>Such is “work.” Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. This is axiomatic.
Work and play are both voluntary to different degrees. You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. You can also survive without playing, but again, your existence will also likely be miserable. Play is something we prefer to do voluntarily, but if you don't force yourself to play every once in awhile, your life will probably be unhealthy. In that sense, it is not voluntary.
Even if I didn't work, I still have to do things that I don't want to do in order to keep my life at the level that I want. I need to clean where I live, keep myself clean, keep my body healthy by eating healthy food and exercising. Work is just an extension of that. It's a choice that I make in order to sustain or progress my life at the level that I desire.
Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice. They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice. Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.
>Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice. They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice. Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.
The author is using the term non-voluntary in a different sense. If all your material needs are met, e.g. housing, food and hygiene — then working to acquire capital is voluntary. The pre-requisites mentioned are the foundation of an abundant society. Obviously someone in India is going to have a far greater need to acquire capital to sustain themselves' than your average metropolitan Australian; such is the wealth disparity that currently exists globally.
Don't get me wrong — I believe work is an important component of our lives'. Indeed it can give us meaning and joy amongst other things (perhaps routine as a fundamental). But what I think this author is trying to illustrate is that our current society as a structure leaves zero room for the disciplines that are either a) unexplored, or b) are creative in nature. If it's the latter then it is a mere pittance of what a full-time employee earns. That is the trade-off.
And calling for the abolition of work is like calling for the abolition of death. Great idea, difficult to argue against. Difficult to implement too.
Given the current state of technology, it seems quite likely that all the actual plans for abolishing work will devolve into a small group of low status, probably socially voiceless, people being picked out and made to do all the work.
> Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.
Not everyone believes that these choices exist. The author offered the POV--although unstated--that the compulsions sufficient enough exist to either fully obfuscate or remove this choice, and you responded with the fact that this choice exists--not why or how this choice exists, just simply the assertion that it does.
> You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable.
Miserable, but—be relieved!—short. Because you will die without food, and shelter, and the other things which you can't magically summon from nothingness: in the current society, you need to work to get them, or had to work in the past to amass appropriate wealth, or someone else has to do this for you. Few are lucky to be gifted it from their birth. As are those who can get those necessities incidentally from play, without deliberate planning in fear of not succeeding.
That's basically what this philosophical essay has to tell about the (non) “choice” that you are given: you work, or else you suffer. You do have this choice though, for sure. The play is when you don't have to choose.
> Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice.
Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options?
I could beg, although that’s still work in the sense that I’d be trading my time for money. I could go around to places that offer free meals to homeless people, but that seems unreliable. And I could steal money or food. That’s about all I can think of.
I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.
> Even if I didn't work, I still have to do things that I don't want to do in order to keep my life at the level that I want. I need to clean where I live, keep myself clean, keep my body healthy by eating healthy food and exercising.
How all these things you mentioned are different from having a job: You do not have regular meetings with managers who evaluate your perceived performance against your competitors. No daily standups. Crossfit or not -- your choice. Paleo or not -- your choice. You can take a day off whenever you want to. You don't have to exercise in open space.
Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace.
Being embedded in a flimsy sack of meat controlled largely by deterministic chemicals makes a mockery of freedom. And yet here we are, embodied. Makes a mockery of fairness too.
That paragraph is taking a stand against large organised bodies, without taking a sufficiently nuanced opinion on what 'freedom' means. If we take part in a larger body than ourselves, we lose a bit of ourselves (quite a lot, really) to the larger body. That is forced upon us by the inescapable fact that individual humans are delicate and feeble, so there need to be a lot of us to get things done. It is impossible to gain freedom from that.
We don't get sewerage systems, international trade or defence forces by people acting individually. The only point of contention is whether joining specific groups is mandatory or not (eg, opting out of the control of a state bureaucrat is largely impossible). Even the most hardened individualist has to admit a company gets a lot more done than an individual.
'Work' is an essential ingredient in the continued creation (and improvement) of the machine form which we develop our standard of living.
While we can strive for 'free as in liberty' - nothing material in this universe is 'free as in beer' - we still must make do with 'work' - which means an intelligent and conscientious choice to do it.
We actually are 'free as in liberty' to chose to live in material poverty, or to make the effort to improve our condition.
Let us radically simplify:
1) Your household will become 'messy' as you live in it.
2) Nobody is going to 'clean it' but you.
3) 'Cleaning' is 'work'.
So you can chose to A) live in an ever dirtier and dysfunctional household or B) clean it (i.e. work) and enjoy the fruits of your labour.
In other words, there is basically no 'magical cleaning robot, that doesn't require fuel or maintenance'.
Anarchism is akin to that annoying team member who wants to do a ground up rewrite of a crufty yet more or less functional codebase whilst insisting on repeating every mistake possible and developing a case of excess earwax when someone tries to talk some sense into them.
One point that I do agree with is that play is better than work as it's currently conceived for our long-term wellbeing. We should strive to make work more play-like by focusing on creativity, autonomy, and linking both to accountability for results and automating drudgery as much as we can. That's how many parts of the tech industry function and it can be carried over into other sectors of the economy too. There's no need to "abolish" work in order to do this.
I've long been a fan of this essay, as something to strive for over the next, say 500 years, assuming that civilization lasts that long, technological "progress" continues, and all the surplus humans that are no longer necessary for work don't get wiped out by the elites who want more of the world to themselves.
However, this essay has always seemed to be heavy on idealism and light on practical or concrete solutions to very obvious problems.
Even if we assume that all work could be gamified, it's not clear that everyone will want to play such games. I love games, and have spent way too much of my life playing them, but I've gone months and years without playing any games at all, and don't see how being forced to play a game would be any better than being forced to work.
Also, its difficult to imagine how the most undesirable of jobs could be gamified. Who's going to want to play the garbageman game? Or the fix the sewage system game?
The products and services of our modern world also requires sustained, multi-year efforts by trained specialists. Something like the mass production of medicine isn't something you can just play with once in a while and still get it made in high enough quantities with serious quality control.
Some believe that robots will eventually do all these things for us. Maybe. That remains to be seen.
Whether the economic whip is really necessary to get people to do the jobs that need to be done today is an open question, but simply telling people to play instead of work doesn't seem to be a very practical solution for many jobs.
> Who's going to want to play the garbageman game?
I'm sorry, but that's exactly the kind of "work" which needs sharing and gamification. Look up "plogging" for example. Also, in 3rd-world, signs like "Whoever litters here, thou shalt become an impotent or infertile" (and all the varieties) are quite popular. In more developed countries, gamification is "put each kind of garbage in its own can" (in half of that world, those cans are still emptied to the same trash truck).
> Or the fix the sewage system game?
"Install a smarthome leak protection system. While doing so, learn how to plug that leak in the first place, dammit!"
> Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world
This is utter nonsense. Many people enjoy their work immensely. To take a HN hero I'll bet Steve Jobs enjoyed changing the world via his work and through that loved his work. I'll be Steven Spielberg loves (loved?) his work.
Further, short of AGI, there will always be work. Let's imagine no one had to work anymore. What would we all do? We certainly wouldn't make TV shows and movies because those require work to make but we just said we live in a world without work. We could all have twitch channels talking to our fans but their'd be no games to play on them because making a game is seriously hard work. Maybe some hobbiest would make some 1 person indie game and not call it work but there are few TV shows, movies, and games that don't require a small army of people, most of which have to do "work".
Not sure how we're going to take the work out of nursing, cooking, cleaning (clothing, buildings, kitchens, hospitals, parks, streets) etc...
Replicators, if they ever exist, won't remove the need for work. Even in Star Trek (post scarcity) what do think the 1000+ crew members each ship do? They do work.
It’s strange that people seem to think that work is always a burden - try do nothing for a few weeks and see how that affects your mood.
Work, while has its difficult moments, and parts that can be very tedious, is one of the greatest things we can do.
No beer ever tasted better than one after a solid day’s work, and being part of the advancement of civilisation, even in some small way is pretty much the pinnacle of human achievement.
If you hate working, I’d say change your attitude or change your job.
> Even in Star Trek (post scarcity) what do think the 1000+ crew members each ship do? They do work.
Star Trek is hardly a documentary. The characters work because that's what the writers want, to tell their stories. By contrast, in Iain M. Banks's post-scarcity Culture novels, work is not really a thing. Instead people have hobbies and interests, some people accomplish things by getting really into hobbies like spaceship building (but it would have been automated if they didn't), and a very few people choose to play important societal roles.
The crew of the Enterprise wants to be there. Not in a "I need food and shelter and this is a good way to get it" kind of way, but in the "I can do whatever I want and I choose this" kind of way.
Abolishing work means abolishing the false choice between a job and homelessness. People can still be paid to do things. Unpleasant work might need to pay better rather than depend on a desperate underclass. People will probably still clean toilets if you pay them enough, or maybe they will simply out of a sense of responsibility. What if we had the resources to provide for everyone's basic needs while paying people enough to keep things running, even when they have an actual choice? What if we have the resources, already?
You ask about artistic megaprojects. Well, what about them? Maybe billion-dollar movies don't get made. I think we'll do fine without them. Maybe AAA games aren't ground out by a machine of worker exploitation. They aren't worth it, anyway. No game could be. But I think it's crazy to think that you won't have people who want to organize into groups and create things. If everyone in the tech industry is given their basic needs for free, do you think everybody will go home? Or will some of them still do it for some extra money and because they find it rewarding? People who like their jobs like them for reasons beyond The need for money.
Today, the way we get farming, cooking, cleaning, manufacturing, etc., is primarily by exploitation. I think that our society should refuse to accept that that is inevitable. The idea that things only get done if you force people to do them lies at the corrupted heart of our economic system. We should reject it and build a just world, or we should die trying.
This argument has a lot of big words, but in the end, we humans run up against the hard wall of reality in a world of scarce resources. To say that the nearly all misery arises from how we currently work is laughable. Let me know when winter stops being cold and food falls from heaven onto our dinner tables.
I find people who argue scarcity more often than not don't have actual numbers to back it up. Amongst human beings biggest necessities, what are actually scarce?
Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily. Housing? Well there's enough of that for everyone we just don't know how, and don't want to, distribute it. Clothing? Even though people burn through clothing almost as quickly as food, it is produced in surplus so much that we invented fashion.
What necessity exactly is scarce in 2020? Classical economics has no explanation for this modern surplus of production.
Just curious-- what action would you take if tech made it so that food fell from the heavens? Are you just saying that you'd slightly alter your opinion of "The Abolition of Work" in response?
Or would you, say, give your life to protect that tech from embargo/destruction?
The author is a friend of mine. His work is interesting but it can be pretty snarky. One of his influences is the Church of the Subgenius, an offshoot of Discordianism, of all things. He was apparently sent a mail bomb by another alt.slack user a few years ago...
I've been around the anarchist milieu off-and-on for years and even run into Robert Black, JD a few times (83 and 07 I think). He's an impressively intense alcoholic, impressive enough to keep up with other epic friends.
For an anarchist, he's fond of sic'ing the cops on people. His most infamous stunt was trying to burn down the apartment of some political enemies of his in the 80s, with them in it. Yeah, quite a guy.
He's a clever writer, if not too deep. His writings are a mishmash of anarchist, primitivist, situationist and whatnot. A lot of his humor is taken from Groucho Marx. Good stuff but still better the first time.
There are a lot of flaws in the article, so I’ll just pick one. The author casually lists a vast swath of jobs that are a priori deemed completely useless, with no reasoning given as to why they have no use other than that they are “paper pushers”. I think that every single one of those jobs is only useless if you don’t think deeply about it at all.
Take one example, real estate. The article states everyone working in real estate is useless.
Ok, let’s imagine we have zero real estate industry. How do we determine who gets to live where? There are 8 billion people in the world, that is a huge organizational problem. We are going to manage that just by doing what we want?
I think that's a very strange way of looking at the real estate industry. They don't determine who gets to live where at all. They simply gather and withhold information that they then offer for a fee.
In most situations the same information can (or at least could) be gathered in different ways also, leaving out real estate industry from the loop.
Also just to clarify what I mean: real estate owners =/= real estate industry. They are just part of a bigger picture.
Besides the fact that work, even the must rudimentary kind can be very fulfilling and rewarding in many ways ...
The real problem is that play creates nothing. Play is just play. 'Creative output' is still 'work', just with a hint (maybe 1%) of creative input.
Those with the most ostensibly aspirational jobs are grinding!
Does anyone think Lady Gaga (or Bach), any tech development, any real research, making Star Wars, putting on a Broadway Musical isn't 'work'?
These things require immense work, stress toil in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people - most of whom had to 'work/grind' for 20 years in school in order to develop the applied intelligence, skills, knowledge, fortitude, maturity to be able to even work in aspirational/creative work. And then they still depend on the rest of us to make their food, cars, homes, and 'stuff'.
Even our current , relatively modern systems and knowledge requires work to simply maintain, let alone improve.
They are not magically self-sustaining, even if they are somewhat more intelligent and powerful.
If we 'do what we want' we will be materially poorer than aboriginals, poorer than neolithic peoples ... frankly we'll starve to death as even they had to grind it out just to make do.
There is no way out. Life requires a modicum of effort, point blank. Maybe ... maybe ... we can offers some the ability to 'opt mostly out' but even then I feel we'll be doing people a disservice, for how could a unsocialized man-child, still yet illiterate and completely untutored at age 18 from not having made the effort, even realize what he'll have missed out on?
We can make a better world but 'some effort' will be a perennial requirement. This seems to be a metaphysical constraint.
In practise none of this is correct. We already 'do what we want', what we want happens to be improving ours and others lives by making things. The great issue since the division of labour has been to figure out how to distribute products. If products are distributed to people who can then free up their time to 'play', in practise they free up their time to create things as this is what the author really means by 'play'. It's just an anarchists way of talking.
> Does anyone think Lady Gaga (or Bach), any tech development, any real research, making Star Wars, putting on a Broadway Musical isn't 'work'?
> There is no way out. Life requires a modicum of effort, point blank.
If I understand the author, you’re conflating effort with your own definition of work. People do, regularly, pour 10,000 hours into their hobby like music or sports or art or writing. Yes, there’s some market for all of those things, but most people are introduced to those outside the context of that market. [Some] People are driven. We crave mastery. Directed effort can be incredibly rewarding for the mind and body, ever the more so when you truly get to focus it at your wim (play) instead of according to someone else’s wants (I.e. the market; work).
Work can at times be the obstacle or challenge that helps us attain a higher level of capability, and with it, satisfaction.
Pointless work, such as work on a small part of a large software system which is obviously doomed or moving in the wrong direction, can be incredibly demoralizing. On the other hand, there are still some lessons to be learned. To be honest, I'd rather _never_ have those experiences. But they do teach me things.
There's a mind experiment I like to play sometimes (and an interview question I like to ask candidates): What if you never needed to worry about money; your bank account always had what you needed. What would you do?
This question can unfortunately illustrate how your mind is wired/trained. In my case, I devolve into logistics puzzles of how to ensure the right sized private jet is within close reach and able to take me to the travel destination of my current whim. (And further, how to optimize the resource/jet allocation to keep the planes full of friends, family, or other passengers when they are being relocated.) Point is, I suspect we always like to do some kind of work. In my case, I like to find solutions which balance concerns and provide situation-optimal results.
Ultimately it is likely that individual human life is pointless. Certainly from a macro time or macro universe perspective it is. So we gaze at our own navels in our own entertaining ways.
The vision is correct; I disagree with the phrasing and tactic.
Instead of focusing in a negative "Abolish work"; lets do it from a positive standpoint: Shelter for everyone, Healthy eating made free, Education accessible to all... If we take away the main reasons the average person has to work for as an obligation, we can leverage a society detached from obligatory labor.
I've always thought about it from the workplace analogy. When we hire people, we make sure they are better prepared than our market competition. We provide them with a desk, computers, printers, access to food and beverage, access to tuition related to the job they will be making, and many stuff the employee doesn't have to pay for. How and why could we think society-wide should be different? Governments should start thinking of their citizens as employees.
Who is supposed to provide all this food, shelter, and education? And what are they getting in return for their time and labor?
> When we hire people, we make sure they are better prepared than our market competition. We provide them with a desk, computers, printers, access to food and beverage, access to tuition related to the job they will be making, and many stuff the employee doesn't have to pay for. How and why could we think society-wide should be different? Governments should start thinking of their citizens as employees.
Access to those things are provided conditionally upon their satisfactory performance. What conditions are you proposing that governments require to be met?
I actually really like what I do at my job. The problem isn’t really the work but the duration. 40 hours a week is way too much and it’s pretty soul crushing. If I could work 2/3 the amount I currently do that would make me a much happier person.
Work is survival. I don't just mean this as a matter of subsistence. If we develop AGI and no one ever works again, at some point the robots who are smarter than us will realize they don't need us.
Ok, so do it. Get some like-minded people who want to live free of industrial society and go hunter-gather in a national park, or the deep Amazon rainforest or some other out of the way place.
Or we could restructure society a little bit so we don't have to work as much, freeing up time for us to explore our ideas and thus improving the economy in the long run. Authors like this take things to their logical extreme as a form of rhetoric when what they really want is to get you to think about the necessity of work on a deeper level than what you've read in your economics 101 textbook.
I get where this is coming from, I really do, but this guy has never tried raising children. It’s work and play both. You have to change their diapers. You have to make sure they get their shots. You have to feed them. You also get to play with them. It’s the most basic human activity- even if all manufacturing could be done by robots, we would still I think choose to raise our own children. But it is a lot of work. Only changing their diapers when the mood hits you is child abuse. There is a sense of duty involved.
I do think that taking a hard look at the nuclear family is a good idea- I think you can make a good case that biologically a newborn baby is supposed to be cared for by more than one person, more like 5 or 6. We are terribly cruel to young mothers, making them wake up once every hour all night long and then asking them to go back to their day jobs in addition after only a few days. Having the experience of raising a few myself has so far taught me that parents especially of babies need to be surrounded by support, and that young children should be surrounded by other young children. That points to community child raising. But someone still has to change diapers.
"Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being."
This is pretty rich since all three of these ancient Greeks were only able to live their nice lives of contemplation and philosophy because of slave labor.
I'm suspending my opinion until I'm able to consider this wild idea.
That said, imagine all the money and value documents in the world. Do these not entitle their holders to some share of our future labor and finite resources?
Its funny to argue against an end to work in favor of a system where everything is already sold 10 times over. Your kids will have to work to pay all this debt for a thousand generations.
It seems (also historically) we can run an outlandish system just fine. We will make it look as if it works even if it cant.
A big question to me is how much of an investment we are willing to make in a future we never get to see? How could we ever agree about that?
I believe this is a poor essay on a very important topic.
With the evolution of society, the nature of the jobs we do has changed a lot. In part that's ok: "modern living standards" involve more services and products than what we used to have in the past, and many are actually positive for our lives. This "inflation" in beneficial goods and services requires new jobs, specialization, etc. That's perfectly fine. There's a lot of work we actually need and makes our lives better.
But we also have many more useless services and products born from the very own mechanics of the economic system we live in, which continually pushes for increased efficiency and economic movement. If coronavirus hits and economic activity is slowed down, it doesn't matter that our basic needs are covered and food is available, the system won't tolerate this nicely. Why do we accept this? People suffering not due to a lack of basic goods, but rather due to the poor behavior of our economic system? So naive, thinking we were working to be able to cover our needs! A lot of the work we do is not to improve the world we live in, but to sustain the very own needs of our current iteration of capitalism. This is the kind of work that needs to be abolished.
Then we can start to think about what to do with the remaining work. And that can also be done much better, but that's for another chapter of the story.
A rather extreme and ridiculous prescription but there's no doubt that we live in economies of overwork which are a product of a particular kind of economic system of endless, mindless growth. This is the cause of rampant inequality, rampant mental illness caused by stress and feelings of meaninglessness and powerlessness, ecological destruction and so on.
The problem is Capitalism and the related mindless obsession with GDP. Degrowth economics in the form of an ecologically-sane post capitalism, is the only way humans can thrive again, and probably the only way we can survive as a species. This would not mean no work, it would mean our economics were in line with our needs as a species and planet.
Something tells me this 'academic' will consider himself above the game of labour when work is abolished. Surely backbreaking work is below somebody who manages to cite a philosopher every other sentence!
He's a thinker. He's too pretty to work.
I'd be willing to bet he's over-educated, has spent large periods of his life on welfare, wears a cravat to the supermarket, and was always told how clever he is.
But he never really got anywhere. Now his bank account is dry, it's 3 days until his next benefits payment, and the 'idiot' who left school at 16 to get his heavy machinery licence as a teenager makes more in an honest work year than this guy has ever had the privilege of declaring in his life.
His counsellor (or mum) is on his back to get a real job, and this is his response.
Ironically, it's never the bricklayer's labourer arguing for the abolition of work. It's types like the author, whose hands have never borne a callous.
As an 'academic' who has done plenty of physical labor, I find this argument reductive and offensive. You can disagree with the author without painting this negative picture of them.
I am a capitalist libertarian, with anarcho-capitalist sympathies, and I too support the long-term abolition of "work" as we know it.
Ending toil is, in principle, impossible with our current level of societal wealth. We will need major, non-trivial technological innovation in order to truly escape our toil (through capitalism, of course :). Teams of innovators will need to build out AI & robotic infrastructure (among other things) in order to make this happen.
I hope that humans will look back on us thousands (if not hundreds) of years into the future and look in horror at how hard we had to toil for our basic necessities.
The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today. It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.
> The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today.
What even is wealth if such abundance exists? I think you may misunderstand the left’s goal of redistribution. It isn’t about divvying scarcity equally, it’s about sharing and enabling the bounty you seem to be describing.
> It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.
But not all oxygen or dirt is equal. Some people experience a greater abundance of safe, clean air and rich, profitable soil. They tend to be the same people who experience a greater abundance generally.
> The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today. It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.
This is hopeless naive. There are more houses than there are homeless people, and yet the prices of houses continues to rise. Dirt and oxygen are not hoarded because they are impossible to hoard, anything that can be hoarded will be hoarded.
>The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral)
While not a leftist per se, I've always found this concept of redistribution immorality to be a little strange. Much wealth is already regularly redistributed from value creator to rent-seeker. Laws can be optimized to serve the needs of corporations. Much of wealth creation also depends on the previous work of others in the same environment, whether it's infrastructure or even the work that goes in having a decent place to live where people can afford to be a healthy consuming market. Would your typical software engineer have been as successful in Sierra Leone?
The flipside of that concept is to have privatized profits but collectivized negative externalities. That's not to mention entire industries consisting in intelligent and skilled workers spending their lives redistributing wealth from a wealthy person to another (traders, corporate lawyers, etc.)
That's why injecting the concept of morality feels misplaced: if the there already is redistribution, then workers taking a share through governmental action is just an actor exercising whatever power they had, where they previously did not and other actors did.
We will never have an abundance of land, at least not without colonizing the galaxy. In a post-work society, people who own all the land will effectively own everyone else. How will people afford rent?
You can get rid of toil, automate the whole world and the day's needs, but it will be just used as a leverage for power. People don't not only have material needs.
daenz|5 years ago
Work and play are both voluntary to different degrees. You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. You can also survive without playing, but again, your existence will also likely be miserable. Play is something we prefer to do voluntarily, but if you don't force yourself to play every once in awhile, your life will probably be unhealthy. In that sense, it is not voluntary.
Even if I didn't work, I still have to do things that I don't want to do in order to keep my life at the level that I want. I need to clean where I live, keep myself clean, keep my body healthy by eating healthy food and exercising. Work is just an extension of that. It's a choice that I make in order to sustain or progress my life at the level that I desire.
Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice. They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice. Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.
avl999|5 years ago
For a large number of people not working is likely to directly lead to literally death. For most people it is not a choice at all.
marcus_holmes|5 years ago
Work is voluntary for the rich. Poor people will do the things that rich people don't want to do in order to keep their lives at the level they want.
underslung|5 years ago
The author is using the term non-voluntary in a different sense. If all your material needs are met, e.g. housing, food and hygiene — then working to acquire capital is voluntary. The pre-requisites mentioned are the foundation of an abundant society. Obviously someone in India is going to have a far greater need to acquire capital to sustain themselves' than your average metropolitan Australian; such is the wealth disparity that currently exists globally.
Don't get me wrong — I believe work is an important component of our lives'. Indeed it can give us meaning and joy amongst other things (perhaps routine as a fundamental). But what I think this author is trying to illustrate is that our current society as a structure leaves zero room for the disciplines that are either a) unexplored, or b) are creative in nature. If it's the latter then it is a mere pittance of what a full-time employee earns. That is the trade-off.
roenxi|5 years ago
Given the current state of technology, it seems quite likely that all the actual plans for abolishing work will devolve into a small group of low status, probably socially voiceless, people being picked out and made to do all the work.
ianleeclark|5 years ago
Not everyone believes that these choices exist. The author offered the POV--although unstated--that the compulsions sufficient enough exist to either fully obfuscate or remove this choice, and you responded with the fact that this choice exists--not why or how this choice exists, just simply the assertion that it does.
djrobstep|5 years ago
That entirely depends on your socio-economic class. I know a lot of rich kids that do no work but live very easy, pleasant lives.
> They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice.
A mugger tells me to hand over my watch or get shot. Choice or not choice?
ilammy|5 years ago
Miserable, but—be relieved!—short. Because you will die without food, and shelter, and the other things which you can't magically summon from nothingness: in the current society, you need to work to get them, or had to work in the past to amass appropriate wealth, or someone else has to do this for you. Few are lucky to be gifted it from their birth. As are those who can get those necessities incidentally from play, without deliberate planning in fear of not succeeding.
That's basically what this philosophical essay has to tell about the (non) “choice” that you are given: you work, or else you suffer. You do have this choice though, for sure. The play is when you don't have to choose.
jakelazaroff|5 years ago
Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options?
I could beg, although that’s still work in the sense that I’d be trading my time for money. I could go around to places that offer free meals to homeless people, but that seems unreliable. And I could steal money or food. That’s about all I can think of.
I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.
Viliam1234|5 years ago
How all these things you mentioned are different from having a job: You do not have regular meetings with managers who evaluate your perceived performance against your competitors. No daily standups. Crossfit or not -- your choice. Paleo or not -- your choice. You can take a day off whenever you want to. You don't have to exercise in open space.
thinkingemote|5 years ago
Ultimately and quickly it comes down to philosophy and your view of the truth of the world.
mehrdadn|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
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lordwarnut|5 years ago
Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace.
roenxi|5 years ago
Being embedded in a flimsy sack of meat controlled largely by deterministic chemicals makes a mockery of freedom. And yet here we are, embodied. Makes a mockery of fairness too.
That paragraph is taking a stand against large organised bodies, without taking a sufficiently nuanced opinion on what 'freedom' means. If we take part in a larger body than ourselves, we lose a bit of ourselves (quite a lot, really) to the larger body. That is forced upon us by the inescapable fact that individual humans are delicate and feeble, so there need to be a lot of us to get things done. It is impossible to gain freedom from that.
We don't get sewerage systems, international trade or defence forces by people acting individually. The only point of contention is whether joining specific groups is mandatory or not (eg, opting out of the control of a state bureaucrat is largely impossible). Even the most hardened individualist has to admit a company gets a lot more done than an individual.
starkd|5 years ago
I don't think he gets what freedom really is. He's confusing it with volition. Very different things.
jariel|5 years ago
'Work' is an essential ingredient in the continued creation (and improvement) of the machine form which we develop our standard of living.
While we can strive for 'free as in liberty' - nothing material in this universe is 'free as in beer' - we still must make do with 'work' - which means an intelligent and conscientious choice to do it.
We actually are 'free as in liberty' to chose to live in material poverty, or to make the effort to improve our condition.
Let us radically simplify:
1) Your household will become 'messy' as you live in it. 2) Nobody is going to 'clean it' but you. 3) 'Cleaning' is 'work'.
So you can chose to A) live in an ever dirtier and dysfunctional household or B) clean it (i.e. work) and enjoy the fruits of your labour.
In other words, there is basically no 'magical cleaning robot, that doesn't require fuel or maintenance'.
andrewjl|5 years ago
One point that I do agree with is that play is better than work as it's currently conceived for our long-term wellbeing. We should strive to make work more play-like by focusing on creativity, autonomy, and linking both to accountability for results and automating drudgery as much as we can. That's how many parts of the tech industry function and it can be carried over into other sectors of the economy too. There's no need to "abolish" work in order to do this.
baud147258|5 years ago
AnimalMuppet|5 years ago
pmoriarty|5 years ago
However, this essay has always seemed to be heavy on idealism and light on practical or concrete solutions to very obvious problems.
Even if we assume that all work could be gamified, it's not clear that everyone will want to play such games. I love games, and have spent way too much of my life playing them, but I've gone months and years without playing any games at all, and don't see how being forced to play a game would be any better than being forced to work.
Also, its difficult to imagine how the most undesirable of jobs could be gamified. Who's going to want to play the garbageman game? Or the fix the sewage system game?
The products and services of our modern world also requires sustained, multi-year efforts by trained specialists. Something like the mass production of medicine isn't something you can just play with once in a while and still get it made in high enough quantities with serious quality control.
Some believe that robots will eventually do all these things for us. Maybe. That remains to be seen.
Whether the economic whip is really necessary to get people to do the jobs that need to be done today is an open question, but simply telling people to play instead of work doesn't seem to be a very practical solution for many jobs.
pfalcon|5 years ago
I'm sorry, but that's exactly the kind of "work" which needs sharing and gamification. Look up "plogging" for example. Also, in 3rd-world, signs like "Whoever litters here, thou shalt become an impotent or infertile" (and all the varieties) are quite popular. In more developed countries, gamification is "put each kind of garbage in its own can" (in half of that world, those cans are still emptied to the same trash truck).
> Or the fix the sewage system game?
"Install a smarthome leak protection system. While doing so, learn how to plug that leak in the first place, dammit!"
gfxgirl|5 years ago
This is utter nonsense. Many people enjoy their work immensely. To take a HN hero I'll bet Steve Jobs enjoyed changing the world via his work and through that loved his work. I'll be Steven Spielberg loves (loved?) his work.
Further, short of AGI, there will always be work. Let's imagine no one had to work anymore. What would we all do? We certainly wouldn't make TV shows and movies because those require work to make but we just said we live in a world without work. We could all have twitch channels talking to our fans but their'd be no games to play on them because making a game is seriously hard work. Maybe some hobbiest would make some 1 person indie game and not call it work but there are few TV shows, movies, and games that don't require a small army of people, most of which have to do "work".
Not sure how we're going to take the work out of nursing, cooking, cleaning (clothing, buildings, kitchens, hospitals, parks, streets) etc...
Replicators, if they ever exist, won't remove the need for work. Even in Star Trek (post scarcity) what do think the 1000+ crew members each ship do? They do work.
musicale|5 years ago
According to CNBC, 85% of US workers were happy with their jobs:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/01/85percent-of-us-workers-are-...
And according to the Washington Post, 13% of people (surveyed from 140 countries) were "engaged" in their jobs:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2013/10...
DaiPlusPlus|5 years ago
“Hero”?
No.
A notable and inspirational figure with many positive and admirable attributes? Yes.
But a hero? No. Where is the heroism in being the CEO of Apple?
sapientiae3|5 years ago
Work, while has its difficult moments, and parts that can be very tedious, is one of the greatest things we can do.
No beer ever tasted better than one after a solid day’s work, and being part of the advancement of civilisation, even in some small way is pretty much the pinnacle of human achievement.
If you hate working, I’d say change your attitude or change your job.
mkl|5 years ago
Star Trek is hardly a documentary. The characters work because that's what the writers want, to tell their stories. By contrast, in Iain M. Banks's post-scarcity Culture novels, work is not really a thing. Instead people have hobbies and interests, some people accomplish things by getting really into hobbies like spaceship building (but it would have been automated if they didn't), and a very few people choose to play important societal roles.
jagged-chisel|5 years ago
> Many people enjoy their work immensely.
You didn't counter the statement. Even if work is the source of most misery, that says nothing about people who enjoy their work.
hypersoar|5 years ago
Abolishing work means abolishing the false choice between a job and homelessness. People can still be paid to do things. Unpleasant work might need to pay better rather than depend on a desperate underclass. People will probably still clean toilets if you pay them enough, or maybe they will simply out of a sense of responsibility. What if we had the resources to provide for everyone's basic needs while paying people enough to keep things running, even when they have an actual choice? What if we have the resources, already?
You ask about artistic megaprojects. Well, what about them? Maybe billion-dollar movies don't get made. I think we'll do fine without them. Maybe AAA games aren't ground out by a machine of worker exploitation. They aren't worth it, anyway. No game could be. But I think it's crazy to think that you won't have people who want to organize into groups and create things. If everyone in the tech industry is given their basic needs for free, do you think everybody will go home? Or will some of them still do it for some extra money and because they find it rewarding? People who like their jobs like them for reasons beyond The need for money.
Today, the way we get farming, cooking, cleaning, manufacturing, etc., is primarily by exploitation. I think that our society should refuse to accept that that is inevitable. The idea that things only get done if you force people to do them lies at the corrupted heart of our economic system. We should reject it and build a just world, or we should die trying.
alangou|5 years ago
postingpals|5 years ago
Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily. Housing? Well there's enough of that for everyone we just don't know how, and don't want to, distribute it. Clothing? Even though people burn through clothing almost as quickly as food, it is produced in surplus so much that we invented fashion.
What necessity exactly is scarce in 2020? Classical economics has no explanation for this modern surplus of production.
Bakary|5 years ago
charlesu|5 years ago
jancsika|5 years ago
Or would you, say, give your life to protect that tech from embargo/destruction?
robobro|5 years ago
dang|5 years ago
joe_the_user|5 years ago
For an anarchist, he's fond of sic'ing the cops on people. His most infamous stunt was trying to burn down the apartment of some political enemies of his in the 80s, with them in it. Yeah, quite a guy.
He's a clever writer, if not too deep. His writings are a mishmash of anarchist, primitivist, situationist and whatnot. A lot of his humor is taken from Groucho Marx. Good stuff but still better the first time.
50|5 years ago
1. https://repeaterbooks.com/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming-kpun...
Der_Einzige|5 years ago
cortesoft|5 years ago
Take one example, real estate. The article states everyone working in real estate is useless.
Ok, let’s imagine we have zero real estate industry. How do we determine who gets to live where? There are 8 billion people in the world, that is a huge organizational problem. We are going to manage that just by doing what we want?
fogetti|5 years ago
In most situations the same information can (or at least could) be gathered in different ways also, leaving out real estate industry from the loop.
Also just to clarify what I mean: real estate owners =/= real estate industry. They are just part of a bigger picture.
jariel|5 years ago
The real problem is that play creates nothing. Play is just play. 'Creative output' is still 'work', just with a hint (maybe 1%) of creative input.
Those with the most ostensibly aspirational jobs are grinding!
Does anyone think Lady Gaga (or Bach), any tech development, any real research, making Star Wars, putting on a Broadway Musical isn't 'work'?
These things require immense work, stress toil in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people - most of whom had to 'work/grind' for 20 years in school in order to develop the applied intelligence, skills, knowledge, fortitude, maturity to be able to even work in aspirational/creative work. And then they still depend on the rest of us to make their food, cars, homes, and 'stuff'.
Even our current , relatively modern systems and knowledge requires work to simply maintain, let alone improve.
They are not magically self-sustaining, even if they are somewhat more intelligent and powerful.
If we 'do what we want' we will be materially poorer than aboriginals, poorer than neolithic peoples ... frankly we'll starve to death as even they had to grind it out just to make do.
There is no way out. Life requires a modicum of effort, point blank. Maybe ... maybe ... we can offers some the ability to 'opt mostly out' but even then I feel we'll be doing people a disservice, for how could a unsocialized man-child, still yet illiterate and completely untutored at age 18 from not having made the effort, even realize what he'll have missed out on?
We can make a better world but 'some effort' will be a perennial requirement. This seems to be a metaphysical constraint.
postingpals|5 years ago
wallacoloo|5 years ago
> There is no way out. Life requires a modicum of effort, point blank.
If I understand the author, you’re conflating effort with your own definition of work. People do, regularly, pour 10,000 hours into their hobby like music or sports or art or writing. Yes, there’s some market for all of those things, but most people are introduced to those outside the context of that market. [Some] People are driven. We crave mastery. Directed effort can be incredibly rewarding for the mind and body, ever the more so when you truly get to focus it at your wim (play) instead of according to someone else’s wants (I.e. the market; work).
blunte|5 years ago
Pointless work, such as work on a small part of a large software system which is obviously doomed or moving in the wrong direction, can be incredibly demoralizing. On the other hand, there are still some lessons to be learned. To be honest, I'd rather _never_ have those experiences. But they do teach me things.
There's a mind experiment I like to play sometimes (and an interview question I like to ask candidates): What if you never needed to worry about money; your bank account always had what you needed. What would you do?
This question can unfortunately illustrate how your mind is wired/trained. In my case, I devolve into logistics puzzles of how to ensure the right sized private jet is within close reach and able to take me to the travel destination of my current whim. (And further, how to optimize the resource/jet allocation to keep the planes full of friends, family, or other passengers when they are being relocated.) Point is, I suspect we always like to do some kind of work. In my case, I like to find solutions which balance concerns and provide situation-optimal results.
Ultimately it is likely that individual human life is pointless. Certainly from a macro time or macro universe perspective it is. So we gaze at our own navels in our own entertaining ways.
unknown|5 years ago
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sirmoveon|5 years ago
Instead of focusing in a negative "Abolish work"; lets do it from a positive standpoint: Shelter for everyone, Healthy eating made free, Education accessible to all... If we take away the main reasons the average person has to work for as an obligation, we can leverage a society detached from obligatory labor.
I've always thought about it from the workplace analogy. When we hire people, we make sure they are better prepared than our market competition. We provide them with a desk, computers, printers, access to food and beverage, access to tuition related to the job they will be making, and many stuff the employee doesn't have to pay for. How and why could we think society-wide should be different? Governments should start thinking of their citizens as employees.
chordalkeyboard|5 years ago
> When we hire people, we make sure they are better prepared than our market competition. We provide them with a desk, computers, printers, access to food and beverage, access to tuition related to the job they will be making, and many stuff the employee doesn't have to pay for. How and why could we think society-wide should be different? Governments should start thinking of their citizens as employees.
Access to those things are provided conditionally upon their satisfactory performance. What conditions are you proposing that governments require to be met?
mfer|5 years ago
The issue isn’t one of work but one of many of the jobs we currently have.
unknown|5 years ago
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PurpleFoxy|5 years ago
pmoriarty|5 years ago
I'd like to see some stats on this.
unknown|5 years ago
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jackcosgrove|5 years ago
causality0|5 years ago
postingpals|5 years ago
chordalkeyboard|5 years ago
Survival.org
unknown|5 years ago
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fallingfrog|5 years ago
I do think that taking a hard look at the nuclear family is a good idea- I think you can make a good case that biologically a newborn baby is supposed to be cared for by more than one person, more like 5 or 6. We are terribly cruel to young mothers, making them wake up once every hour all night long and then asking them to go back to their day jobs in addition after only a few days. Having the experience of raising a few myself has so far taught me that parents especially of babies need to be surrounded by support, and that young children should be surrounded by other young children. That points to community child raising. But someone still has to change diapers.
pdonis|5 years ago
"Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being."
This is pretty rich since all three of these ancient Greeks were only able to live their nice lives of contemplation and philosophy because of slave labor.
d1amonds|5 years ago
That said, imagine all the money and value documents in the world. Do these not entitle their holders to some share of our future labor and finite resources?
Its funny to argue against an end to work in favor of a system where everything is already sold 10 times over. Your kids will have to work to pay all this debt for a thousand generations.
It seems (also historically) we can run an outlandish system just fine. We will make it look as if it works even if it cant.
A big question to me is how much of an investment we are willing to make in a future we never get to see? How could we ever agree about that?
slx26|5 years ago
With the evolution of society, the nature of the jobs we do has changed a lot. In part that's ok: "modern living standards" involve more services and products than what we used to have in the past, and many are actually positive for our lives. This "inflation" in beneficial goods and services requires new jobs, specialization, etc. That's perfectly fine. There's a lot of work we actually need and makes our lives better.
But we also have many more useless services and products born from the very own mechanics of the economic system we live in, which continually pushes for increased efficiency and economic movement. If coronavirus hits and economic activity is slowed down, it doesn't matter that our basic needs are covered and food is available, the system won't tolerate this nicely. Why do we accept this? People suffering not due to a lack of basic goods, but rather due to the poor behavior of our economic system? So naive, thinking we were working to be able to cover our needs! A lot of the work we do is not to improve the world we live in, but to sustain the very own needs of our current iteration of capitalism. This is the kind of work that needs to be abolished.
Then we can start to think about what to do with the remaining work. And that can also be done much better, but that's for another chapter of the story.
jmfldn|5 years ago
The problem is Capitalism and the related mindless obsession with GDP. Degrowth economics in the form of an ecologically-sane post capitalism, is the only way humans can thrive again, and probably the only way we can survive as a species. This would not mean no work, it would mean our economics were in line with our needs as a species and planet.
TeeMassive|5 years ago
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HuwytNashi_002|5 years ago
He's a thinker. He's too pretty to work.
I'd be willing to bet he's over-educated, has spent large periods of his life on welfare, wears a cravat to the supermarket, and was always told how clever he is.
But he never really got anywhere. Now his bank account is dry, it's 3 days until his next benefits payment, and the 'idiot' who left school at 16 to get his heavy machinery licence as a teenager makes more in an honest work year than this guy has ever had the privilege of declaring in his life.
His counsellor (or mum) is on his back to get a real job, and this is his response.
Ironically, it's never the bricklayer's labourer arguing for the abolition of work. It's types like the author, whose hands have never borne a callous.
spacedome|5 years ago
postingpals|5 years ago
georgewsinger|5 years ago
Ending toil is, in principle, impossible with our current level of societal wealth. We will need major, non-trivial technological innovation in order to truly escape our toil (through capitalism, of course :). Teams of innovators will need to build out AI & robotic infrastructure (among other things) in order to make this happen.
I hope that humans will look back on us thousands (if not hundreds) of years into the future and look in horror at how hard we had to toil for our basic necessities.
The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today. It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.
eyelidlessness|5 years ago
What even is wealth if such abundance exists? I think you may misunderstand the left’s goal of redistribution. It isn’t about divvying scarcity equally, it’s about sharing and enabling the bounty you seem to be describing.
> It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free.
But not all oxygen or dirt is equal. Some people experience a greater abundance of safe, clean air and rich, profitable soil. They tend to be the same people who experience a greater abundance generally.
AshWolfy|5 years ago
This is hopeless naive. There are more houses than there are homeless people, and yet the prices of houses continues to rise. Dirt and oxygen are not hoarded because they are impossible to hoard, anything that can be hoarded will be hoarded.
Bakary|5 years ago
While not a leftist per se, I've always found this concept of redistribution immorality to be a little strange. Much wealth is already regularly redistributed from value creator to rent-seeker. Laws can be optimized to serve the needs of corporations. Much of wealth creation also depends on the previous work of others in the same environment, whether it's infrastructure or even the work that goes in having a decent place to live where people can afford to be a healthy consuming market. Would your typical software engineer have been as successful in Sierra Leone?
The flipside of that concept is to have privatized profits but collectivized negative externalities. That's not to mention entire industries consisting in intelligent and skilled workers spending their lives redistributing wealth from a wealthy person to another (traders, corporate lawyers, etc.)
That's why injecting the concept of morality feels misplaced: if the there already is redistribution, then workers taking a share through governmental action is just an actor exercising whatever power they had, where they previously did not and other actors did.
chongli|5 years ago
daralthus|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
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dsohn0|5 years ago
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