"Automation and technology would be a great boon if it were creative, if there were more leisure, more opportunity to engage in raising a family, providing guidance to the young, all the stuff we say we need. America will work if we're all in it together. It'll work when there's a shared sense of destiny. It can be done!"
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Automation is treated here less like a technical upgrade than a moral test. Brown’s opening gambit yanks the conversation away from the usual productivity fetish: technology isn’t automatically “progress” unless it buys something human - time, care, community competence. The phrase “would be a great boon if” is doing quiet but heavy work. It implies America already has the machine, the capital, the innovation story; what’s missing is the political choice to distribute the gains as leisure and stability rather than anxiety and precarity.
He lists the “stuff we say we need” with a hint of impatience, almost a scolding. These are bipartisan platitudes - family, guidance, youth - invoked endlessly on campaign trails. Brown’s subtext is that we’ve turned values into slogans while building an economy that undercuts them. Automation becomes the mirror held up to that hypocrisy: if robots make us richer but also more exhausted, the problem isn’t the robots.
The second movement shifts from policy to civic theology. “America will work if we’re all in it together” is a deliberately blunt counter to the every-man-for-himself ethos that often rides alongside tech optimism. “Shared sense of destiny” echoes New Deal and wartime rhetoric, an older language of collective sacrifice repurposed for a future shaped by algorithms and inequality. And that final “It can be done!” is classic Brown: managerial realism laced with preacher cadence, insisting that the obstacle isn’t feasibility but will - the willingness to treat technological change as a shared project instead of a private windfall.
He lists the “stuff we say we need” with a hint of impatience, almost a scolding. These are bipartisan platitudes - family, guidance, youth - invoked endlessly on campaign trails. Brown’s subtext is that we’ve turned values into slogans while building an economy that undercuts them. Automation becomes the mirror held up to that hypocrisy: if robots make us richer but also more exhausted, the problem isn’t the robots.
The second movement shifts from policy to civic theology. “America will work if we’re all in it together” is a deliberately blunt counter to the every-man-for-himself ethos that often rides alongside tech optimism. “Shared sense of destiny” echoes New Deal and wartime rhetoric, an older language of collective sacrifice repurposed for a future shaped by algorithms and inequality. And that final “It can be done!” is classic Brown: managerial realism laced with preacher cadence, insisting that the obstacle isn’t feasibility but will - the willingness to treat technological change as a shared project instead of a private windfall.
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| Topic | Technology |
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