Alex Williams

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Haven’t yet read Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, which I blogged about last month, though it’s on my list, my fucking list. Bookforum has published an excerpt. The authors are hopeful that a technological future–“Marxism basically dressed up with robotics,” as they’ve termed it–will free us from drudgery if we can ever unloose ourselves from the Puritan work ethic. I think regardless of work hours or mindset, the menial, physical or otherwise, will always be part of the human experience. There’s just something small about us.

A passage:

THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY

One of the most difficult problems in implementing a universal basic income (UBI) and building a post-work society will be overcoming the pervasive pressure to submit to the work ethic. Indeed, the failure of the United States’ earlier attempt to implement a basic income was primarily because it challenged accepted notions about the work ethic of the poor and unemployed. Rather than seeing unemployment as the result of a deficient individual work ethic, the UBI proposal recognized it as a structural problem. Yet the language that framed the proposal maintained strict divisions between those who were working and those who were on welfare, despite the plan effacing such a distinction. The working poor ended up rejecting the plan out of a fear of being stigmatized as a welfare recipient. Racial biases reinforced this resistance, since welfare was seen as a black issue, and whites were loath to be associated with it. And the lack of a class identification between the working poor and unemployed—the surplus population—meant there was no social basis for a meaningful movement in favor of a basic income. Overcoming the work ethic will be equally central to any future attempts at building a post-work world. Neoliberalism has established a set of incentives that compel us to act and identify ourselves as competitive subjects. Orbiting around this subject is a constellation of images related to self-reliance and independence that necessarily conflict with the program of a post-work society. Our lives have become increasingly structured around competitive self-realization, and work has become the primary avenue for achieving this. Work, no matter how degrading or low-paid or inconvenient, is deemed an ultimate good. This is the mantra of both mainstream political parties and most trade unions, associated with rhetoric about getting people back into work, the importance of working families, and cutting welfare so that “it always pays to work.” This is matched by a parallel cultural effort demonizing those without jobs. Newspapers blare headlines about the worthlessness of welfare recipients, TV shows sensationalize and mock the poor, and the ever looming figure of the welfare cheat is continually evoked. Work has become central to our very self-conception—so much so that when presented with the idea of doing less work, many people ask, “But what would I do?” The fact that so many people find it impossible to imagine a meaningful life outside of work demonstrates the extent to which the work ethic has infected our minds.

While typically associated with the protestant work ethic, the submission to work is in fact implicit in many religions. These ethics demand dedication to one’s work regardless of the nature of the job, instilling a moral imperative that drudgery should be valued. While originating in religious ideas about ensuring a better afterlife, the goal of the work ethic was eventually replaced with a secular devotion to improvement in this life. More contemporary forms of this imperative have taken on a liberal-humanist character, portraying work as the central means of self-expression. Work has come to be driven into our identity, portrayed as the only means for true self-fulfilment. In a job interview, for instance, everyone knows the worst answer to “Why do you want this job?” is to say “Money,” even as it remains the repressed truth. Contemporary service work heightens this phenomenon. In the absence of clear metrics for productivity, workers instead put on performances of productivity—pretending to enjoy their job or smiling while being yelled at by a customer. Working long hours has become a sign of devotion to the job, even as it perpetuates the gender pay gap. With work tied so tightly into our identities, overcoming the work ethic will require us overcoming ourselves.

The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering. Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward.•

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George-Lawnmower-1950 (3)

In her really good Vice interview with Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the new manifesto, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Arielle Pardes perfectly sums up a particular strain of potential techno-utopianism: “It’s basically Marxism dressed up with robotics.”

It’s probably not going to be so neat, the future resistant to being any one thing, but it seems likely the foundations of education and Labor will be radically remade. How do we reimagine economies that have been largely free-market ones if a full-employment society is no longer a reality?

Important to Srnicek and Williams isn’t just basic income but also the end of the fetishization of the work ethic. The opening:

Vice:

Can you explain what you mean by a “high-tech future free from work”?’

Alex Williams:

The idea of the book is to argue for a different kind of left-wing politics to the kind we may be used to in America and in the UK, where traditionally, the role of the Democratic Party or, in the UK, the Labour Party, is one where we’re going to help poorer people by giving them jobs. For a variety of reasons, which we go into in the book, we view that as no longer possible, and possibly no longer desirable in the same way. This is all related, in part, to the increasing role of automation—this new wave of automation that a quiet wide variety of economists, technologists, and sociologists have begun thinking about.

Vice:

Right—the idea that “robots are stealing our jobs.”

Alex Williams:

Right. Our kind of perspective on this is, well, is it possible that robots stealing jobs might be a good thing? What would it require to make it a good thing?

Nick Srnicek:

We have all this amazing technology around us. It seems like we’re in a rapidly changing world and we’ve got new potential sprouting out everywhere. But at the same time, our everyday lives are crushed by debt and work and all of these obsolete social relations. It seems that we could be doing much better with the technologies that we have. Our argument has to do with capitalism. This isn’t fundamentally different from what Marx was saying 150 years ago, but it is a matter of capitalism constraining the potentials available within technology and within humanity.•

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Fran Lebowitz action figure.

Fran Lebowitz action figure.

As a lifelong New Yorker, I probably should feel guilty for saying in recent years that I think Los Angeles has become more interesting than NYC, but how can I be when even Fran Lebowitz, who was born on the jumpseat of a checker cab in Greenwich Village, has shifted her feelings on the rival metropolises?

A lot of the more creative, interesting people were driven out of New York by cost-of-living increases (particularly rents), and a lot of those who remain sit around and binge-watch TV on their iPads like everyone in every other place in the country. Sure, NYC is still more interesting than Cleveland, but was that really the goal?

From Alex Williams at T Magazine:

No less a New York mascot than Fran Lebowitz, whose jaded, cigarette-sucking visage may as well be inscribed on the city seal, also confessed to a change of heart about Los Angeles.

“L.A. is better than it used to be, New York is worse than it used to be,” Ms. Lebowitz said at a recent Vanity Fair party for the Tribeca Film Festival. The quality-of-life campaigns under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg swept away so much that was gritty, quirky or exceptional about the city, she said, and as a result, “New York has become vastly more suburban,” while “L.A. has become slightly less suburban.”

This is not a trivial point. Los Angeles is widely acknowledged to have become strikingly more cosmopolitan in recent years.•

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The opening of Alex Williams’ short Techcrunch piece which asserts that data won’t kill narrative but rather alter it:

“I keep seeing this topic push up about how data is affecting creativity. Some say we are losing our sense of narration and storytelling. It’s not this at all. We are just experiencing a shift that other civilizations have faced when the traditional means for storytelling transform to give a sense of the changing times facing society.

That does not mean a rejection of the narrative form. The ancient Greeks developed a rich oral tradition for telling stories. Out of that they created a common language, which formed the foundation for fables, legends and myths.

Now we see that data, shaped by software, creates a space to tell stories in new ways. Narrative methods to express our imagination will change as techniques emerge that allow us to use programming languages to carry on what we know for the next generations.”

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