> but there are plenty of bad side effects like the invasion of privacy, cluttering up urban spaces, breaking up TV shows, et cetera.
I will add another set that is often missed in discussion - electricity, fuel and man-hours. We are heading for a crisis in supply of the former two in part because of wasting a big part of them on those bullshit zero-sum jobs.
There's plenty of fuel around. We will have some upset as we switch sources, but believe it that business will switch to whatever keeps them going at a good price, when push comes to shove.
I'm not sure that people going to jobs is very big deal energy-wise. Isn't smelting steel our largest electricity consumption? Industry uses buttloads of energy; dwarfs what you and I use to heat our houses and run our cars by orders of magnitude.
Bullshit jobs don't exist in a vacuum, they are consumers of goods and services produced by other industries. For instance, I'd wager that most of the print industry serves advertising. All those magazines, leaflets and billboards use horrible amounts of paper, paint, metal and electricity (and all of this is ephemeral, often thrown away without even delivering its message). And of course you need to design it, manage it, transport it, etc.
I think there would be much less need for products from more useful industries if we could cut down on some pointless zero-sum things we're doing. I don't have any numbers in front of me though. It would be interesting to see how much % of resources we actually waste like that.
I will add another set that is often missed in discussion - electricity, fuel and man-hours. We are heading for a crisis in supply of the former two in part because of wasting a big part of them on those bullshit zero-sum jobs.