Displaced from their own society. DPs. Historically, D.P.s have been an unintentional consequence of war. Here, the unintentionally is not nearly as clear.

Not because of tech. or restructuring as such.

Want to stress this. Tech. is a social constr. and it can be designed, managed and used so as to extend the scope of what people do. But that's only happening for a minority of people -- the new elite of "knowledge workers." In far too many institutions, private and public. technology is not being used to extend what people are doing, but to replace them, and to diminish and control what they do.

That's why there's so much unemployment and underemployment, and why 40 per cent of Cdn. describe themselves as economically distressed. That's also why a good education and hard work will no longer guarantee people meaningful stable work these days. Just recently, there was the case of 2,500 people lining up for a chance to apply for a possible 150 jobs in a big grocery store outside Ottawa, and of 4,000 people applying for the same number of jobs in Montreal.

Machines are replacing people; machine intelligence is replacing human intelligence, judgement and involvement.

3 major trends. 1) more and more goods and services. are being produced with a minimum of human involvement. i.e. jobless ec. growth.

2. computer-simplification of work.. This is turning good jobs into bad jobs. Full time jobs replaced by part-time mcJobs or short-term contracts because system does most of the thinking, organizing, supervising... This is a big blow to women in senior clerical, administration and middle-management as these jobs are being decimated. Not surprisingly, the wage gap is beginning to widen again. (It would be wider still but for the fact that young men's earnings have dropped so precipitously.)

3) Computer simplification of work is also permitting the increasing digital delivery of services and service-support to material goods. Here, computer simplified work is shifted from the paid hands of workers to the unpaid hands of consumers - who then push-button their way through a computerized voice-clip maze to serve themselves in a torrent of new areas of so-called customer-service. The effect here is more jobless ec. growth plus more mcJobs in a two-tiered labour force.

But there's more to this than numbers. We're moving away from an inclusive society of universal standards and universal services toward a society of deepening polarizations. Between over-worked rich, and the barely working or out of work poor, which could intensify into a political one: between the righteous rich and the resentful poor.

Equally there's a technology gap: between those with home-computers and modems and those without -- i.e. the technologically enfranchised from the tech. disenfranchised... Similar disparities in the relations with tech.: Between .those who work with these powerful new information systems, and those who merely work for them, and are controlled by them.

There is a strong gender element in these polarizations, with women disproportionately concentrated at the losing end, on any measure from income to technology have or have-not status. My friend and communication scholar Ellen Balka's research on women's groups and their access to computers, modems and the Internet has documented some troubling disparities between the more professional and grassroots elements of the women's movement. Women are not only losing a lot of the middle-management, clerical and administrative plus skilled manufacturing and service jobs they'd been getting in recent decades. They're concentrated in the occupations most likely to be strongly affected by the move to telework. Not only are call centres growing by leaps and bounds - over 5,000 in Onto alone.