If We Didn't Have To Work

We could spend the amount of time just needed to work on meeting our collective essential life needs and then do as we please for the rest of our day.

Right now, the model that we have of employment and paid hours has basically debased absolutely everyone who has had to engage in it, even those who regard themselves at the top of it.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.

[Source: The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels]

Outside of socialist and indigenous societies, and especially in capitalist societies, your survival heavily depends on your employment. Loss of employment puts at risk your ability to access core needs of living beings: food, a decent place to live, and more.

The late anthropologist, anarchist and activist David Graeber also put into popularity the term "bullsh*t jobs" which captures how much of people's labour is spent on what they feel are extremely unimportant and useless tasks in society.

Perhaps it was this failure to produce a theory of modern communism that explains why Marx preferred to spend the last fifteen years of his life not in an attempt to complete Capital, but rather burying himself in the intensive study of ancient, communal and pre-capitalist forms from the prairies of North America to the villages of the Russian steppes. Perhaps he hoped that these villages and tribes might contain the secret of another and more certain route to a post-capitalist future.

[Source: Gareth Stedman Jones in an introduction to The Communist Manifesto, published by Penguin Books]

The works of Graeber particularly explore indigenous societies and challenge present-day prevailing conceptions about humanity, how to organise societies, origins of money and more — books by him that I have read at least in part or in full on these include Debt: The First 5000 Years; The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy; Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and the comprehensive The Dawn of Everything: A New History for Humanity which was co-authored with archaeologist David Wengrow and published after Graeber's passing.

The Dawn of Everything explores societies from North America to communities in Western Russia. They are very beautiful and heartwarming, and hope I can share more quotes from the book over future pieces when I have some time to revisit the book.

Linguist and anthropologist Daniel Everett also observed of the Pirahã in the Amazon Rainforest that they would spend 15-20 hours a week on getting food and spend the rest of the days as they pleased.

They do a lot of talking and laughing. It doesn't take that long to get the food that they need. Takes a man 15-20 hours a week of work to provide all that he needs to provide for his family. Maybe his wife again works 15 to 20 hours a week. But most of the time they do what they want to do.

[Source: Daniel Everett: The Evolution and Varieties of Language, and the Pirahã]

The main reason that they are able to do this is because most of their labour is not spent on growing crops from scratch. Keeping entire ecosystems intact means that there are other animals, plants, fungi and more that are participants of the systems that happen to produce food for humans as well, meaning that humans don't have to tend to the food production process from start to finish.

In The Dawn Of Everything, it is mentioned that foraging societies in the North American continent also valued foraging over agriculture, for basically this reason. (Will also quote directly when I can find it later on.)

Graeber mentions in one part of his books (I don't remember which book but will quote directly from it if I remember — it was probably Debt) that he thinks that we will have to deal with money in some form or other.

But I think that it is possible to do without money entirely.

I think that money has brought along with it sprawling systemic problems. For one problem that it solves, it has brought on hundreds and thousands of more problems to solve.

Articulating new systems

Instead of money, we could use ideas that have been best articulated by pioneers of true computing — ideas that are simple and can scale.

For example,

• publish and subscribe

I think messaging today needs to be a kind of "publish and subscribe" where the targets and recipients will be specified by properties rather than names or references.

[Source: Computing pioneer Alan Kay in email correspondence with me]

The Social Dynamics of Programming Together in Dynamicland

Here's Bret mashing up "Exquisite Corpse" by May-Li Khoe, "eyes (with lids!)" by Kate Compton, and "Punch it, Chewie!" by Kai Chang.

Each one of these was made by a different person at a different time, yet Bret was able to combine them without making a single code change, he just placed them next to each other. (And yes, our walls are magnetic!)

Ad-hoc coupling is possible in Dynamicland because Realtalk — the communication protocol that allows dynamic objects to see and respond to each other — is designed for this flexibility.

Dynamic objects communicate by making claims about the world and reacting to the claims of objects around them.

For example, "Exquisite Corpse" just looks for an object that claims it is a "head" body part, and then it draws that object's image in the appropriate place on the exquisite corpse.

"Punch it, Chewie!" draws a starfield on whatever object it's pointing at.

Spatial referencing — coupling objects by pointing them at each other — lets people in Dynamicland quickly try out different ways of combining dynamic behavior.

[Source: The Social Dynamics of Programming Together in Dynamicland]

• protocols — described in the book The Art of the Metaobject Protocol by Kiczales et al.

Protocols are basically where two parties don't know the insides of how each other works, but they are able to get things done by mutually agreeing on certain parameters. (This can be on how they will communicate to each other, or in what form they provide things to each other, or more.)

• "no centers" — described in this interview with Alan Kay

Sure! As many things as possible should have a distributed ‘no centers’ architecture. And of course this is tantamount to really getting rid of the concept and the reality of an “operating system”.

The ARPA/PARC research community tried to do as many things ‘no center’ as possible, and this included Internet, Ethernet, personal computers instead of main-frames, multiple processor architectures instead of single CPUs, and the Smalltalk system which was ‘objects all the way down’ and used no OS at all.

This could be done much better these days, but very few people are interested in it (we are). We’ve got some nice things to show not quite half way through our project. Lots more can be said on this subject.

• object-oriented — single complete units like cells or computers or people, everyone is an actor

This allows us to have structures that can complete complex endeavours involving large numbers of people while not using direct force or compulsion.

For example, rather than using a structure of hierarchy and obligation to get people to pick fruit by ordering them to do it and to reward them with money for it, and creating a super infrastructure whereby fruit-picking is reserved for those on the lower tiers of the broader societal ladder, we have a large-scale, loose system. Observers can publish from season-to-season or day-to-day how many people are needed to pick fruit. People who are interested in picking fruit on particular days can subscribe to these events and sign up to help form that day's force for picking fruit.

Why would people sign up? There are several innate reasons.

Computerist, electrical engineer and human interface designer Bret Victor mentions in his talk, The Humane Representation of Thought, how the idea of "exercising" has had to become a thing because we are engaged in work where our bodies are atrophying. And I would add that the exercise that we do — what we typically consider to be exercise — is by far and large either mindlessly repetitive or deprived of context, or simultaneously both — either framed in terms of scoring useless points with meaningless "win or lose" or repetitively running around in circles or doing repetitive movements with equipment. By actually re-engaging in a task that has direct meaning, this exercise is not isolated and deprived of context but done in a larger context with intrinsic meaning (feeding yourself and others).

Plus, seeing the fruit that you pick before you use it for cooking is deeply intrinsically rewarding. Chefs and people who love food talk about quality, fresh produce a lot and how much they value from whom and where they source it from. It's deeply gratifying to pluck something and use it in a beautiful meal.

And being able to see what you need and where it comes from has a huge factor in not isolating ourselves from the world and environment that we live in and depend upon. Being able to witness conditions for yourself that make it harder for food to grow means a more direct connection in understanding the deep-rooted challenges and immense pressures that are being put on the natural world.

Similarly, publish and subscribe systems can be used for participating in any society-wide tasks, from necessities like cooking for everyone and building houses, to making complex multipart products that are feats of engineering and art, when used in conjunction with protocols.

The important things include

• this is done on an as-needed basis
• there is no central hierarchy
• AND there is no pay system at least by which scoundrels can easily parasite upon the labour of countless others through mass-accumulating non-existent "profit margins" which they then use to subordinate more countless others — though like in any ecological system, there can be parasites which live off hosts in other ways, but at least it's not a default centralised monopoly like we have for capitalist societies

Instead of money being the primary relationship between employee and employer, and really, instead of such a relationship constituting the basis of society in the first place, we have multiple non-compulsory associations that you can partake in. (Political heavyweight and linguist Noam Chomsky has also espoused the idea of anarchist associations.)

This is similar for business-to-business, customer-seller and more.

There can be independent groups for training people to agreed-upon standards set out by protocols. Similarly, protocols can be established and adopted for setting boundaries on how much we can use from a particular environment and so on. Groups will only deal with groups that adhere to protocols.

Protocols can be set up across industries to make artisan products. A group that requires regular, reliable amounts of a certain material can subscribe to groups that provide those needs, which they can alert to others for general use by publishing about it.

And the same with food in general. When places have a lot of food to share, they can publish how much they have, like how many apples they can give away, and others can subscribe to this notification so that they can use some apples to make apple pies for others to eat. Others can participate by listening to publish and subscribe events to help deliver food, cook, and so on.

And instead of money being the way that customers "buy" products, people can make requests for orders, and groups can have protocols that determine how much can be made at a time and how long it will take — instead of mass-producing products that are meant to be used quickly and thrown out, and having mass labour spent on things that the people themselves feel are meaningless and useless. Instead, it could feel like this:

monome is brian crabtree and kelli cain. we met in art school where our initial collaborations included electro-mechanical installations, films, and music. now we live and work in the mountains of upstate new york where we also tend apple orchards, shiitake stacks, and forest paths.

monome is operated on a human scale. we use local suppliers and manufacturers, assemble and test in house, and only sell direct. like our designs, our organization is focussed on adaptability and the long-term. staying small affords us the flexibility to pursue interesting new directions, not simply commodify established trends.

monome is supported by a global community of curious, helpful, and creative people. dan derks is on the team. all based at luck dragon.

we began in 2005. we continue.

[Source: monome.org]

So rather than careers and jobs, and defining oneself by that, you are an actor who can choose to participate in different activities under different groups, each and every day. You can publish what abilities you are able to provide, and others can subscribe to that and make requests for you to do something that they need.

Like this principle of communism:

From each, according to his or her ability; to each, according to his or her need.

In this way, perhaps everyone is a volunteer and everything is voluntary. Like in open-source projects or volunteer organisations.

Anyway hope I can make some representations / simulations of this so that it is much easier to explore and ponder about than in text form. But this is just the beginning public form of this idea. Hopefully I can start to express it more clearly and succinctly in future, the more I write about it.