Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Some people, including Paul’s famous father, had talked in the old days as though engineers, managers, and scientists were an elite. And when things were building up to the war, it was recognized that American know-how was the only answer to the prospective enemy’s vast numbers, and there was talk of deeper, thicker shelters for the possessors of know-how, and of keeping this cream of the population out of the front-line fighting.

But now this elite business, this assurance of superiority, this sense of rightness about the hierarchy topped by managers and engineers—this was instilled in all college graduates, and there were no bones about it.

It was a vote of confidence from the past, he thought—where the past admitted how humble and shoddy it had been, where one could look from the old to the new and see that mankind really had come a long way. Paul needed that reassurance from time to time.

there was the attitude of a secret order, above and apart from society by virtue of participating in important and moving rites the laity could only guess about—and guess wrong.

And here, now, this little loop in the box before Paul, here was Rudy as Rudy had been to his machine that afternoon—Rudy, the turner-on of power, the setter of speeds, the controller of the cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as far as his machine was concerned, as far as the economy was concerned, as far as the war effort had been concerned. The tape was the essence distilled from the small, polite man with the big hands and black fingernails; from the man who thought the world could be saved if everyone read a verse from the Bible every night; from the man who adored a collie for want of children; from the man who … What else had Rudy said that afternoon? Paul supposed the old man was dead now—or in his second childhood in Homestead.

“It seemed very fresh to me—I mean that part where you say how the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work. I was fascinated.” “Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, said all that way back in the nineteen-forties. It’s fresh to you because you’re too young to know anything but the way things are now.”

A third one, eh? In a way, I guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields.” “Uh-huh,” said Katharine thoughtfully. She rattled a pencil between her teeth. “First the muscle work, then the routine work, then, maybe, the real brainwork.”

“See—see them two go up and down, Doctor! Just the way the feller hit ’em. Look at ’em go!” The music stopped abruptly, with the air of having delivered exactly five cents worth of joy. Rudy still shouted. “Makes you feel kind of creepy, don’t it, Doctor, watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out.”

Why Finnerty had seen fit to offend these gentle people was never clear to Paul, who supposed the aggressiveness, like most aggressiveness, dated back to some childhood muddle.

It’s just a hell of a time to be alive, is all—just this goddamn messy business of people having to get used to new ideas. And people just don’t, that’s all. I wish this were a hundred years from now, with everybody used to the change.”

The Meadows was a flat, grassy island in the St. Lawrence, in Chippewa Bay, where the most important men, and the most promising men (“Those whose development within the organization is not yet complete,” said the Handbook) in the Eastern and Middle-Western Divisions spent a week each summer in an orgy of morale building—through team athletics, group sings, bonfires and skyrockets, bawdy entertainment, free whisky and cigars; and through plays, put on by professional actors, which pleasantly but unmistakably made clear the nature of good deportment within the system, and the shape of firm resolves for the challenging year ahead.

“A brain, a brain,” said Berringer triumphantly. “Checker Charley, world’s champion checker player, and looking for new planets to conquer.” He grabbed a corner of the bedsheet, and unveiled Charley—a gray steel box with a checkerboard painted on its front panel. In each square that could be occupied by a checkerpiece were a red and a green jewel, each with a lamp behind it. “Pleased to meet you, Charley,” said Paul, trying to smile. When he realized what was going on, he felt himself reddening and getting a little mad. His first inclination was to walk the hell out.

“Because my sympathy’s with any man up against a machine, especially a machine backing up a knucklehead like you against a man like Paul. Besides, Charley had a loose connection.”

Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.”

He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn’t have what his father had, what Kroner had, what Shepherd had, what so many had: the sense of spiritual importance in what they were doing; the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality. In short, Paul missed what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.

Khashdrahr shrugged and looked questioningly at Halyard. “Shah says, if these not slaves, how you get them to do what they do?” “Patriotism,” said General of the Armies Bromley sternly. “Patriotism, damn it.” “Love of country,” said Halyard.

what Bud’s machine now did better. Now, personnel machines all over the country would be reset so as no longer to recognize the job as one suited for men. The combination of holes and nicks that Bud had been to personnel machines would no longer be acceptable.

“I’m mad,” said Katharine, her voice small. “You have no right to go around saying a machine can do what I do.” “Aw, now honey—there wasn’t anything personal in it.”

Lasher sighed. “What do you expect?” he said. “For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men—and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s been shot to hell.

Maybe the actual jobs weren’t being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was.

“You know—those ads about the American system, meaning managers and engineers, that made America great. When you finished one, you’d think the managers and engineers had given America everything: forests, rivers, minerals, mountains, oil—the works.

Yesterday’s snow job becomes today’s sermon.”

It isn’t knowledge that’s making trouble, but the uses it’s put to.”

Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it’s sure to be a bloody business.” “Messiah?” “Sooner or later someone’s going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth—hell, dignity.

“Exactly,” said Lasher. “And it’s built on more than just brain power—it’s built on special kinds of brain power. Not only must a person be bright, he must be bright in certain approved, useful directions: basically, management or engineering.”

“I’m going to get myself a uniform, so I’ll know what I think and stand for.”

Paul did a complicated sum in his mind—his savings account plus his securities plus his house plus his cars—and wondered if he didn’t have enough to enable him simply to quit, to stop being the instrument of any set of beliefs or any whim of history that might raise hell with somebody’s life.

“Yes,” said Khashdrahr, smiling at her oddly, “citizen. The Shah would like to know why she has to do everything so quickly—this in a matter of seconds, that in a matter of seconds. What is it she is in such a hurry to get at? What is it she has to do, that she mustn’t waste any time on these things?”

It does seem like the machines took all the good jobs, where a man could be true to hisself and false to nobody else, and left all the silly ones.

“Almost nobody’s competent, Paul. It’s enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.”

“Well, a fully automatic setup like that makes culture very cheap. Book costs less than seven packs of chewing gum. And there are picture clubs, too—pictures for your walls at amazingly cheap prices. Matter of fact, culture’s so cheap, a man figured he could insulate his house cheaper with books and prints than he could with rockwool. Don’t think it’s true, but it’s a cute story with a good point.”

“The way they keep culture so cheap is by knowing in advance what and how much of it people want. They get it right, right down to the color of the jacket. Gutenberg would be amazed.”

“Why doesn’t he write about clipper ships, or something like that? This book about the old days on the Erie Canal—the man who wrote that is cleaning up. Big demand for that bare-chested stuff.” She shrugged helplessly. “Because he never got mad at clipper ships or the Erie Canal, I guess.”

some of the greatest prophets were crazy as bedbugs.”

The conductor’s plaint, like the lament of so many, wasn’t that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn’t do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do.

was taken into the refrigerated bowels of the station. No cabs had bothered to meet the unpromising train. Paul phoned the cab company, but no one answered. He looked helplessly at the automatic ticket vendor, the automatic nylon vendor, the automatic coffee vendor, the automatic gum vendor, the automatic book vendor, the automatic newspaper vendor, the automatic toothbrush vendor, the automatic Coke vendor, the automatic shoeshine machine, the automatic photo studio, and walked out into the deserted streets on the Homestead side of the river.

“Don’t you see, Doctor?” said Lasher. “The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.”

“And then we get back to basic values, basic virtues!” said Finnerty. “Men doing men’s work, women doing women’s work. People doing people’s thinking.”

“Man has survived Armageddon in order to enter the Eden of eternal peace, only to discover that everything he had looked forward to enjoying there, pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.

“Again, let me say we are all in this together, but the rest of us, for what we perceive as good, plain reasons, have changed our minds about the divine right of machines, efficiency, and organization, just as men of another age changed their minds about the divine right of kings, and about the divine rights of many other things.

“I deny that there is any natural or divine law requiring that machines, efficiency, and organization should forever increase in scope, power, and complexity, in peace as in war. I see the growth of these now, rather, as the result of a dangerous lack of law.

Replacement is not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness.

“These are radical proposals, extremely difficult to put into effect. But the need for their being put into effect is far greater than all of the difficulties, and infinitely greater than the need for our national holy trinity, Efficiency, Economy, and Quality.

“I hold, and the members of the Ghost Shirt Society hold: “That there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, and Man is a creation of God.

“You perhaps disagree with the antique and vain notion of Man’s being a creation of God. “But I find it a far more defensible belief than the one implicit in intemperate faith in lawless technological progress—namely, that man is on earth to create more durable and efficient images of himself, and, hence, to eliminate any justification at all for his own continued existence.

Machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings,” said Paul, “not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”

The street before the police station was snow-white, paved with bits of punctured pasteboard: the fifty-thousand-card deck with which the Ilium personnel and crime-prevention machines had played their tireless games—shuffling, dealing, off the bottom, off the top, out of the middle, palming, marking, reading, faster than the human eye could follow, controlling every card, and implacably protecting the interests of the house, always the house, any house.

“Most fascinating game there is, keeping things from staying the way they are.”

Paul, perhaps, had been the one most out of touch, having had little time for reflection, having been so eager to join a large, confident organization with seeming answers to the problems that had made him sorry to be alive.