The Price of Mechanization: Vonnegut's Player Piano in the 2010s [Review Essay]

New technological means, through the veneer of efficiency, reinforce a hierarchy that favors elites. A few organizations dictate the forms of inclusion. Automation spreads human irrelevance; disaffection follows. Opposition groups favor hyperbole and institute their own hierarchies. This is the world of Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 dystopic novel. It details a more fully automated United States, one where the scientific and organizational changes brought about by a third world war have led to a union between the state and a handful of corporations. Dr. Paul Proteus, the manager of one such factory in Ilium, is a bystander to the growing discontent. As the Ghost Shirt rebellion brews, Vonnegut critiques not the facts of any displacing technology, but rather the social structures that hide behind their use. At issue is not that the “robots are taking our jobs,” but that the facts of automation conveniently mask a consolidation of power.