I don’t fault your interpretation. There is a reason Vonnegut uses the term “spiritual” throughout the book. At least for me, I would describe my understanding of the book to have required a spiritual/moral shift before I could really understand the image being painted.

I also read God Bless You Mr. Rosewater first of the two, so maybe that colored how I interpreted Player Piano. It is a more direct argument that humans need to be cared for, independent of their economic utility.

So when I read Player Piano, it didn’t strike me as an argument against automation (which, being an engineer myself, I am entirely for), but moreso as a warning that freedom from labor doesn’t alone make a perfect life. Especially in the mid-20th century context Vonnegut was writing in, it’s an argument against the “American” style of automation, wherein you displace people from their jobs and discard them entirely. They serve no further purpose to your economy, and since your society is tightly adjoined to the economy, they serve to purpose to society…

So it’s not really a book about automation, if if I said that in my first post. It’s a book about failings of American culture, which happens to be revealed through automation. It’s about the inconsistency of a society where one’s usefulness to others is determined solely by their labor, and where that labor is constantly sought to be devalued and eliminated, and what the end of that process looks like for humans who want to find meaning in their activities.

Yeah this sounds like religion to me. Believe it is true and you will believe it is true.

Are you saying that reading and interpreting the work of one of the most beloved authors in the English language is “like religion?” If so, you could not be more wrong. Reading, interpreting, and reinterpreting the work of those who came before us is actually the very core of any academic pursuit. It’s the most basic description of what every single academic does with their time.

Also, you didnt address what I wrote, only the argument you think I was making

I did, actually. I could not have addressed it more directly. Let me do it again, but this time greatly expanding it.

I am making the world a better place. Freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work. You know what really irked me the most about that novel? The population lived in a freaken utopia and couldn’t say one good thing about it.

It’s been more than ten years since I read the book, but were Vonnegut a less subtle writer, that could be a literal line of dialog from one of the engineers in the book. I could imagine one of them defensively saying exactly that in an argument with the minister (whose name I forget).

You are frustrated that the engineers, through their ingenuity and hard work, have given the population a utopia, but the population is ungrateful. Your attitude is the same as the upper classes in that world. What you overlook is the world’s inherently violent class structure, which is revealed as the book goes on. The lower classes in the books are relegated to meaningless existences in sad, mass-produced housing, physically segregated from the wealthy in Homestead. They are denied an active participation in society, made obsolete by the upper classes (wealthy engineers, which iirc are implied to keep it in the family), who control every aspect of society. Again, it’s been a very long time since I read this so I’m hazy on the details, but in the book, some in the lower classes are trying to actively organize to challenge this class structure. They are brutally repressed. They are infiltrated by secret police, and when they rise up in protest, are met with state violence.

What you describe as utopia is actually a repressive regime that meets the subsistence needs of its lower classes in exchange for their unquestioning acceptance of the oligarchy’s control of society, which they justify to themselves and to the lower classes as a technocratic utopia (“freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work,” as you say), but which is also perfectly willing to subjugate the lower classes using deadly force if they dare to question the existing power structure.

How you describe the world is exactly how the regime chooses to portray itself, and how the upper classes, consisting of people like you and me, view the lower classes. In fact, viewing the lower classes as ungrateful for the upper classes’ generosity is actually a staple of upper class attitudes throughout much of human history. At the beginning of the book, since we’re only given an engineer’s perspective, this is an understandable reading of the world. If you read the entire book and still finished it thinking that same thing, you completely and utterly missed the point.

You and I make technology for companies, which are mostly owned by rich people. Vonnegut is asking us to interrogate what the implied philosophy behind our work is, even if we do not intend it to be so. We try to make people free from tedious work, but if you simply ask the people who we’re supposedly liberating from work, they hate us. This is not necessarily because they like the drudgery of their work, but because the wealthy people who employ us will simply lay them off, increasing corporate profits, but relegating the now-obsolete workers to the margins of society.

If the people you and I are “freeing … from degrading filthy boring work” are actually further degraded by this so-called freedom, are we really freeing them? Maybe we should question how our society is organized if the people you and I work to “free” actually hate us for it, or as they’d put it, hate us for taking away their jobs.