Antiwork – a radical shift in how we view “jobs”

https://contributoria.com/issue/2014-12/543d1c2487628e9a6500001b

by tdaltonc • 11 years ago

202 124 11 years ago

javajosh• 11 years ago

Follow your bliss...to the poorhouse.

Not all work is created equal. What we have in reality is an information space where allocation is firmly in the center (financial industry at the center of the overall economy; IT at the center of each and every business). People who make a living allocating money are happy people because they literally do nothing but pick from their options. And yet somehow these pickers (investors, bankers, executives) are some of the best remunerated people in our society. Note that the startup scene itself is just a high risk/reward set of options from which those same people get to pick.

(The crazy thing is that in a growing economy the "allocation class" domination is self-reinforcing because it's impossible to pick wrong.)

Meanwhile as children we're taught "follow your passion" and exposed to arts, crafts, stories, and other things that have nothing to do with allocation. Meanwhile the allocation class is dominated by a social structure defined primarily by college admission boards. "Legacy" students have an edge, this implies that our brand of capitalism is at least loosely hereditary. They are offered jobs on graduation that most of the nation doesn't even know exist.

derekp72• 11 years ago

On the "follow your passion" advice... There are a number of occupations that can lead to success. Many of those occupations require a certain amount of skill to pull off. And if you are passionate about a given skill, you stand a better chance than average of acquiring a high level of proficiency in said skill (at least in most cases). Therefore, the advice to "follow your passion" is to find the occupation that you are most comfortable with, and not pursue a job that you hate just because it pays well.

This even works for some of the "follow your passion" cliches, such as being an artist or musician. In those cases, you may not make it rich on stage, but you could do well in advertising (which requires artistic and/or musical talent). But you also have to refine some secondary skills, such as psychology (so you know the techniques to combine with your art that will be successful in getting people to buy product).

zanny• 11 years ago

The broader point is those that run the economy are also those who need no "job" or "work" at all. They already have everything and are the arbiters of its dissemination. You are told to find a passion, but for the children of the privileged elite there is no need for passion or pursuit, because its already in your hands on a silver plate from birth or from graduation.

fennecfoxen• 11 years ago

Allocation isn't exactly at the center. Capital is at the center. Things like factories, mines, offices, homes, computers, code, infrastructure and other equipment to make things effectively form the core of our economy. The capitalists are at the core of the remuneration (sometimes this is rich guy investing instead of buying another yacht, sometimes this is a retirement fund).

But still, allocating that well is tricky. Imagine if you did poorly, say, if you provided the capital to make millions of loans on overvalued housing, like FNMA. Instead of something useful that would help the nation prosper, the economy ends up with a bunch of houses that weren't as valuable as people thought. Also, the people doing the allocation would go bankrupt and lose everything... just kidding!!! they'd go run to the government whining for a bailout and get it!!! -cough- did I call them allocators? I meant more like leeches.

Those are the stakes, at least. :P

raincom2• 11 years ago

Very true. That's why there is so much competition to get into HYP (harvard, yale, princeton) as undergrad, then take easy courses or courses with 'private booklets, or even hire people to do assignments, get top grades. Finally, get a job in those blue chip IB or consulting, etc.

It is a big game, played very well by those who know. People are sold "meritocracy" bullshit. Even economist ran an article called "Heriditary meritocracy"

aianus• 11 years ago

Have you met an entry-level investment banking analyst or management consultant? They're really terrible soul-crushing jobs and nobody should be jealous of them, regardless of how many Ferraris they may or may not be able to afford in ten years.

wooyi2• 11 years ago

Hard work is the foundation of success. The best people I know are all hard workers. They love their jobs, they are competitive, and they work hard.

It is a privilege to be able to work in such an environment as it is so rare.

intopieces2• 11 years ago

Hard work is one foundation of success that most successful people exhibit. However, I think we can agree that it's possible to be successful without working hard (let's stick to one definition of success: monetary) and it's possible to unsuccessful while working hard. The fact that the "best" people you know are all hard workers is selection bias at work: the people you're classifying as "best" are people who are already "successful" enough to be in your group of people.

Turing_Machine• 11 years ago

Sure. People who (e.g.) pick crops by hand almost certainly work much harder than the people the OP was talking about, but they're never going to get rich.

People with that background have gotten rich, of course, but almost always by leaving that line of work and doing something else.

derekp72• 11 years ago

I have a definition of success that is a bit different. To me, being successful is when you take a series of actions with the intent of reaching a goal, and you achieve that goal or a positive outcome. The measure of success is how well you achieve your goal, and how important that goal is to you.

LesZedCB• 11 years ago

Yes, like you say, only allowing that one definition of success is exactly the moral framing that the author is talking about! I would say that any person is successful if they feel like they have been successful. Additionally, they should not need any external validation of their success, and somebody else's diminution of their standard of success is oppressive.

sago4• 11 years ago

Work will set you free!

First define success in a way that isn't just "happy" (because then you're defining anti-work, as the OP was). Then take the set of all successful people, based on that criteria, and the set of all hard working people, and tell me how big the overlap is.

I suspect that many successful people are hard-working. But the other direction that hard work is the foundation of success will be transparently nonsense.

You're using the classic fallacy of affirming the consequent here.

This is exactly the point made in this article and others. We've uncritically accepted the myth that hard work leads to success.

The prime beneficiaries of this are the successful people who control masses of capital and are thus able to anti-work (i.e. they do what they enjoy, building their business, creating new products, competing). The prime losers are those who do hard work for them for squeezed wages.

fernly3• 11 years ago

I want to think you made that reference -- arbeit macht frei -- knowingly, and if so, nice sting!

EdSharkey• 11 years ago

So, it is a good thing to enjoy one's "anti-work". Which is to say, it's a personal and societal good to enjoy what you do for a living. Um, is this some new existentialism thing? Yes, attention attention: it would be best for everyone to like what they do, especially when what they do is hard. If you can't dazzle them with data, baffle them with bullsh*t, am I right?

Here's a fun what-if. What if in the next 10-20 years, robots and software begin automating away huge swaths of the non-creative drudgery jobs, doing the work safer and better than humans ever could. And, right around the same time, we develop life extending vitamins to give humans 500+ year lifespans at the physical age of 30. The vitamins soon become cheap to make, anyone can get them. Millions of people, suddenly vigorous and youthful, who used to have [bad/fake] labor jobs will now be priced out of the market. Grumble, grumble, they say. Life was better when I at least HAD a crummy job, grumble! Thank God, the anti-work problem is solved: the crappy jobs have been purged. Except now we've got a huge new powderkeg of a problem to deal with.

My question is, will we plan our future society ahead of time and peacefully enter this new era of plenty and health? Or, will we have wars and endless class strife between the have-jobs and not-have-jobs? Can we have a public debate about this before it actually happens?

When I read the OP and your message, I hear a negative view. Both of you posit negative thoughts about the current work scene that could lead a reader to doubt and resent their own job and position/status. You're simply stirring up trouble and unhappiness when you fail to also bring solutions to the table.

wooyi2• 11 years ago

v. late reply. Was busy working:-) There is a lot of empirical research that attribute grit, perseverance, practice to success. The best and most "successful" creatives, are also the ones that started the earliest, are the most productive (worked the hardest),.. http://pmarchive.com/age_and_the_entrepreneur.html

More anecdotal research like the 10000 hour "rule" for mastering a skill,... also state the same thing.

Sure you can be born rich and this doesn't apply to you.

But most people aren't born rich, so, what is available to them is hard work.

Ok, I'm going back to work now. Thanks for listening

grey-area• 11 years ago

For such broad claims, I think you need to define some terms. What is work? What is success? What do you hold to be best? These are slippery abstract concepts, and it's therefore dangerous to hold strong opinions about them without being very clear about what you're saying.

So for example if you define work as activities you are paid for and which society values, Einstein was not paid for the work he did on general relativity at first. If you define success as becoming rich, Abraham Lincoln, Rembrandt, Mozart, Einstein in his early days, Wittgenstein etc were all abject failures. If you define it as recognition from your peers, many people we now value were ridiculed and rejected in their lifetime - Darwin, Newton, Van Gogh etc. Of course you can find fault with some of these examples, but it only takes one to undermine your first sentence, which is a remarkably broad claim without qualification.

So when you make sweeping statements about hard work consider what you mean by best. Are they best simply because your implicit value system values hard work above all else? Are they best because they earn the most money? Are they best because they are esteemed by their peers today, even if in 100 years they will be forgotten?

From the article:

Immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous – Bertrand Russell

I think what he is driving at here is that leisure, or at least the avoidance of work for pay, is required for some of the greatest advances in our civilisation, we require leisure in order to speculate, create and explore. I'm not entirely sure I agree with him completely, but it is an interesting counterpoint to the martial beat of the calvinist work ethic we now march to.

wazoox• 11 years ago

Sheer luck is the foundation of success. I had the luck to be born in one of the richest country in the world, in one of the richest period in history, in one of the 10% richest families of the country, and everything else flowed naturally from there.

The smug pretense, the self-entitlement of people who pretend to be "hard working" and "deserving it" is the root of most injustice in the world.

tankenmate• 11 years ago

And yet I have met, and I suspect that you also have probably met, people that have worked their proverbial behind off their whole lives and have wound up with not much. There is more to success that hard work. In the converse I have met some people who haven't and still don't work hard and have been very very successful.

The true key to success is to work smarter not necessarily harder (working harder can sometimes help in a relative sense), and also a some luck.

But all those who work hard and are also successful, I have found, tend to diminish the input of luck and information advantage (i.e. it's not what you know but who you know etc).

jokoon6• 11 years ago

Those best people are not best because they work hard.

They're the best because they have the privilege to work in that environment.

If success is a privilege, I would not call it success. If they're privileged, you can't call them competitive. They're competitive with their own selves, which is not how competition works.

icebraining3• 11 years ago

"Ne Travaillez Jamais" (Never Work) - Guy Debord, 1963.

http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/3/391/F4.large.jpg

To the extent that automation and cybernetics foreshadow the massive replacement of workers by mechanical slaves, forced labour is revealed as belonging purely to the barbaric practices needed to maintain order. Thus power manufactures the dose of fatigue necessary for the passive assimilation of its televised diktats. What carrot is worth working for, after this? The game is up; there is nothing to lose anymore, not even an illusion. The organization of work and the organization of leisure are the blades of the castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning dogs. One day, will we see strikers, demanding automation and a ten-hour week, choosing, instead of picketing, to make love in the factories, the offices and the culture centres? Only the planners, the managers, the union bosses and the sociologists would be surprised and worried. Not without reason; after all, their skin is at stake.

"THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE" - Raoul Vaneigem, 1972

(Full text: http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/v...)

sago4• 11 years ago

I've been fortunate to anti-work all my life. I've started companies, built technology, made sales, written books, and generally got paid well to do what I love. I've anti-worked very hard. Often 15 hour days for months on a new project. I have a spouse who is a homebird and provides me the flexibility and support I need for that. In return I support the household. I've been reasonably successful. Not rich, but I have a home, a residual income, assets, I can buy nice things, and buy nice experiences. I can provide for my children and give to charity.

There are plenty of people who work, who work more than one job. They turn up, are told what to do, are at the mercy of the politicking of the organisation, get paid poorly, are physically exhausted, are pressured into moral compromises, have little medical or mental health support, have no assets or qualifications to be able to escape, and are well aware they would not be able to find anything substantially better. Perhaps they work 10 hours a day, then go home, cook for their kids, put them to bed, do the laundry and clean and crash.

When people try to compare my effort against those people, and say "look at people like him, he's proof hard work is the road to success!" I find it morally obnoxious.

The lie that work is the road to success is perpetuated by those who are able to anti-work, to maximise their own success on the backs of those who can't.

themartorana2• 11 years ago

Most importantly is that many of those people shouting about the virtue of work are enjoying anti-work on the backs of those working harder than ever. I don't know if it's actually malicious, or just an echo chamber (there have been plenty of studies that show that the more money people have, the more they feel they deserve to be in the position they are [0] - this of course being a generalization and not an accusation of parent), but it certainly seems like a degree of Ostrich Syndrome when it comes to acknowledging how the efforts of many often benefit the few.

Edit: forgot link

[0] http://blog.ted.com/6-studies-of-money-and-the-mind/

sago4• 11 years ago

The idea that someone can claim they deserve their success because they worked so hard, when 'work hard' just means 'spend long-hours doing something they were intellectually and emotionally engaged by' seems so transparently egotistic.

On that basis, most successful people I know almost never work hard.

golergka3• 11 years ago

on the backs of those working harder than ever

As a software engineer — no I don't. Sometimes I feel bad about earning a lot of money doing what I love, but at the same time, I know for sure that I don't exploit anyone, and that I got where I am only thanks to my own work. Yes, it's unfair that the world needs more software engineers than artists right now, and if I loved art more than code but that doesn't mean that I exploit anyone.

partition• 11 years ago

This is also known as value _creation_ versus value _transference_:

http://halfsigma.typepad.com/half_sigma/2008/03/value-creati...

I do not completely agree with the guy's views; in particular I do not believe in there being anything other than value transference, and value "creation" means you are closer to physics, transferring value at a physical level, than to politics and sales, transferring value from other people. But it does cut the bullshit.

jokoon6• 11 years ago

on the backs of those who can't

So, do you feel guilty ?

I have no mercy for people who work hard and pretend they deserve more because they're not unemployed. I'm unemployed, but I'm not living comfortably, and I honestly cannot fathom the idea of obeying someone because I should "contribute" because that's righteous. I live in france, there's a lot of welfare there, unemployment is at 10% (the U3 stat), workers are treated nicely, but there's a lot of hypocrisy about it.

I don't think most people cannot "antiwork". Work is not mandatory, work is consented. People can negotiate their salary. If nobody does, I'd agree to blame the entire society and its citizens for not standing up to higher standards. Slavery has been abolished, but slave wages show that people now consent to be treated like shit, so to me, people are responsible of their own situations.

In my opinion, if people agree to be treated like slaves, let them be treated like so, and let the other laze away. We live in the 21th century, people should not give up so easily on their life.

I'm tired of people arguing that capitalism and free market are virtuous, while a large majority of people are being paid at the minimum wage. Minimum wage doesn't feel like freedom, it feels everybody is treated the same no matter the contribution. It's not free market anymore, it sounds more like an exploitative society that can't lift individuals out of their poverty.

StavrosK2• 11 years ago

Consent is a slippery notion. If the choice is between a shitty job and homelessness, did you really consent to the shitty job? It's a tragedy of the commons, people do what's best for them individually while making society as a whole worse.

loup-vaillant• 11 years ago

Don't underestimate network effects. If most people consent to being treated like shit for a lousy pay, those who don't will be singled out. Which makes it even harder to stand up for yourself… well you get the idea.

Demand better terms by yourself, and you will simply be dismissed as entitled, arrogant, or not knowing your place. Have everyone demand better terms, and you will all get them.

jasim• 11 years ago

You are quite lucky to live in a time and place where humans are treated well and without the shackling notion of productivity. But it has less to do with your personal agency and more to do with your luck. People can be made responsible for their situation only so much. Individuals are powerless before the collective idea of normalcy of the society they live in.

Steve Bruce puts its nicely in his book "Sociology: A Very Short Introduction" - None of us personally created the social institutions that shape our lives; we were born into them. The roles that structure our behaviour and encapsulate the expectations that others will have of us preceded our arrival and will endure (no doubt slightly modified) after we depart. Reality may be socially constructed, but, taken in its totality, it is not the work of any nameable individual and it certainly has little or nothing to do with any one of us.

danbruc4• 11 years ago

We obviously have to work because goods and services do not suddenly appear out of the blue. And we should obviously try to spread the required work as evenly as possible across all the people so that everyone does his fair share of the necessary work. It also is obviously a good thing if we manage that as many people as possible can do work they like to make the necessary work even easier to do. But beyond that? Are there really people seriously believing that work is more than a means to an end? I have a hard time imagining this.

EDIT: Would someone downvoting this care to explain why? Because you are really believing necessary work has some intrinsic value or goodness or whatever? If yes, what is it?

sukilot2• 11 years ago

You are speaking from a communist ethos that not everyone agrees with.

danbruc4• 11 years ago

Communist ethos? In seriously don't get the connection. The premise is uncontroversial, isn't it? Until we automated everything humans will have to do necessary work to sustain our livings and doing unnecessary work for the sake of keeping everyone busy is a dumb waste of resources. After that I really don't care. If someone is not into fairly sharing this necessary work, go for it, work long hours. I will happily work less and spend my time with stuff I love to do if you really want to do all the work. If you want to do work you don't like, I won't stop you. What am I missing?

swatow4• 11 years ago

Are there really people seriously believing that work is more than a means to an end?

Probably, but this argument is mainly a strawman to avoid debating actual classical economics. The classical viewpoint is that no job would exist if it didn't serve some useful purpose, and requiring people to find a job instead of getting welfare, is a way of preventing people using other people's tax dollars for their sustenance, instead of getting it by performing some useful task for someone else.

rbrogan• 11 years ago

Personally, I try to differentiate between something that is work, something that productive, versus something that is keeping busy but not really accomplishing anything. Keeping busy will most likely be worse than being idle. It is wasting energy and occupying time. If you would not think of leaving equipment running for the sake of burning energy, why do it with people? If there is no concept of legitimate idleness or leisure, then there will be a lack of pressure to find meaningful work for people to do.

tdaltonc• 11 years ago

I don't think that "do what you want" is going to cut it. The world of ubiquitous-automation is going to need an ethics. Some principles to guide people toward wise activities and away from unwise activities. Addictive, abusive, and destructive patterns of behavior are bad. In the 20th century we explained their unwisdom by saying things like, "if you become an alcoholic, your children will starve because you didn't work to feed them" or "compulsively binge-viewing TV will keep you from your studies." These activities are still unwise, but "do what you want" doesn't give us the ontological or moral tools to explain their unwisdom to each other (especially to children).

skj• 11 years ago

Maybe in the world of ubiquitous automation, those sorts of things won't actually be problems.

transfire2• 11 years ago

So we need starving children to convince alcoholics to give up the bottle and do drudgery work no one really needs? Er.. What?

I think you've made the perfect case for this article's point for the need for a different "frame".

quanticle5• 11 years ago

Some principles to guide people toward wise activities and away from unwise activities.

The paternalism inherent in categorizing some activities as "wise" and others as "unwise" is exactly the sort of thing the article argues against. If I want to spend my days playing a video game, and I find genuine fulfillment in it, who are you to say that it is a "wise" or "unwise" activity?

Addictive, abusive, and destructive patterns of behavior are bad.

They're "bad" because you're coming at it from a reference frame that says that every hand and every mind is needed to ensure the collective survival and prosperity of the community. In short, no work, no food. But that hasn't been the case for quite some time. Moreover, it also looks like you're taking the view that addiction is a choice. Empirically, it is not. Drug users do not choose to be addicted to drugs. They are addicted because of a poor choice they made years (or, in some cases, decades) ago. Thirty years of experience has shown that treating drug addiction as a moral problem is ineffective, expensive, and corrosive to society.

"compulsively binge-viewing TV will keep you from your studies."

And why are we studying? To get a job, which is exactly the problem that UBI seeks to solve. If compulsive TV-watching (or heck, even compulsive novel-reading) is more interesting than your studies, then maybe the problem is with the studies, not the TV.

_yosefk• 11 years ago

What happens when the majority of people can't phrase or spell what you've just written, having played video games all their lives? An Idiocracy kind of deal, something else, you think?

"Paternalism"...

masterleep• 11 years ago

This article reads like a proposal for journeying to the moon that was designed without knowledge of the theory of gravitation.

For example, the author does not appear to realize that the reason most people work is to exchange their time and efforts for something they value more, which is usually money but could be experience or other things, in any combination.

CompanyLaser3• 11 years ago

The hegemony of consumerism is falling apart and the things people increasingly "value more" than work is free time and to be loved by the people they love. That's something work won't give you in exchange.

sukilot2• 11 years ago

Work gives you free time when you are more efficient at your profession than by subsistence farming.

JoachimS• 11 years ago

Being able to feed and house yourself and family is rather hard to replace in the long run. The society still expects people to buy food and pay rent (mortgages on your house etc).

We could start paying citizens a base salary, but that salary would be rather low. And with a large part of the population not working we need to figure out how to finance these citizen salaries. Preferably in a way that don't drive business and money to other countries.

Countries compete for industry and there is a race to the bottom re cost of operating a business in a country. I have a hard to to reconcile how the trend with increasing automation and, anti work, basic income and global business.

CompanyLaser3• 11 years ago

I was actually just reading Max Weber today. The radical change in Christianity over time is astounding.

Jesus: "consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin thread"

...I don't think he meant that literally, but he definitely didn't mean, "work as hard as you can so you can give a little to charity yet still anonymously hire tons of people to make you nice things"

et1337• 11 years ago

That passage is meant to keep you from worrying, not from working. Later on there's this: "Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands."

thret2• 11 years ago

Christianity was never for the rich:

“Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor” and "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!” - Mark 10:21+

cturner• 11 years ago

The thing I find most frustrating about periods of hard work is that it ruins your ability to think.

comex• 11 years ago

It depends what you mean by work, doesn't it?

I'm quite willing to accept that the value I instinctively place on work and, to a lesser degree, success has a large societal component. When I try to evaluate myself, I cannot avoid those values, and it doesn't help that my predisposition to anxiety emotionally magnifies any idea of not doing something useful with my life, of wasting time and makes it difficult for me to ever be truly relaxed if I feel like I'm in such a situation. That's been the dominant emotion when I think about my day job since I first started having day jobs some four years ago - anxiety.

And it's pretty arbitrary, isn't it? A common justification or explanation of caring about success is that it improves one's chances of being important and remembered. But I am not important; I hope to accomplish something interesting enough in life that people will remember me for time to come, but it's very unlikely to happen, and if I consider that there are ways to optimize for memorability - careers more associated with fame, or writing - that I am not taking advantage of, and that I don't mind that at all, I can see that that has nothing to do with my real emotional goals. I value work not as a means to any end, but because I've internalized it as an end in itself.

Even people who spend money to get buildings named after them - are they doing it to be remembered, or just because leaving one's name on things is part of our societal narrative of success, and doing it themselves makes their self-narrative better track that one?

But... then there are my side projects. The ones that even if I had the capability to work on full time, I wouldn't, because they don't seem important enough in the long run (there the anxiety creeps up again) - yet that I like no less for it. When I think about doing them as side projects, the associated emotions are pleasure, personal fulfillment, and connection. I value the intellectual stimulation I get out of them; I value being able to prove to myself my ability to complete them (which is a different, more idiosyncratic and egotistical emotion than the desire to matter); I value being able to help people, if the project is used by others, and to socially engage with them. I even value the feeling of being (mentally) exhausted after giving the thing my all, very similar to the feeling of having given a physical activity, say skiing, my all.

I think those desires are more intrinsic than the desire to work. Inherently those projects are so similar to work; indeed, I'm lucky enough to be able to perform for my job almost the same activities (reverse engineering, coding) I like to do by myself. But I think they are anti-work, because when I pop a project off the personal stack and onto the work stack, I can't help but think about it very differently. It grows all sorts of context that didn't exist before.

But at least it's similar.

andrewmutz• 11 years ago

The standard of living we all enjoy today is due to billions of people doing things they consider work and not "antiwork".

If we can live in a world like ours where everyone is doing "antiwork" instead of work, that would certainly be better. But it's not at all clear from this article how such a world would function.

Many of the actions necessary for clean water, plentiful food, good shelter, etc. (as they are provided today) are actions that no one would do "out of love, fun, interest, talent, enthusiasm, inspiration".

kaybe• 11 years ago

Antiwork is also a rejection of what we regard as pointless or immoral work. This might include any form of forced or subtly coerced labour, work that serves no positive purpose (in the opinion of those doing the work), work that has harmful consequences (physical, psychological, environmental), etc.

Work for clean water, plentiful food etc is not pointless, so I think it doesn't qualify.

calinet62• 11 years ago

But there are parts of that work, and parts of other work, that seem pointless on the surface, but in fact have a very specific and necessary part of the system ensuring the end goal.

Someone might just be a paper pusher, literally organizing papers, something that seems entirely pointless busy work—but someone needs to do that organization, within the context of the system, to ensure its function.

People should know their function and how it impacts the end result that their organization achieves, but it is not guaranteed to be full of meaning and glory.

There is something noble, and virtuous about it, still. It is a contribution to a system which enables the function of society, which by all measures improves as a result, on average. Why not call it virtue?

transfire2• 11 years ago

You are correct in so far as you are correct ;) The flip side however is the large quantity of jobs that are not really useful but are simply created for a variety of ignoble reasons. Worst among them is the creation of jobs for the purpose of improving "employment rates". Nearly as bad is the proliferation of bureaucracies --typically the creation of paper trails and overseers to monitor other paper trials and overseers. The "work ethic" can lead to perverse incentives, to "make work" where none is really necessary.

swatow4• 11 years ago

Can you give examples of this kind of job, other than those created directly by the government?

icebraining3• 11 years ago

How many people are actually working on distributing clean water, growing food for nourishment and making shelters, relative to the size of the workforce?

The point of the article isn't that we could never work ("work will doubtless always be necessary"), but against the glorification of work and the condemnation of those who choose to do only the necessary.

enraged_camel• 11 years ago

But the types of work people do these days are increasingly unconnected to the production of goods and services. In fact, you could argue that a lot that work is in fact anti-productive because it introduces unnecessary extra steps and crippling bureaucratic overhead to production.

monort• 11 years ago

If you can see unproductive work, then you should start competition and win the market. (Or realize, that it wasn't that unproductive).

ritchiea• 11 years ago

Not to mention how much of the standard of living we enjoy today is based on enslaved people doing work they are not paid for (and if you think I'm just talking about centuries ago, think about Dubai and see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery).

sitkack2• 11 years ago

Those infrastructure level things are supplied by less than 5% of the workforce. So yes, 95% of the rest, when just considering basic needs, are superfluous. I would be stoked to analyze, maintain and create clean water systems used by the rest of humanity. How many Roman Aqueducts are still functioning? Capitalism and bullshit jobs are not the only way to sustain a virbrant human race.

raverbashing• 11 years ago

Exactly

As much as I'd like to work in a antiwork position, it's very complicated society-wise (especially due to the fact that there aren't that many jobs)

Relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVdiHu1VCc

littletimmy• 11 years ago

We've heard this form of thinking before.

The standard of living we all enjoy is due to the slave labor of the negro. Without blacks, how would we cultivate our land? How would the economy of the South function?

It wasn't a good argument then and it is not a good argument now. People shouldn't have to work to make your shitty society work.

swatow4• 11 years ago

The facts and figures generally don’t support the rose-tinted political view of work. Studies consistently show how jobs keep many of us poor while also making us ill, stressed, exhausted and demoralised

This whole article is a ridiculous strawman. People don't advocate hard work for its own sake (or if they do, this viewpoint isn't politically influential). They promote hard work for what it brings, that is, whatever the worker produced.

Graeber's essay is wrong. There are no "bullshit jobs". From the employer's point of view, why would they hire someone if hiring that person wasn't profitable? Does he really think businesses put the ideology of everyone having a job over profit?

wes-k2• 11 years ago

I think if you graphed money and work you'd find some cycles that weren't really benefitting mankind. There's definitely work that is not needed.

Additionally plenty of people are not working 100% of the time at their job. Many Amazon Turks are these people. Either they have work they are procrastinating OR they don't have much to do.

fernly3• 11 years ago

I find the analysis of the popular attitudes toward work very resonant. We (as a society) do treat the unemployed or unemployable as morally suspect. We do punish people for needing welfare. Many receive the idea of Basic Income with suspicion nearing to revulsion not on economic grounds, but on moral grounds: people would use it to "be lazy".

This, I think, is a particularly telling summary of the connection between Christian doctrine and attitudes to work: "The underlying idea is that you’re endlessly undeserving – that reward, ie happiness, will always be contingent on the endurance of some unpleasant activity (eg “hard work”). Again, we could trace this notion to early moral ideas – eg original sin and redemption through suffering ..."

However I see two shortcomings in this essay. First, he doesn't make what should be the obvious economic connection. True, any job has value; this is evident from the fact that the employer pays for it to be done. There is a market in labor. However, the religion-derived morality that makes it deeply wrong not to work tends to drive down the price of labor. People will accept shittier jobs for lower wages than they would otherwise, when they also accept the belief that it is evil to be unemployed, and virtuous to have work regardless of the type or satisfaction of the work.

Thus the societal attitudes ably described in the essay serve the interests of the employers and work against the interests of the workers. If the workers didn't buy into this zeitgeist, they might not not-work, they might even work the same shitty jobs, but they would be more willing to drop them, and would demand higher pay in line with the shittyness. The necessary jobs would still get done (ya want fries with that); but the employers would have to pay more and provide better conditions because the workers would feel morally free to be more choosy about pay and conditions.

The second thing wrong with the essay is that it ends without even sketching a solution, or a direction that society might take if "antiwork" gained traction. It seems to be an empty term.

wes-k2• 11 years ago

To your first point, I completely agree. I've noticed that for myself and my peers who are confident in finding work, we all can, and for the most part do, demand better wages and benefits. I've seen others not in this situation and they put up with outrageous employers and contracts.

quanticle5• 11 years ago

True, any job has value; this is evident from the fact that the employer pays for it to be done.

Value to the employer != value to society != value to the laborer. We're using one word to describe three concepts, and running headlong into the confusion that results.

raincom2• 11 years ago

Yeah, when the reference (and the concept) of a word shifts, it becomes a fallacy of equivocation.

fernly3• 11 years ago

True. And I think that's the point of the subject essay: that "work" is surrounded by attitudes and mythologies that distort everyone's perceptions of its value.

nickstefan12• 11 years ago

And what makes you so confident people wouldn't use universal income to be lazy? The default behavior of young people who have lots of free time is basically what college students do: drink and copulate haha. Lowest common denominator there would be plenty of people who would use it to be lazy.

Sure the ones with families now would spend more time with theirs, but the generations coming up it would have unintended effects I think.

Think about the invention of the internet. Sure some people use it to learn and connect meaningful. But what do most people use it for? Cat pictures, YouTube celebrities and Facebook stalking.

WorldMaker• 11 years ago

First of all we have scientific studies of an actual experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

Second, the great thing about mincome is that it makes the Labor "market" an actual market with actual liquidity. Sure, you will get people that finally have a choice to never work again. Finally companies would have to compete against each other and that option to not work to make people want to work. Businesses already pride themselves on their efficiency and productivity metrics about how much work they can squeeze out of as few people: this puts their money where there mouth is.

Thirdly, a basic income means that jobs and activities without a steady paycheck become much easier to try and live as a lifestyle. Think of the music, art, writing, acting, and other fine arts we might see if musicians/artists/writers/actors didn't need a 9-to-5 to pay rent and eat. Even things like "stay-at-home parent" start to become easier and better for everyone involved. We're in an economy now where most households both parents need to work a full time job to raise a kid. Who is raising the kids?

Finally, what's wrong with drinking and copulating? If people want to spend their time doing such things which don't impact you at all who are you to condemn them for that?

TeMPOraL4• 11 years ago

The default behavior of young people who have lots of free time is basically what college students do: drink and copulate haha.

Also: network, engage in three million different hobbies, travel, volunteer, learn new skills, build stuff, do art. Beer and sex tend to get boring quickly - every stereotypical college student I knew eventually found something useful to do with his or her free time.

Think about the invention of the internet. Sure some people use it to learn and connect meaningful. But what do most people use it for? Cat pictures, YouTube celebrities and Facebook stalking.

I'd say that is what people with jobs do to procrastinate/relax. Again, who do you think writes Wikipedia articles? Or creates those cat pictures? Or the programming tutorials you grew up on? Often, they are the high-schoolers and students and unemployed - people who have free time to do things that don't bring in profits.

I used to contribute to Wikipedia and write programming tutorials and code games when I was in secondary and high school, and at the university - basically, when I didn't have to work most of the day for a living. Now I'm stuck at a shitty webdev job (believe it or not, programming jobs can also be shitty and boring as hell) and I barely have time to do anything useful or interesting for people around me or the world at large. It's soul-crushing. God help me escape this madness before I have kids.

Frankly, I find this stereotyping of people offensive. All that drinking and sex and sitting in front of TV is what humans do because they can't really afford to do anything else. Every single human being I met has some dreams, passions and interest, but they can't follow any of them because there is not enough hours during the day. You can't, unless you have super-strong willpower, really engage in any meaningful activity if you spend 8+ hours at work every day and come home tired. So people don't.

My best friend used to write a lot; she studied journalism and wanted to be a reporter and a writer. After university she got caught in the cycle of shitty jobs. Mind you, she's not lazy - she's actually the most hard-working and professional person I have ever met in my life. But years of working 8-10 hours a day, six days a week, on bullshit jobs under abusive bosses, made her almost unable to write a single sentence. And constantly asking herself, "will I ever write that book?".

So in TL;DR: no, I don't think most people would use universal income to be lazy. They would use it to do meaningful things with their lives. And honestly, if some group of people really decides to spend their lives drinking wine and singing, I say let them. Because if they can and it costs us nothing, why keep everyone enslaved so that some people won't get do things we find unworthy?

zkhalique• 11 years ago

If you divide today's GDP by the number of people employed, and adjust for inflation, you'll find that average worker productivity went up 4x since the 1950s, while wages stayed stagnant or went down.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-american...

Companies aren't hiring like they used to. There is no need. Automation and outsourcing have reduced the demand for local labor.

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=185

This is a good thing. Overpopulation is behind some of the biggest dangers that face the entire human race, including climate change, overfishing, ecosystem collapse (bees and others disappearing due to stresses introduced by changes in agriculture), factory farms (ethical issues) etc.

Countries have to break their dependence on the old style pyramid of more young people paying for old people's social security. It encourages exponential population growth, which just leads people into trouble later on and kicks the can down the road.

lupin_sansei• 11 years ago

These studies are flawed as they use "median household income" but households have changed a lot since the 1950s. There's many many more single parent households than in the 1950s. If you compare individual wages instead of households you can better see the wage increase since the 1950s.

jqm• 11 years ago

Also a cell phone cost $7000000 in 1950. So if we look at the change in terms of cell phones rather than in terms of pieces of paper with pictures of dead white guys on them, wages have gone up over a million time while productivity has only gone up 4X. (well, not really, but to make a point...).

In the 1950's families generally had one car. They didn't eat out as much. Less vacations. More work to manage a household. So amount of paper in hand is maybe less of an indicator than amount of goods and services that paper can buy. Which has increased I think.

calinet62• 11 years ago

Work is an effort to do something meaningful with time. If our perspective on it is skewed, then that can change—and perhaps it should—but work itself is not evil, nor should we redefine the word to be so construed.

As W. Edwards Deming said, "All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride." Prideful, real work—work that produces joy for the worker and results in something of value—is virtuous.

The real problem is structural. A requirement of working with pride is to be a part of an organization that treats employees well and enables that pride, and removes all barriers to it. They must seek a quality product and a valuable result as a primary goal.

This is why Deming advocated for Quality as a first principle, and why his system was so functional and correct. It took into account primarily the need for every individual in the organization to take pride in work. Learn more -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

And to sum this up, never a better time for this poem:

To be of use – by Marge Piercy

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2006/09...

  The people I love the best
  jump into work head first
  without dallying in the shallows
  and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
  They seem to become natives of that element,
  the black sleek heads of seals
  bouncing like half-submerged balls.
  
  I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
  who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
  who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
  who do what has to be done, again and again.
  
  I want to be with people who submerge 
  in the task, who go into the fields to harvest 
  and work in a row and pass the bags along,
  who are not parlor generals and field deserters
  but move in a common rhythm
  when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
  
  The work of the world is common as mud.
  Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
  But the thing worth doing well done
  has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
  Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
  Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
  but you know they were made to be used.
  The pitcher cries for water to carry
  and a person for work that is real.

wyager• 11 years ago

the pernicious culture of “hard work”

Yes, because productivity and determination are so pernicious.

I don't understand the point of this article; is it suggesting that we intentionally try to decrease humanity's labor output in the name of some poorly-defined notion of "work sucks"?

miscellaneous2• 11 years ago

If you think about this from first principles, it is clear that work is necessary. Considering that we (self-organizing collections of matter) exist in a universe where entropy tends to a maximum, doing work is necessary to maintain our existence.

As for the moral argument as to why people on welfare are often viewed negatively, I think the reasoning is fairly obvious - most taxpayers are doing work which they don't necessarily enjoy, and may become annoyed if they think they are being exploited by people who are not working. Hence why nobody cares if a person who is not on welfare doesn't work.

Finally, I would be interested to know what specific jobs the author is referring to as "BS jobs". As far as I'm aware, people are only given money if someone else finds utility in what they are doing.

d4nt• 11 years ago

Consider this example:

I run the EMEA division of a multinational, I want to justify a bigger budget and/or get a bigger bonus and so I hire a data analyst to prepare some reports showing my division in a favourable light. The reports are well received and have desired effect for the first year or two until my competitor who runs AsiaPac realises what's happening and also hires a data analyst. The situation then returns to normal, but the company now employs two more data analysts than it did a few years ago. Neither one of us will fire our data analyst for fear of looking bad, but the data analysts are in competition and so have no net benefit to the company's performance or humanity as a whole.

miscellaneous2• 11 years ago

I guess I was more looking for an entire category (or industry) of jobs that was deemed "BS" - since that is what I thought the author was implying. But nevertheless, I have considered your example.

I have the following thoughts: -Are these data analysts preparing accurate (factual) reports? If so, then I would contend that they are in fact doing a useful service by allowing upper management to make better resource allocation decisions (i.e. more accurately determine which division is performing the best). -If the data analysts are employed to produce inaccurate or biased reports purely for the benefit of the division managers, then I believe this would be an example of illegal behaviour and an agency problem. For this reason, I would expect that the head office would employ (neutral) data analysts to avoid this problem.

capisce• 11 years ago

I'd recommend you read this article: http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2012/05/27/corny_econ...

And to point you to this comment in the same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205724

It's fully possible for one person in the chain to get positive utility from employing someone while society as a whole gets negative utility, considering negative externalities and race to the bottom-style situations, or a way less than optimal utility if you consider opportunity costs.

chromanoid• 11 years ago

Read the "Manifesto against Labour" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POHENPfWhi8 http://www.krisis.org/1999/manifesto-against-labour

Those who do not work (labour) shall not eat! This cynical principle is still in effect; all the more nowadays when it becomes hopelessly obsolete. It is really an absurdity: Never before the society was that much a labour society as it is now when labour itself is made superfluous.

jokoon6• 11 years ago

I don't know if I have a shitty personality, or if it comes from the fact that I live in france where there's a lot of welfare and unions, which results in workers being treated very nicely. On the other hand, U3 unemployment is at 10%.

I'm 30 and I've never been paid a salary in my entire life except for 1 month. Same for my father, and my mother is not so much better on that.

I tried being honest and tried the "reintegrate myself" option, but I have to say I'm not convinced.

If some people are ready to bite their tongue and subscribe to the obeying workforce, I would let them be, but I will never let them insult unemployed people as being lazy. But I think I belong to the portion of people who is not really actively doing something I think is productive, or is not being able to effectively progress towards that goal. I can't always stick the blame on me.

I understand that civilization and economics are something people hold dearly, like it's important for the well being of millions of people, but sometimes, you have to be honest and explore the sociology and psychology of it if you want to make real improvements. I can't honestly believe politics are completely insensitive to this. Or may they will be in 50 years.

suttree• 11 years ago

I think the shift has already happened. All those people who talk about the "future of work" are the ones I'd quite like to send into the future. The far future.

Work has already changed, the future is here, but it's here because people need two jobs to make rent, or because people freelance so that they can realise their personal visions, not because robots are going to steal our jobs.

The real problem is finding out what you want to do and where you fit (hence https://www.somewhere.com).

Rainymood• 11 years ago

"From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce." - Thomas Edison

arh68• 11 years ago

Antiwork is a terrible name that just throws people off. Why not self-work? It's the work you give yourself. I get the gist of the article: it's not Work vs Leisure, it's Their Work vs Your Own Work, with Leisure on the side.

Antiwork makes it sound like it's the opposite of work. It's not the opposite of work; it's the opposite of pointless work. If anything needs a new nickname, it's the pointless work. Pseudo-work. And if we're going to be morally superior about one or the other, I think the author makes a good case for celebrating selfwork, not pseudowork. (I don't know who celebrates leisure, it's usually the butt of a joke)

czottmann• 11 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree. This point irked me the entire time as the author did not condemn work itself.

I wish there was a way to upvote your comment more than once!

curiously• 11 years ago

so what is it that makes antiworkers so successful? luck? market-fit awareness?

what special skill or trait do you need to become a successful antiworker?

I have this growing uneasiness about capitalism that its really about capital, not special skill, not some super insight, but mainly luck and/or capital. Not brains. Not muscles.

To me this realization throws the entire concept of working hard. It's easy to see that capitalism is not based on exploiting yourself or peddling your ass for wages. In fact the people who claim that hard work is road to success are the very people who benefit it.

It might be that this has become a widely accepted falsehood that was started by no good factory owners since the industrial age, that is being perpetuated to this day.

I honestly feel like I've been lied to all my life. Your startup or business failed, not because you were dumb or it was all your fault, a lot of it has to do with luck. Luck comes in many forms, sales, market timing, product fit etc.

I almost feel like you are almost entitled to spend some time without accomplishing much with antiwork but when you stick around luck will eventually come to you.

In the past month I've completely stopped trying so hard. I just tuned out and let business happen. it was the best month I've had so far.

Antiwork – a radical shift in how we view “jobs”

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