It's Time to Stop Living the American Scam - NY Times opinion
Midcentury science fiction writers assumed that the increased productivity brought on by mechanization would give workers an oppressive amount of leisure time, that our greatest threats would be boredom and ennui. But these authors’ prodigious imaginations were hobbled by their humanity and rationality; they’d forgotten that the world is ordered not by reason or decency but by rapacious avarice.
In the actual dystopian future we now inhabit, the oligarchs have realized they can work everyone harder, pay them less, eliminate benefits, turn every human institution from medicine to corrections into a racket, charge far more for basic rights and services than people in any other nation would stand for without revolting, and get rich beyond the penny ante dreams of a Carnegie or Astor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/opinion/work-busy-trap-millennials.html
No paywall:
https://archive.ph/6UWGu
= new reply since forum marked as read
and seems to want to force-fit some situations into the theme he chose, taking much literary license.
For example, just the OP excerpt alone shows he missed all the other "midcentury science fiction writers" that did the opposite (with some works also becoming pop sensations through films) like William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's "Logan's Run" (1967). And who would dismiss Orwell's "1984" (published in 1949)?
Most (good) science fiction attempts to bring out "the human condition" within the imagination of an alien universe, good and bad. And if he is attempting to hide behind what is apparently a reference to "Star Trek", he completely missed the point of that as well.
The other content force-fit into the narrative that I vehemently disagree with and that literally minimizes the struggles of certain demographics in this country, is this part from the essay -
Enough with the busywork already. We’ve been “productive” enough — produced way too much, in fact. And there is too much that urgently needs to be done: a republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impoverished, imprisoned, illiterate, sick or starving. All while we waste our time at work.
Meaning that a racist fucking cop kneeling on the neck of a bound and prone man lying face down in the street, for 9 1/2 minutes, killing him in place while others held him down, where the entire thing is recorded and shown for the world to see, and then people protesting that, is nothing more than a "social movement" that "arose during the enforced idleness of quarantine", speaks volumes.
I suppose he himself was "too busy" to see the struggles of people who were NOT like him and didn't have the privilege he enjoys daily.
If he truly had any background in history and sociology, he would have known that throughout the entire organized existence of humanity, there have always been "oligarchs" (family/clan/tribal leaders/monarchs/elders - whatever one might call them) who have set up hierarchies within communities, and many in the upper rungs of that hierarchy, did everything they could to either rise higher or maintain their status near or at the top.
So this isn't new but I suppose if your "job" is writing, you have to come up with something to "write about".
and provide those of us without subscriptions access behind the paywall? Thanks. 
. . .so says Scott Galloway, author and NYU professor of marketing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/dealbook/scott-galloway-economy-pandemic.html
We mistake prosperity for progress. And we have created tremendous, staggering, unprecedented prosperity. I think the mistake or the myth that we buy into — that whenever there’s prosperity economically, the G.D.P. grows, that it’s going to translate to progress for a nation.
What do we mean by progress? I think the ballast. . . is a healthy and thriving middle class. The geopolitical power of a nation, its well-being, its democratic strength, is usually a function of how prosperous its middle class is.
There’s a constant notion that if the economy does well, the middle class will restore itself. That is not true. What happens over time in all economic history is that the wealthy weaponize government, lower taxes on them, resist competition — the biggest, most powerful companies entrench themselves, and you end up with an erosion of the middle class. You end up with income inequality. It gets worse and worse, and then the same thing happens with income inequality. The good news is income inequality, when it gets to these levels, always self-corrects. The bad news is that the mechanisms for self-correction are war, famine and revolution.
Unless you provide and invest in a strong middle class, whether it be the minimum wage or support of unions or vocational training or access to free education or reduced-cost education, the middle class, as an entity, goes away. We have fallen into this notion that as long as the economy does well, the middle class will do well. The two are not necessarily linked.
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