Not a communist, but having ideas isn’t labor, execution of ideas is. In the context of creativity, labor is the long process of rejecting all of the bad ideas

Not a communist, but having ideas isn’t labor, execution of ideas is. In the context of creativity, labor is the long process of rejecting all of the bad ideas before you get to the good one. Also, part of the thesis of the labor movement was that workers should be compensated for producing value, not for working “hard”. Briefly, this means that wages don't have to decline as advances in technology make life easier. The modern tech industry is weird because the laborers build the machines that they use (where “machine” means things like algorithms, not laptops).