19 ms·

The Abolition of Work (2002)

157 points by lordwarnut 6y ago

lordwarnut 6y ago
The quote that stands out to me the most is: 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.
- starkd 6y ago
  "work makes a mockery of freedom" I don't think he gets what freedom really is. He's confusing it with volition. Very different things.
- roenxi 6y ago
  > Work makes a mockery of freedom 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.
  - trevyn 6y ago
    >Even the most hardened individualist has to admit a company gets a lot more done than an individual. I think a big part of the argument is that "getting a lot done" may not be as valuable as we have been led to believe, and the things that we give up may be more valuable than we have been led to believe. If we assume that a human often does what is in the best interest of that human, it is not at all surprising that we may have been misled by our fellow humans about where value lies.
  - pfalcon 6y ago
    > controlled largely by deterministic chemicals I wonder if that's a typo, but there's no determinism all the way up from position of an electron in the core, and thru protein binding, which is also non-deterministic. That's why they run that COVID Folding@Home stuff - to assess how well vaccine particles can bind to a virus thru variations - lone "hit" or "non-hit" don't matter much. That non-determinism alone is a great source of suffering, even before we get to "embodiment" and "need to feed that embodiment". ;-)
  - jancsika 6y ago
    > It is impossible to gain freedom from that. Your sudden shift to such a low-level critique makes it impossible to, say, distinguish a c-corp from a coop (or even c-corps of different sizes, for that matter). Both are merely "impossible to gain freedom from" in your sense. It's like a submitter defending a spaghetti patchset by talking about the complexity of modern chipsets.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      Paragraph says work makes a mockery of freedom - it doesn't distinguish between working for a coop or working for a c-corp either. Neither does the article as far as I can tell, although it is a bit complicated for me.
- baud147258 6y ago
  it looks like a shitty workplace.
- jariel 6y ago
  It 'stands out' for it's dystopian naivete. '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 6y ago
  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.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Someone who confuses a workplace with a police state is someone who almost certainly has never lived in a police state.
  - mordae 6y ago
    You are probably privileged enough so that you don't have a camera looking at you your whole workday. Some of the people who processed your food or sewn your garments might not have been that lucky. Also, their breaks are timed and there is no playstation.
    - Jochim 6y ago
      You don't even need to look that far away, anyone you've interacted with in a bar or supermarket is most likely having their actions timed and watched by a security camera.
robobro 6y ago
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...
- dang 6y ago
  Do you think he'd be interested in participating in the thread? (If so, please email hn@ycombinator.com so I can tell the software to be nice to him.)
- joe_the_user 6y 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.
mfer 6y ago
A lot of people find work to be very satisfying. The issue isn’t one of work but one of many of the jobs we currently have.
- deleted 6y ago
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- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "A lot of people find work to be very satisfying." I'd like to see some stats on this.
  - cmdli 6y ago
    According to Pew at least [1], about 85% of workers are "satisfied or very satisfied" with their jobs, with 49% being "very satisfied". That still leaves a lot of unsatisfied people, but there is also a lot of people relatively happy with their current arrangement. [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-v...
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  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.
daenz 6y ago
>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.
- djrobstep 6y ago
  > You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. 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?
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > A mugger tells me to hand over my watch or get shot. Choice or not choice? Choice, of course.
    - djrobstep 6y ago
      So taxation is voluntary? You'll upset a lot of libertarians with that attitude!
50 6y ago
Reminds me of a line by Mark Fisher (1): "Real wealth is the collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy." 1. https://repeaterbooks.com/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming-kpunk-election-post-4/ https://repeaterbooks.com/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming-kpun...
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  Too bad he killed himself - though it seems entirely in-line with his pessimistic projections of capitalism (that there is "no alternative")
  - 50 6y ago
    Despite the claim that there is no alternative, there is something invisibly worthy in claiming that the way we live now is not the only way humans can live. Who knows what that inertia may lead to? The anti-capitalist project - based off my brief and limited political philosophy reading - seems to be an infinite one: not only is there much to build but more imperatively, there is an entire world to destroy.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Yeah... um... how about making sure we have an alternative that not only works, but works better, before we get to the destroying part?
      - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
        The traditional vision of a total revolution in which the old regime is destroyed and utopia is born phoenix-like in its ashes is unhelpful. Rational conservatism advises in favour of the stuttered and experimental socialisation of ownership and services. Socialising health, housing and transport, and dispersing wealth throughout society through progressive stock remuneration for workers and/or a fixed ownership stake in an economy-wide index fund at birth, could lead to the gradual emergence of a qualitatively different kind of society.
  - 6y ago
georgewsinger 6y ago
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.
- chongli 6y ago
  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?
  - Noos 6y ago
    I don't get this. Go out and drive on a highway sometime. I do, and I'm not in a particularly big state (small New England one.) Yet I pass empty miles and miles of forest, often without a single building in site. Even in normal streets I can go fifteen minutes down my road by car, and the houses thin out to nothing. Unless you restrict the world to maybe what, the 100 most dense megacities, there's insane amounts of empty land out there. We are not that dense. The owning and restricting of land through law in many ways seems to be more a part of capitalistic society than a requirement; people have to own land to make money or not make money.
    - AshWolfy 6y ago
      Maybe there is a reason housing isnt built on that land. Maybe we shouldnt be bulldozing every forest just so we dont have to rethink how we organize society
alangou 6y ago
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.
- Bakary 6y ago
  It's estimated that around half of produced food is wasted/thrown away so maybe we aren't that far from what you're describing
  - notahacker 6y ago
    Much of the produced food is thrown away because it's no longer considered fit to eat, however. And scarcity also takes into account the where. Malnourished people in poor countries might happily eat bread which is past its 'sell by' date in rich countries' supermarkets, or even the slightly burned leftovers from my plate, but there isn't a distribution system to get it there (and the resources needed to transport that food to them whilst the food is still edible genuinely are scarce)
    - Bakary 6y ago
      I've written a lengthier response to that in the conversation tree, but the gist of it is that it is a political choice whereas the OP sarcastically alluded to a physical problem (mana from heaven, which we already have thanks to tech) The problem is that the massive tech surplus is captured and not allocated to make life less hellish.
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        > the gist of it is that it is a political choice I disagree, it is economic reasoning. > The problem is that the massive tech surplus is captured and not allocated to make life less hellish. What massive tech surplus is there that could move food across the ocean for free?
cortesoft 6y ago
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?
- fogetti 6y ago
  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.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    "They simply gather and withhold information that they then offer for a fee." That's not even 100th of what they do. One of the most important services they provide is that they are the ones who make sure the deal comes together, which means coaxing the buyers and sellers in to agreeing, without which the deals would just fall apart. They show houses for people, which means sitting and wasting time some stranger's home, then showing the people who come there around while telling them about the house and answering their questions. This takes hours and hours of their time. They drive buyers around neighborhoods and go with them to see houses. They arrange and attend engineers' inspections of the house. In the midst of this pandemic these alone are life-threatening tasks. But even when there's no epidemic, real estate agents have to go to strangers' homes and be there alone, and for women (who make up the majority of real estate agents) this is not always safe. Then they guide and give advice to buyers and sellers. I guess you could call this "giving information for a fee", but it's not the kind of information that you're going to get from a database. It includes negotiation advice, advice on what kind of offers are or are not likely to be accepted and why, what problems there are with the house and what needs to be done to fix it, etc. Depending on the agent, that information could be the fruit of decades of experience in the business that the clients are getting. They'll also get their clients in touch with reliable professionals who can do the work that their clients require (like fixing some part of the house), etc. They often read over contracts that their clients sign, explain them to them, and advise them regarding them (you'd think it's the lawyers job to do this, but lawyers often don't). They often advertise for their sellers... for free. That means the real estate agents pay advertising fees out of their own pockets, and they don't get that money back until and unless the house sells. They also have to put up with asshole buyers and sellers, and clients who lie to them. They take calls at night and on weekends from clients that have absolutely no respect for their time. ...and best of all, they often do all the above (which takes a lot of time and effort) completely for free, as many clients will take all these services, advice, and help and then change their mind and not want to buy or sell after all, or change their mind and go with another agent... after using dozens of hours of the real estate agent's time, for which the real estate agents don't get paid a penny (as they only get paid if the house is sold). Someone very close to me is a real estate agent, and I just constantly feel so bad for them because they're constantly getting screwed by their clients and slaving away for absolutely no money.. occasionally they get lucky and actually eventually get paid.. usually after many months of effort, but so much time is wasted for absolutely nothing. And then on top of all that, so many people hate and look down on real estate agents, so they have to put up with that too. Not that it's all bad. Some clients are decent, and even nice people. But I'd still never, ever want to be a real estate agent and put up with all that shit. Just not even remotely worth it.
pmoriarty 6y ago
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.
- pfalcon 6y ago
  > 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!"
  - notahacker 6y ago
    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). I don't think the recycling schemes (illusory and otherwise) were introduced on the assumption that the public would get so addicted to rubbish separation that we'd eventually be able to eliminate the need for any paid garbage collectors though. Or indeed that many people don't view rubbish separation as 'work' imposed on them, to the extent many local authorities collecting household waste have to threaten fines or at least noncollection of waste to enforce compliance. As for less developed countries, they usually have an abundance of flytipped waste because they don't pay [enough] garbage collectors and whilst there's the occasional eyecatching 'clean up this beauty spot' activity nobody wants to play the garbageman game all year round...
blunte 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
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causality0 6y ago
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.
- postingpals 6y ago
  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.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    If so, they might tell us that. In particular, if they have a practical plan, they might actually tell us what it is...
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  This is not allowed. In fact the very few people who still live this way are currently persecuted. Survival.org
- deleted 6y ago
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jariel 6y ago
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.
- postingpals 6y ago
  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.
  - jariel 6y ago
    The person making coffee for a living is not 'doing what they want'. If we were to distribute products and services such that this person could do something on the 'create side' - we'd all be poorer for it because their value is likely in 'coffee making'. Anarchism is nonsense.
HuwytNashi_002 6y ago
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.
- spacedome 6y ago
  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.
- postingpals 6y ago
  How can one be 'over-educated'? Is that a bad thing?
  - HuwytNashi_002 6y ago
    Imagine the type who is still studying at 34 with a range of loosely-related degrees and qualifications, still with no real direction and without any actual experience.
  - paconbork 6y ago
    It is if you see any available work as beneath you as a consequence
    - underslung 6y ago
      I think you've missed the point of the article. He is illustrating a society of post-capitalism where the emphasis on work is not to maintain ones' standard of life, but rather to "play" as he puts — a method of unlocking the 'true joy' life has to offer. This concept is not rooted in the need of capital.
TeeMassive 6y ago
> That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality I can't help but feel like this is a very naive view of how the world and people works, almost child like. Large organizations of people capable of mass producing useful products efficiently will always out-compete everyone else and push the "ludic" workers to the side because they involve 1) selecting who can and can't be part of the organization because the fun "things that need doing" will be in high demand and the others will need on the things that need doing that are as much if not more necessary and 2)it involves delaying and abstracting the direct reward of the work which is hard to put in play with any kind of reward system outside of money.
gfxgirl 6y ago
> 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.
- musicale 6y ago
  > Many people enjoy their work immensely. According to CNBC, 85% of US workers were happy with their jobs: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/01/85percent-of-us-workers-are-happy-with-their-jobs-national-survey-shows.html 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/2013/10/10/only-13-percent-of-people-worldwide-actually-like-going-to-work/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2013/10...
- jagged-chisel 6y ago
  > > Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world > 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.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > To take a HN hero I'll bet Steve Jobs enjoyed changing the world via his work and through that loved his work “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?
pdonis 6y ago
From the article: "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.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
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.
sirmoveon 6y ago
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.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  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?
  - sirmoveon 6y ago
    Basic healthy food, shelter and education isn't as costly as society wants you to believe. I think that is the point being made when people talk about abolishing work and offering all the basics for free. I believe its a correct premise aswell. We are not talking about luxury. > Access to those things are provided conditionally upon their satisfactory performance. What conditions are you proposing that governments require to be met? As soon as we hire people we provide them with all these basic perks, they are not conditional, because we believe if we are sending soldiers to fight we better provide them with the best chances of succeeding. Its the same idea society-wide. If you mean you fire the employees that don't perform you'd be right, but governments could create brackets. The point is, in this day and age there's no reason why we couldn't provide every citizen of a developed society all these basic things. You could argue shelter is the most expensive but there are examples like Singapore solving the issue society-wide.
jmfldn 6y ago
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.
fallingfrog 6y ago
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.
slx26 6y ago
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.
d1amonds 6y ago
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?

157 points by lordwarnut 6y ago

The quote that stands out to me the most is: 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.

starkd 6y ago
"work makes a mockery of freedom" I don't think he gets what freedom really is. He's confusing it with volition. Very different things.
roenxi 6y ago
> Work makes a mockery of freedom 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.
- trevyn 6y ago
  >Even the most hardened individualist has to admit a company gets a lot more done than an individual. I think a big part of the argument is that "getting a lot done" may not be as valuable as we have been led to believe, and the things that we give up may be more valuable than we have been led to believe. If we assume that a human often does what is in the best interest of that human, it is not at all surprising that we may have been misled by our fellow humans about where value lies.
- pfalcon 6y ago
  > controlled largely by deterministic chemicals I wonder if that's a typo, but there's no determinism all the way up from position of an electron in the core, and thru protein binding, which is also non-deterministic. That's why they run that COVID Folding@Home stuff - to assess how well vaccine particles can bind to a virus thru variations - lone "hit" or "non-hit" don't matter much. That non-determinism alone is a great source of suffering, even before we get to "embodiment" and "need to feed that embodiment". ;-)
- jancsika 6y ago
  > It is impossible to gain freedom from that. Your sudden shift to such a low-level critique makes it impossible to, say, distinguish a c-corp from a coop (or even c-corps of different sizes, for that matter). Both are merely "impossible to gain freedom from" in your sense. It's like a submitter defending a spaghetti patchset by talking about the complexity of modern chipsets.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    Paragraph says work makes a mockery of freedom - it doesn't distinguish between working for a coop or working for a c-corp either. Neither does the article as far as I can tell, although it is a bit complicated for me.
baud147258 6y ago
it looks like a shitty workplace.
jariel 6y ago
It 'stands out' for it's dystopian naivete. '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 6y ago
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.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Someone who confuses a workplace with a police state is someone who almost certainly has never lived in a police state.
- mordae 6y ago
  You are probably privileged enough so that you don't have a camera looking at you your whole workday. Some of the people who processed your food or sewn your garments might not have been that lucky. Also, their breaks are timed and there is no playstation.
  - Jochim 6y ago
    You don't even need to look that far away, anyone you've interacted with in a bar or supermarket is most likely having their actions timed and watched by a security camera.

robobro 6y ago

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...

dang 6y ago
Do you think he'd be interested in participating in the thread? (If so, please email hn@ycombinator.com so I can tell the software to be nice to him.)
joe_the_user 6y 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.

mfer 6y ago

A lot of people find work to be very satisfying. The issue isn’t one of work but one of many of the jobs we currently have.

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pmoriarty 6y ago
"A lot of people find work to be very satisfying." I'd like to see some stats on this.
- cmdli 6y ago
  According to Pew at least [1], about 85% of workers are "satisfied or very satisfied" with their jobs, with 49% being "very satisfied". That still leaves a lot of unsatisfied people, but there is also a lot of people relatively happy with their current arrangement. [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-v...
PurpleFoxy 6y ago
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.

daenz 6y ago

>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.

djrobstep 6y ago
> You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. 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?
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > A mugger tells me to hand over my watch or get shot. Choice or not choice? Choice, of course.
  - djrobstep 6y ago
    So taxation is voluntary? You'll upset a lot of libertarians with that attitude!

50 6y ago

Reminds me of a line by Mark Fisher (1): "Real wealth is the collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy." 1. https://repeaterbooks.com/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming-kpunk-election-post-4/ https://repeaterbooks.com/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming-kpun...

Der_Einzige 6y ago
Too bad he killed himself - though it seems entirely in-line with his pessimistic projections of capitalism (that there is "no alternative")
- 50 6y ago
  Despite the claim that there is no alternative, there is something invisibly worthy in claiming that the way we live now is not the only way humans can live. Who knows what that inertia may lead to? The anti-capitalist project - based off my brief and limited political philosophy reading - seems to be an infinite one: not only is there much to build but more imperatively, there is an entire world to destroy.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Yeah... um... how about making sure we have an alternative that not only works, but works better, before we get to the destroying part?
    - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
      The traditional vision of a total revolution in which the old regime is destroyed and utopia is born phoenix-like in its ashes is unhelpful. Rational conservatism advises in favour of the stuttered and experimental socialisation of ownership and services. Socialising health, housing and transport, and dispersing wealth throughout society through progressive stock remuneration for workers and/or a fixed ownership stake in an economy-wide index fund at birth, could lead to the gradual emergence of a qualitatively different kind of society.
- 6y ago

georgewsinger 6y ago

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.

chongli 6y ago
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?
- Noos 6y ago
  I don't get this. Go out and drive on a highway sometime. I do, and I'm not in a particularly big state (small New England one.) Yet I pass empty miles and miles of forest, often without a single building in site. Even in normal streets I can go fifteen minutes down my road by car, and the houses thin out to nothing. Unless you restrict the world to maybe what, the 100 most dense megacities, there's insane amounts of empty land out there. We are not that dense. The owning and restricting of land through law in many ways seems to be more a part of capitalistic society than a requirement; people have to own land to make money or not make money.
  - AshWolfy 6y ago
    Maybe there is a reason housing isnt built on that land. Maybe we shouldnt be bulldozing every forest just so we dont have to rethink how we organize society

alangou 6y ago

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.

Bakary 6y ago
It's estimated that around half of produced food is wasted/thrown away so maybe we aren't that far from what you're describing
- notahacker 6y ago
  Much of the produced food is thrown away because it's no longer considered fit to eat, however. And scarcity also takes into account the where. Malnourished people in poor countries might happily eat bread which is past its 'sell by' date in rich countries' supermarkets, or even the slightly burned leftovers from my plate, but there isn't a distribution system to get it there (and the resources needed to transport that food to them whilst the food is still edible genuinely are scarce)
  - Bakary 6y ago
    I've written a lengthier response to that in the conversation tree, but the gist of it is that it is a political choice whereas the OP sarcastically alluded to a physical problem (mana from heaven, which we already have thanks to tech) The problem is that the massive tech surplus is captured and not allocated to make life less hellish.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > the gist of it is that it is a political choice I disagree, it is economic reasoning. > The problem is that the massive tech surplus is captured and not allocated to make life less hellish. What massive tech surplus is there that could move food across the ocean for free?

cortesoft 6y ago

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?

fogetti 6y ago
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.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "They simply gather and withhold information that they then offer for a fee." That's not even 100th of what they do. One of the most important services they provide is that they are the ones who make sure the deal comes together, which means coaxing the buyers and sellers in to agreeing, without which the deals would just fall apart. They show houses for people, which means sitting and wasting time some stranger's home, then showing the people who come there around while telling them about the house and answering their questions. This takes hours and hours of their time. They drive buyers around neighborhoods and go with them to see houses. They arrange and attend engineers' inspections of the house. In the midst of this pandemic these alone are life-threatening tasks. But even when there's no epidemic, real estate agents have to go to strangers' homes and be there alone, and for women (who make up the majority of real estate agents) this is not always safe. Then they guide and give advice to buyers and sellers. I guess you could call this "giving information for a fee", but it's not the kind of information that you're going to get from a database. It includes negotiation advice, advice on what kind of offers are or are not likely to be accepted and why, what problems there are with the house and what needs to be done to fix it, etc. Depending on the agent, that information could be the fruit of decades of experience in the business that the clients are getting. They'll also get their clients in touch with reliable professionals who can do the work that their clients require (like fixing some part of the house), etc. They often read over contracts that their clients sign, explain them to them, and advise them regarding them (you'd think it's the lawyers job to do this, but lawyers often don't). They often advertise for their sellers... for free. That means the real estate agents pay advertising fees out of their own pockets, and they don't get that money back until and unless the house sells. They also have to put up with asshole buyers and sellers, and clients who lie to them. They take calls at night and on weekends from clients that have absolutely no respect for their time. ...and best of all, they often do all the above (which takes a lot of time and effort) completely for free, as many clients will take all these services, advice, and help and then change their mind and not want to buy or sell after all, or change their mind and go with another agent... after using dozens of hours of the real estate agent's time, for which the real estate agents don't get paid a penny (as they only get paid if the house is sold). Someone very close to me is a real estate agent, and I just constantly feel so bad for them because they're constantly getting screwed by their clients and slaving away for absolutely no money.. occasionally they get lucky and actually eventually get paid.. usually after many months of effort, but so much time is wasted for absolutely nothing. And then on top of all that, so many people hate and look down on real estate agents, so they have to put up with that too. Not that it's all bad. Some clients are decent, and even nice people. But I'd still never, ever want to be a real estate agent and put up with all that shit. Just not even remotely worth it.

pmoriarty 6y ago

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.

pfalcon 6y ago
> 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!"
- notahacker 6y ago
  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). I don't think the recycling schemes (illusory and otherwise) were introduced on the assumption that the public would get so addicted to rubbish separation that we'd eventually be able to eliminate the need for any paid garbage collectors though. Or indeed that many people don't view rubbish separation as 'work' imposed on them, to the extent many local authorities collecting household waste have to threaten fines or at least noncollection of waste to enforce compliance. As for less developed countries, they usually have an abundance of flytipped waste because they don't pay [enough] garbage collectors and whilst there's the occasional eyecatching 'clean up this beauty spot' activity nobody wants to play the garbageman game all year round...

blunte 6y ago

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.

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causality0 6y ago

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.

postingpals 6y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  If so, they might tell us that. In particular, if they have a practical plan, they might actually tell us what it is...
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
This is not allowed. In fact the very few people who still live this way are currently persecuted. Survival.org
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jariel 6y ago

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.

postingpals 6y ago
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.
- jariel 6y ago
  The person making coffee for a living is not 'doing what they want'. If we were to distribute products and services such that this person could do something on the 'create side' - we'd all be poorer for it because their value is likely in 'coffee making'. Anarchism is nonsense.

HuwytNashi_002 6y ago

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.

spacedome 6y ago
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.
postingpals 6y ago
How can one be 'over-educated'? Is that a bad thing?
- HuwytNashi_002 6y ago
  Imagine the type who is still studying at 34 with a range of loosely-related degrees and qualifications, still with no real direction and without any actual experience.
- paconbork 6y ago
  It is if you see any available work as beneath you as a consequence
  - underslung 6y ago
    I think you've missed the point of the article. He is illustrating a society of post-capitalism where the emphasis on work is not to maintain ones' standard of life, but rather to "play" as he puts — a method of unlocking the 'true joy' life has to offer. This concept is not rooted in the need of capital.

TeeMassive 6y ago

> That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality I can't help but feel like this is a very naive view of how the world and people works, almost child like. Large organizations of people capable of mass producing useful products efficiently will always out-compete everyone else and push the "ludic" workers to the side because they involve 1) selecting who can and can't be part of the organization because the fun "things that need doing" will be in high demand and the others will need on the things that need doing that are as much if not more necessary and 2)it involves delaying and abstracting the direct reward of the work which is hard to put in play with any kind of reward system outside of money.

gfxgirl 6y ago

> 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.

musicale 6y ago
> Many people enjoy their work immensely. According to CNBC, 85% of US workers were happy with their jobs: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/01/85percent-of-us-workers-are-happy-with-their-jobs-national-survey-shows.html 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/2013/10/10/only-13-percent-of-people-worldwide-actually-like-going-to-work/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2013/10...
jagged-chisel 6y ago
> > Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world > 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.
DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> To take a HN hero I'll bet Steve Jobs enjoyed changing the world via his work and through that loved his work “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?

pdonis 6y ago

From the article: "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.

jackcosgrove 6y ago

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.

sirmoveon 6y ago

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.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
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?
- sirmoveon 6y ago
  Basic healthy food, shelter and education isn't as costly as society wants you to believe. I think that is the point being made when people talk about abolishing work and offering all the basics for free. I believe its a correct premise aswell. We are not talking about luxury. > Access to those things are provided conditionally upon their satisfactory performance. What conditions are you proposing that governments require to be met? As soon as we hire people we provide them with all these basic perks, they are not conditional, because we believe if we are sending soldiers to fight we better provide them with the best chances of succeeding. Its the same idea society-wide. If you mean you fire the employees that don't perform you'd be right, but governments could create brackets. The point is, in this day and age there's no reason why we couldn't provide every citizen of a developed society all these basic things. You could argue shelter is the most expensive but there are examples like Singapore solving the issue society-wide.

jmfldn 6y ago

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.

fallingfrog 6y ago

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.

slx26 6y ago

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.

d1amonds 6y ago

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?