Working Towards the Future
Posted on December 6, 2016Throughout history, people from different places and cultures have tried to imagine and describe how a perfect world should be like. Most of these ideas became utopias, some really inspired change, but many of them created more disagreements, conflicts and wars than anything else. In a world where population growth and the breakdown of the planetary climatic system are turning dystopic scenarios of mass unemployment and natural disasters into reality, the need for a new direction is urgent, not only to create a better way of living, but mainly to allow us to survive as a species. The bad news is that we don’t have enough time for utopian theories of change. We are facing a global crisis of accumulation perpetuated by the mainstream, a crisis of our political systems dividing countries and exposing scandalous corruption, and an environmental crisis caused by our own behavior – and there is a lot of work to be done.
In Inventing The Future, Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams describe their vision of a desirable future, where full automation, the reduction of the working week, the provision of a basic income and the diminishment of the work ethic are the steps to get there. They believe that these proposals can also be taken as individual goals and they state that “the demand of full automation amplifies the possibility of reducing the working week and heightens the need for a universal basic income.”[1]
The possibility of associating technological development with the freedom of humanity from our economic system seemed appealing for me in the beginning – especially considering my daily struggle observing humans perform their jobs as cashiers, waitress and waiters, metrocard sellers, store securities, among others, with a sad and apathetic expression on their faces – clearly if they could choose, they would prefer to be somewhere else. I was almost convinced that Srnicek and Williams´s theory could provide a dignified existence for billions of people that hate their lives because of their jobs, until I changed my mind (or my side) after I went to an event hosting a conversation (that became a debate) between Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams and the French philosopher Alain Badiou about the former’s book, discussing the possibilities and impossibilities of their proposals.
After the two authors exposed their vision and I was almost building a new belief that they had the solution for our failed economic system, Alain Badiou explained his thoughts during a one hour monologue, strongly disagreeing with the author’s ideas. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but some of his thoughts made me rethink about my previous assumptions. After a week reflecting about the debate and observing my own life experiences, the idea of an automated world without work started to sound more like a dystopia – and I’ll try to make my point here.
First of all, why a world without work is portrayed as a good thing? Alain Badiou first statement was that the vision of working as something stressful and boring is a western concept. In fact, for many eastern cultures, work – of all kinds – is an honorable and essential part of life, and that is through our work and through serving our community that our consciousness develops best. For many eastern religions and philosophies such as Zen Buddhism, work has a very special meaning, and to try to achieve mastery regardless of the recognition or the money one receives, is a spiritual goal.
Yes, many religions use these concepts to manipulate masses – and yes, Nick Srnicek´s and Williams´s talk addressed the need for the diminishment of the work ethic exactly because western society places ‘work’ in a pedestal, mainly for economic purposes. However, I don’t believe the solution lies in diminishing the work ethic, but in reframing and understanding the true value in work, creating the right conditions for people to have a good and balanced work experience, and giving youth more opportunities to discover their passions and develop their skills in order to work with what they truly love. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihály Csíkszentmihálvi explains that although most people would choose leisure over work, work is the activity that truly engages people in the flow experience: “a feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.”[2]
Second, their idea that the demand for full automation amplifies the possibility of reducing the working week and heightens the need for a universal basic income, and that each of their proposals could have been taken as an individual goal, is too risky. What is most likely to happen, as it happened in the Industrial Revolution (observing humanity’s past mistakes is a great way of not committing them again), is mass unemployment and misery for a long period of time – until governments decide to distribute a universal basic income that wouldn’t be enough to afford healthy food and a healthy roof.
It’s been a while that technology has been promising a better life with less work, but until now, it didn’t fulfilled the promise. Technology and the communications network is allowing us to be at our jobs at morning, noon, and night, wherever we may be. At least, when we didn’t have our personal laptops, getting home after work had a different meaning, one that usually wasn’t related to work even more.
After softwares for creative professionals such as Autocad, Sketchup, Photoshop and 3D renderings appeared (promising to make our lives easier and to do our work faster), an architect, for instance, started to develop five projects at the same time, instead of one. These technological tools are not giving us more leisure time – they are only making us produce more in the same amount of time. Is technology making us free, or is it the opposite?
What I know from my experience is that I feel much more alienated and stressed when I have a one month deadline to create three architectural projects in my computer, then when I had to create only one project within the same time span using my hands, pencils, rulers and watercolors. We all want to have enough time to work, play, sleep, eat, socialize, contemplate and live a healthy and happy life. But automating everything and reducing the working week won’t significantly change our levels of stress if we don’t rethink our working processes and the frenetic rhythm of our productivity.
Alain Boudier finished his ‘debate’ stating that Williams´s and Srnicek’s manifesto for the end of capitalism was nothing but another utopia – that didn’t even mentioned private property, one of the biggest issues of capitalism. Indeed, an idea that can’t be experimented in a small scale in the present moment, can’t give us much hope. Anyone can write a book about how the world should be like, but then, how to live in it? We need a new direction for a desirable future, with proposals that can start being tested today to achieve a long lasting transformation. We can’t achieve anything at once, but we should start thinking about possibilities that can be experimented, in order to understand soon if it works and what needs to be redesigned.
We have a lot of ‘what we need’ theories and opinions, but not enough of ‘how to achieve it’ processes. It is time for a vision of a better world that comes with a real strategic plan ready to be applied, open to be transformed and framing the right questions. What it would take to achieve it? How it would last? Who would sustain it? What could go wrong? Does the plan still looks perfect?[3]
Connecting people to work together toward the common goal to reinvent the future requires the humility to question our beliefs. Instead of assuming that our dream for a better world is the ideal one (starting right away to research for evidences and develop arguments to sustain our point), maybe we should start by debating with ourselves. I guess that by questioning all the possible outcomes and even the negative impacts of our projects can be a good way to start to create real solutions that can effectively work locally, to expand globally in dynamical ways.
Endnotes
1 – Nick Srnicek & Alex Willaims, Inventing The Future – Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
2 – Mihály Csíkszentmihálvi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
3 – Alex Gendler, How to Recognize a Dystopia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a6kbU88wu0