The Future is Now. What Will Be The Future of Work?
Looking back at the Luddites, Looking at You!
A few years ago, Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor formed a joint economic development council (JECD), and between the two towns, they spent 79000,00 on an economic development plan for the peninsula.
The plan recommended museums but when I presented a concept for A Museum of American Designer Crafsmen, fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas I was told various exclusionary explanations as to why my proposal would not be considered, meaning not reviewed at all, Such explanations as “We can’t do anything to help individual businesses” a statement delivered by the perpetual chair of almost everything, Wendy Wolf, is matched by the Maine Community Foundation policy prohibiting individuals and small enterprises from submitting a community project proposal. The Foundation upholds this exclusionary practice levied against individuals and small businesses by hiding behind a completely unsubstantiated claim that an IRS regulation mandates the exclusion, announced in a manner equivalent to the way that Erin Cooperrider justifies every promise she breaks by saying it is for “economic reasons”. None of the statements are supported or make any sense, but are stated with an air of unquestionable authority, as if that should suffice. Ms. Wolf also informed me that I should not initiate any ideas until I had attended the meetings conducted by the JECD, in silence, for a year, to show my respect for the board.
I do not support the notion that Ms. Wolf or the select boards of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor are qualified to manage economic development for our Peninsula. Other than Ms Wolf’s ability to climb the corporate ladder, I do not know what abilities Ms. Wolf has to run anything. She seems about as qualified to head up economic development as Pete Hegseth is to be Secretary of Defense. She doesn’t even know that one of the characteristics of “PsyCap”, the quality sought after in corporate and academic cultures to encourage innovation in the workforce, is associated with the ability to take the initiative. The ability to initiate is a quality that Ms Wolf seeks to suppress among the people on the Boothbay Peninsula, as do other members of leadership whom I have encountered.
Economic development can be a function of the select board’s responsibilities, but the boards are supposed to be responsive to the community, which Ms Wolf, by her admission, is not. The Boothbay selectboards have a long history of treating small entrepreneurs in an adversarial manner. and are eager to deter or close down small entrepreneurs, as they did to Andersen Design plans to expand locally in the late seventies when they would not allow my parents to build a production facility (aka “making space”) and gallery on the land they owned across the street from our house in a village that supports a shipyard, a village store, and many small galleries.
There are some small entrepreneurs on the select boards. At least one is a devotee of our leading local oligarch, another seems to believe that the entire economy of this Peninsula is tourism, even though his shop features handmade crafts, he does not acknowledge that such a culture exists on the peninsula. and needs to be given consideration, for instance, in housing.
The Town select boards are easily impressed by anyone representing concentrated wealth. Paul Coulombe was the sole source of funding for the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation, but Ms. Cooperrider effectively convinced the Selectboard to allocate ARPA funding, which was initially reported as already appropriated. She said the town needed to donate to the BRDC for the BRDC to procure further donations, setting in motion the system wherein the town, county, and state collectively funded the massive, overcrowded “workforce” housing zone, which in no way qualifies as affordable housing by HUD standards. The Boothbay selectboard rolled over for Coulombe-backed Ms Cooperrider with practically no investigation into the BRDC organization or its plans, asking only, “What can we do to help?”Is this the way it also worked at the county and state levels? No questions asked?
In a recent infomercial (or so it comes across) on News Center Maine, titled Donations help build workforce housing in Boothbay The Workforce housing project is represented as supported by community donations, as if all the people of the community got together to fund the project, but there was no announcement of a public funding drive, nor was there an announcement that the project had received grants from two foundations, credited with funding the project, both with a connection to Paul Coulombe.
So, how do I know this? I asked ChatGPT: Here is the answer I got:
Who are the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation’s Equity Investors?
Private Donations
Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund: Provided a $50,000 grant for BRDC’s exempt purposes. causeiq.com+1boothbayregister.com+1
Schacknow Family Foundation: Contributed $5,000 in general support.
Additionally, seed funding was provided by Paul Coulombe, a local philanthropist, to initiate BRDC’s housing project. boothbayregister.com+5boothbayregister.com+5boothbayregister.com+5
The Schacknow Family Foundation makes contributions in Florida and Southport, Maine, both locations where Mr Coulombe resides. In addition, they were among the “anonymous investors” who donated to the Demolish and Replace school project with investments organized by Coulombe. (The identities of the anonymous investors were obtained through an FOIA request.)
How is Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund connected to Paul Coulombe?
Coulombe Family Foundation: Paul Coulombe serves as Vice President of the Coulombe Family Foundation, which has made substantial donations to various causes. For instance, in 2020, the foundation contributed $1.5 million to Fidelity Charitable for general support purposes.
Donations to Boothbay Regional Development Corporation that were not reported by ChatGPt but reported on CauseIQ:
GS Daf (GSPF) (Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund;) 2023–12 Community & Human Services $50,000
The Blackbaud Giving Fund 2023–12General Support$25,000
These foundations from outside the community are the known “community donations.” Collectively, the community of foundations contributed $130,000, and the Town and County contributed $350,000. Add another $1.5 million in tax increment financing to pay for extending water and sewer lines for the project. That is still only $1,980,000. from “community donations,” which, except the Town, are all sourced outside our community.
“We were able to raise over three million dollars from the community,” Malcolm said. “Some are folks that summer here, and they are supporting a year-round community they can come back to, year after year. It’s their plumbers, their electricians, their Coast Guard.” News Center Maine
A very exclusive community!
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The summer residential class is what constitutes “the community” in the BRDC narrative. The “community” donated to an overcrowded year-round housing project to house the resident class that serves their interests, and the BRCD specifically designates the housing for that purpose.
The unspoken reason for the year-round housing shortage is the short-term rentals that are repurposing former year-round housing, which is now mainly used to serve a summer rental community. About $1100000 in funding is not identified, so it is dark money. Could the missing $1100000 have been raised at a fundraiser at Coulombe’s Country Club?
I grew up on the Peninsula. There was always a cultural divide between the rooted community and the transients, which includes summer residents. Our family stood on the dividing line. Year-round residents regarded us as outsiders for doing something very different, and for being new to the area, but what we did was popular with the summer residents (and some of the year-round residents). The joke among the local people was that the new arrivistes loved the peninsula; they just wanted to change it to be like where they came from. My family moved to the peninsula from a housing project similar to, but less crowded and with more spacious units than, the project that BRDC is developing. My parents couldn’t do what they wanted to do in the housing project in Ohio, which was to operate a ceramic enterprise in their home. Then, they could do it in Maine because the appropriate housing was available, but if the appropriate housing is written out of the community plan by the leadership class, then it is no longer possible to have a home-based business on the peninsula.
After spending all its ARPA funding to finance the BRDC, Boothbay still has no affordable housing, but it has market-rate “workforce” housing that fits the corporate community development model and ignores the workers’ movement that rejects the corporate model.
So, to fill the affordable housing requirement in HP1489 and at the same time fill the need for the rest of the working class, we need affordable business-in-residence zoning.
Today, the workers’ movement rejecting corporate culture joins with the workers’ movement whose jobs are being dumped by corporations and replaced with AI.
This isn’t just about technology; it’s about power. Decisions like this are made by corporate managers with little regard for the people whose livelihoods depend on narrating audiobooks. It’s the same old story: squeeze labor, boost profits, and dress it up as “progress.” Amazon Just Killed 50,000 Human Voices
The corporate world is no longer creating jobs, it’s dropping jobs.
If the large-scale corporate sector is no longer the job creation sector, then growth has to happen within other sectors of the economy.
41% of companies worldwide plan to reduce workforce by 2030 due to AI
Society has to take stock of the alternatives!
Now that large corporations are dumping more jobs than they are creating. will the state finally support economic growth at the roots, the way it supported economic growth at the top of the economy under the rubric of “job creation”,
In Maine, the state has already moved on to situate itself as the primary taxpayer-financed job creator, having ignored Article IV Part Third Sections 13 & 14 of the Maine Constitution ever since it deemed the centrally managed economy into being in 1976.
Article IV
Part Third.
Legislative Power.
Section 13. Special legislation. The Legislature shall, from time to time, provide, as far as practicable, by general laws, for all matters usually appertaining to special or private legislation.
Section 14. Corporations, formed under general laws. Corporations shall be formed under general laws, and shall not be created by special Acts of the Legislature, except for municipal purposes, and in cases where the objects of the corporation cannot otherwise be attained; and, however formed, they shall forever be subject to the general laws of the State.
Not only has the Maine Legislature chartered the Maine Space Corporation by special act of Legislation, permitting it to use the public school system as its industrial job training facility starting in KIndergarten, which I think is called indoctrination, rather than education, but it is also building the Factory of the Future which will use AI technology and 3d printers to build just about everything in Maine.
The Corporate State’s ambitions to completely control the entire economy of Maine from the top down are advancing faster than ever, and HP 1489’s mandate for overcrowded ”priority zones” in every Maine municipality is the corporate workforce housing planned by the Plantation State of Maine. But it is supposed to be affordable, which the BRDC housing is not.
The University of Maine is central to the State’s Industrial Complex.
Let us not forget that the University of Maine has its right to intellectual property ownership over any project taking place at its publicly-funded facilities in place. Scroll down to the very end to see who the winners are!
UMaine breaks ground on $82M ‘factory of the future’
The Future of AI in Prefabricated Construction
UMaine’s ‘Factory of the Future’ aims to tackle the housing crisis with 3D printing
After 500 days without a contract, University of Maine graduate workers push back on funding freeze
The last article attributes the funding freeze to the actions of the Trump administration.
The number of patent records for the University of Maine on Lenz.org increased from 6,280 on May 12th to 6,313 on June 5th. I have never seen patent income for the University accounted for, but the University’s ownership of patents begs the question: why does the University need public funding to pay student labor fairly?
The undersized workforce living units will not suffice those who work at home. The only way to have a working space in the BRDC project is to use a bedroom as an office, and that means not having kids.
There is a marked difference between the conversation of local leadership and that found on Medium, where the voices of the “workforce” are heard. On Medium, the AI job takeover is a hot topic. Local leadership hasn’t caught on yet.
A New Cast of AI Tools Will Make Millions of Media & Marketing Professionals Obsolete
We are at an inflection point moving into an era when the narrative is written for a drastically different future.
Decades before Ms Wolf arrived, my family settled on the Peninsula and established Andersen Design.
As an industrial designer, Dad philosophically considered his choices within a temporal, social, cultural, and economic context.
I recently came across these photos of my parents holding a mold for the first wildlife sculpture they designed, the Floating Gull, which sells as well today as it did when it was first created in the 1950s
The housing plans devised by the dark money investors’ community target large-scale corporations and their employees. The plans do not include remote workers or Luddites.
The core values of the original Luddites were the quality of the work process, a value not found in the dominant culture that defines a “quality job” as one that pays higher than average wages and benefits. PERIOD!
That dominant narrative is coming to a crashing halt. Coders are no longer needed because AI can code itself, or so it is thought. The technological evolution that took away the handcrafted jobs is now taking away the old new tech jobs, and the contemporary Luddite culture is where some of the alternative jobs are found.
Change asks us to reassess where we are headed and provides an opportunity to make a change for the better.
The Boothbay Harbor selectboard approved a May 27 proposal from RCAP Solutions, a non-profit community development organization, to help create an economic development plan.
RCAP Solutions is the go-to resource of sustained success for individuals, families, and the communities in which they live. Established in 1969 (as Rural Housing Improvement), RCAP Solutions has supported the power and potential of communities for over half a century as strategists of community-wide well-being. Dedicated to nurturing strength, resilience and confidence in those we serve, we engage communities in the realization of a collective vision, creating and implementing a plan to guide them to self-actualized and sustained success.
On May 30, I emailed RCAP with an introductory letter about Andersen Design, the vision, and the challenges. On June 4, I received a response. That said, “it’s wonderful to hear about the ceramics community and skillsets present in the region. I’m taking note”
What that means remains to be seen, but it’s more recognition than I have ever received from local, town, and state leadership, which generally does not respond at all and never even mentions local crafters in their conversations. However, handmade crafts are an industry that AI cannot do
Ceramics invokes STEAM skills that converge on the fields of art and science, and so ceramic research into ceramic bodies and surfaces, such as Andersen Design engages in, can be applied across fields. Today, ceramics are being used in state-of-the-art data storage.
Cerabyte and the Yottabyte Era: storing the future in ceramic
Even in the Age of AI, data storage is still needed.
As technological progress ties the bow on its historical loop by eating its own jobs, I expect we will be hearing a lot more about the Luddites
The Luddite movement is generally described in dominant culture terms as a movement that is opposed to the technology of the dominant culture, rather than a movement that has its own cultural values. Description after description begins with fear or opposition to the dominant culture and new technology. When I identify Andersen Design as Luddites, I am identifying with the cultural values of the Luddites and not with the acts of destruction by which the dominant culture defines the Luddites, because Andersen Design was a creative response to the dominant culture of the Industrial Revolution, versus a destructive response. Andersen Design created production as an art form that emphasises individuality versus the production of indistinguishable units.
There will always be a counterculture even in the midst of the expanding State-controlled industrial complex. Inflection points, such as we are at today, are points when anyone can take the ball and run with it with eyes wide open!
Peninsulas are perfect for counter cultures!
