is upset that Finnerty didn't say anything about the loose connection but he couldn't give a shit about their concerns.
"'If Checker Charley was out to make chumps out of men, he could damn well fix his own connections. Paul looks after his own circuits; let Charley do the same. Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.'"
We're going ever deeper into the philosophical question, "What is freedom?" At what point have the machines gone from freeing men to pursue their hopes, dreams, and happiness to enslaving man into roles as simple caretakers for the machines? And those who don't understand the machines? Well, they have to earn their reason for existence some other way. But since the machines are doing everything, their options are limited. Provide a reason for your existence as a citizen of your nation by either joining the army or filling potholes. An interesting note is that Vonnegut sees exactly the way America would wind up in a system where machines do all the work. It would still demand some kind of proof from everybody that they deserve to be "taken care of" by the government. Notably, Star Trek: The Next Generation bases their world in roughly the same environment but sees it differently. With machines and replicators available to do all the work, nobody needs to feel obligated to do anything they don't want to do. They are truly free to pursue any activity they want. In the Star Trek universe, everybody is taken care of when machines meet all needs. In Vonnegut's world (which is more realistic), the people in charge of the machines don't feel any obligation to provide for the people who don't own the machines and are no longer playing a part in the economic system. They're simply leeches and parasites who have to provide some service if they want any income at all. So it's the army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Works.
Notably, there has yet to be any real discussion about artists and entertainment. Presumably, like the bartender, these careers still exist. Vonnegut still has two hundred pages to bring them up so I'm not yet going to assume they make the entire parable too messy. It's possible art has also been devalued by the efficiency of machines to the economy and it's just looked down upon as silly and a waste of time. If that's the case, I'm sure Finnerty's cohorts and revolutionaries will all be playwrights and poets.
Oh wait! I forgot this book is called Player Piano and there was that scene with the player piano! So Vonnegut has already shown how machines have, in at least some way, taken away the livelihoods of artists. And we saw that there was no connection between the artist and their audience; there was no crucial interaction or play between the art and the reaction, as you might expect with a piano player at a bar. Instead, it was just "five cents worth of joy" and the piano was done. It was a simple financial interaction; art had become a commodity.
Another theme in this chapter was how nepotism affected this new world. The guy who brought Checker Charley wasn't really smart enough to have become an engineer. But his father (who built the machine) was well known and well liked so Paul's boss went to bat for the kid, even if he was mostly a dumb jerk.
"Ordinarily, nobody would have hired him. But Kroner, who knew his bloodlines, had taken him on anyway and sent him to Ilium to be trained. The break had done anything but teach him humility. He took it as evidence that his money and name could beat the system any time and, paraphrased, he'd said as much. The hell of it was that his attitude won grudging admiration from his fellow engineers, who had got their jobs the hard way. Paul supposed, gloomily, that beaters of systems had always been admired by the conventional."
Reading something like this from 1952 by a fucking genius is depressing. This was America. This is America. This will always be America. What good is art that points out this bullshit if the "conventional" never read it, never learn from it, never fucking care? This is why all of my favorite books are the ones where the protagonists realize what Matthew Broderick realized in Wargames: the only way to win is not to play the game. You know, books like Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and, more recently, Gravity's Rainbow. Although nobody really wins in Gravity's Rainbow; Slothrop just sort of disappears from everybody's sight and vanishes into legend. But the sentiment is still there because Pynchon still shows how Pirate Prentice and Katje and others all realize that they're still working for the system when they choose to fight against it.
One of the things I've always believed having grown up on the West Coast is that even though we think of history as people fighting against tyranny and changing the world, what history really was was people fleeing westward instead of fighting to set up their own systems. Then the people subjugated and oppressed by those systems fled west to set up their own systems. Until there was no more west to flee to and the West Coast had all the misfits and anti-establishment revolutionaries bottled up trying to figure out the best way to live together. But this is also why, eventually, we're going to need a huge fight. Because we have nowhere left to run and we can't live with this bullshit system for much longer.
Paul's presentation to his co-workers is about the first and second Industrial Revolutions. The first one, he says, devalued muscle work. The machines created were much more efficient than man's muscles could ever be. They were stronger and could work longer hours. The second Industrial Revolution devalued mind-numbing, repetitive labor. Machines could now take over all the rote tasks with far fewer rejected units than a factory worker bored by the job and concerned with other aspects of their life, which left them prone to making mistakes. He doesn't get into the potential of the inevitable third Industrial Revolution because the checkers tournament against the machine at the end of the chapter puts a spotlight on that.
Paul is the Ilium Works checkers champion and it's tradition to play incoming engineers to defend his title. This year, the new recruits have brought in a checkers playing computer to beat Paul. At first Paul wants to concede, knowing that any machine built for a specific purpose will inevitably be better at that purpose than a human counterpart. But his pal Finnerty encourages him to play and makes bets with everybody there that Paul will win. Which he does because had seen, looking inside the machine, that it had a loose connection which causes it to catch fire. Finnerty's confidence wasn't that a man could beat a machine but that a machine will break down under the right conditions. I mean, a man will too! But a machine does it immediately and with lots of smoke and fire.
Everybody is upset that Finnerty didn't say anything about the loose connection but he couldn't give a shit about their concerns.
"'If Checker Charley was out to make chumps out of men, he could damn well fix his own connections. Paul looks after his own circuits; let Charley do the same. Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.'"
We're going ever deeper into the philosophical question, "What is freedom?" At what point have the machines gone from freeing men to pursue their hopes, dreams, and happiness to enslaving man into roles as simple caretakers for the machines? And those who don't understand the machines? Well, they have to earn their reason for existence some other way. But since the machines are doing everything, their options are limited. Provide a reason for your existence as a citizen of your nation by either joining the army or filling potholes. An interesting note is that Vonnegut sees exactly the way America would wind up in a system where machines do all the work. It would still demand some kind of proof from everybody that they deserve to be "taken care of" by the government. Notably, Star Trek: The Next Generation bases their world in roughly the same environment but sees it differently. With machines and replicators available to do all the work, nobody needs to feel obligated to do anything they don't want to do. They are truly free to pursue any activity they want. In the Star Trek universe, everybody is taken care of when machines meet all needs. In Vonnegut's world (which is more realistic), the people in charge of the machines don't feel any obligation to provide for the people who don't own the machines and are no longer playing a part in the economic system. They're simply leeches and parasites who have to provide some service if they want any income at all. So it's the army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Works.
Notably, there has yet to be any real discussion about artists and entertainment. Presumably, like the bartender, these careers still exist. Vonnegut still has two hundred pages to bring them up so I'm not yet going to assume they make the entire parable too messy. It's possible art has also been devalued by the efficiency of machines to the economy and it's just looked down upon as silly and a waste of time. If that's the case, I'm sure Finnerty's cohorts and revolutionaries will all be playwrights and poets.
Oh wait! I forgot this book is called Player Piano and there was that scene with the player piano! So Vonnegut has already shown how machines have, in at least some way, taken away the livelihoods of artists. And we saw that there was no connection between the artist and their audience; there was no crucial interaction or play between the art and the reaction, as you might expect with a piano player at a bar. Instead, it was just "five cents worth of joy" and the piano was done. It was a simple financial interaction; art had become a commodity.
Another theme in this chapter was how nepotism affected this new world. The guy who brought Checker Charley wasn't really smart enough to have become an engineer. But his father (who built the machine) was well known and well liked so Paul's boss went to bat for the kid, even if he was mostly a dumb jerk.
"Ordinarily, nobody would have hired him. But Kroner, who knew his bloodlines, had taken him on anyway and sent him to Ilium to be trained. The break had done anything but teach him humility. He took it as evidence that his money and name could beat the system any time and, paraphrased, he'd said as much. The hell of it was that his attitude won grudging admiration from his fellow engineers, who had got their jobs the hard way. Paul supposed, gloomily, that beaters of systems had always been admired by the conventional."
Reading something like this from 1952 by a fucking genius is depressing. This was America. This is America. This will always be America. What good is art that points out this bullshit if the "conventional" never read it, never learn from it, never fucking care? This is why all of my favorite books are the ones where the protagonists realize what Matthew Broderick realized in Wargames: the only way to win is not to play the game. You know, books like Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and, more recently, Gravity's Rainbow. Although nobody really wins in Gravity's Rainbow; Slothrop just sort of disappears from everybody's sight and vanishes into legend. But the sentiment is still there because Pynchon still shows how Pirate Prentice and Katje and others all realize that they're still working for the system when they choose to fight against it.
One of the things I've always believed having grown up on the West Coast is that even though we think of history as people fighting against tyranny and changing the world, what history really was was people fleeing westward instead of fighting to set up their own systems. Then the people subjugated and oppressed by those systems fled west to set up their own systems. Until there was no more west to flee to and the West Coast had all the misfits and anti-establishment revolutionaries bottled up trying to figure out the best way to live together. But this is also why, eventually, we're going to need a huge fight. Because we have nowhere left to run and we can't live with this bullshit system for much longer.
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