People are being replaced by computers in many Canadian industries, including banking, oil refining, pulp and paper, and telecommunications. And where they remain, they are becoming hand servants, or “human post-it notes” as Heather Menzies calls them in her new book, Whose Brave New World?

In this, her fourth book on technology and restructuring, Menzies attacks the corporate world for computerizing the workplace at the expense, primarily, of employees, but also of the consumers who buy their products and use their services. We have created a society, she says, that places productivity and profits ahead of people.

Menzies, an Ottawa-based writer and teacher, divides her book into three sections. In part one, she argues that social spending and deficit reduction aren’t the country’s main problems. These issues are, she writes, merely part of a larger corporate agenda associated with technological restructuring; the growth of the information highway being the final step in creating a global economic system. She says corporations, in Canada and the world at large, are making profits at the expense of the population at large. In part two, she discusses the link between technological restructuring and unemployment, jobless economic growth, and a new breed of servant-employees who act as mindless operatives of computers. In the last part of the book, she talks about how society can solve these problems.

Her solutions are both general and specific. Generally, she believes that we, as a society, have to change the agenda to a more people-oriented approach that serves both workers and consumers. She persuasively argues that we have to concentrate on creating interesting and fulfilling jobs in a technologically restructured world. At the same time, we have to ensure consumers have access to people when a computer can’t give them the help they need.

Specifically, she proposes such things as a special tax on computers that would slow the growth of the industry. At times like this, Menzies seems to forget that her real beef is with capitalism, not technology. The computer is merely a tool of a system that values profits more than it values employee happiness. It is not the problem itself. Computers don’t fire people. People fire people.

Menzies suggests some progressive ways of dealing with problems associated with technological restructuring, such as shifting the emphasis back to people and away from productivity and profits. She also suggests some regressive steps – the punitive “head tax” on computers being the most prominent example. On balance, though, the book is a worthwhile read, if for no other reason than because it challenges the widely held notion that computerization has been a net gain for society.