Getting people to work seems to require getting rid of machines, and a return to the pre-industrial age. Everyone agrees we don't want that (except Derek Jensen, etc. -- but he flies around on airplanes, so we can't take him too seriously.)

At first, we were told that machines wouldn't cause unemployment, they would increase efficiency. And they did.

Then we were told that machines had made so much stuff that we could all join the Leisure Class. Trouble is, we got leisure but no money, and the stuff piled up but no one could buy it.

So we had the Great Depression. Terminated, apparently, only by the wartime command economy --

Then they invented the "information society" because it was time to stop fighting and so they started a Cold War to do something with all those active minds. On the civilian side, there was still not all that much to do, so they invented "Foundations" to give "grants" and a new class of work arose-- Grant Writing. The successful grant applicants got some money and produced some stuff. Lots of reports and studies that no one ever looked at-- just like Kuwait?

All that activity produced the need for office buildings and computers and such, but what was actually going on in all those millions of offices in all the high rises of the cities of the world?

A few cartoon strips give us insight into the cubicle world-- but mostly its pretty isolating and lonely, I would guess.

But then, all that turned out to be built on gas-inflated seafoam, and it is all collapsing back into the ocean. It was such a pretty dream. I haven't really found the flaw yet, though there are a number of candidate flaws, of which "greed" might be the leading contender.