Beware Anything Labeled ‘2.0’

‘2.0’ translates to 20th century

The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Institutional Innovation was most recently held in 2018, and the report from the get-together is The Future of Work 2.0, by the rapporteur David Gibson. The report embodies a great deal of ‘enlightened’ thinking about the idealized emergent sort of company of the near future, meaning a distillation of intellectual and theoretical thinking by the participants of the roundtable, while steering clear of naked political issues, like the precarity of work, #MeToo, unions, the economic inequality built into international trade, and so on. The report downplays the threats of automation and as far as I can tell sidesteps blue-collar work, while focusing implicitly on white-collar workers, without really addressing class distinctions. And there is some outright disdain for workers to simply do their jobs and then go home:

“I think there’s two factors that particularly interest me here,” says [Dorie] Clark. “One is this idea about specifically what companies can do to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset in their employees, to both give them permission and encourage them with the tools and knowledge to be able to take that agency. And the second is the big gap that I see between the highly self-motivated employees and the ones that are not.”

This second class may…