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Antiwork

How I Interpret Antiwork, or a hasty and impatient but impulsive attempt to coalesce my thoughts.

My take on the anti-work movement is that we're on the cusp of, if not actually past, the point of scarcity for basic necessities. The primary issues hampering post-scarcity include logistics (how do we get our abundance distributed where it needs to go?); the new economics of a post-scarcity world (Universal basic income [UBI]? Abolish money? A radical redefinition of money based on the idea that the source of money's value is the work that people do, that the work IS that value, and that free-market capitalism is a poor arbiter for translating work into currency? Cryptocurrency?), and just good old-fashioned cruelty and greed. The relative severity each of these three issues has on realizing a post-scarcity economy is debatable. Personally, I think we can kill all birds with one stone, redefining the nature of money in a framework that recognizes that the true store of value is labor itself…


My take on the anti-work movement is that we're on the cusp of, if not actually past, the point of scarcity for basic necessities. The primary issues hampering post-scarcity include logistics (how do we get our abundance distributed where it needs to go?); the new economics of a post-scarcity world (Universal basic income [UBI]? Abolish money? A radical redefinition of money based on the idea that the source of money's value is the work that people do, that the work IS that value, and that free-market capitalism is a poor arbiter for translating work into currency? Cryptocurrency?), and just good old-fashioned cruelty and greed.

The relative severity each of these three issues has on realizing a post-scarcity economy is debatable. Personally, I think we can kill all birds with one stone, redefining the nature of money in a framework that recognizes that the true store of value is labor itself – definitely not a central bank, and DEFINITELY not gold or any other substance. (For an egregious modern-day example of what I mean, consider the Mozambique trillion dollar bill; the currency was catastrophically worthless, but the work performed across the country didn't substantially change; so, why should it be that a loaf of bread that was affordable recently could bankrupt someone now? Wouldn't it be better to just agree that the $MZN was divorced from reality and for buyers and sellers to be the ones defining what the value of goods and services are and what abstraction to use to reflect that value?) The changes which would result let us continue to pay the people who keep our groceries and food services and etc. stocked while simultaneously neutering greed by making wealth as we now know it irrelevant. (Also, UBI.)

And now for a tangent: It's frankly beyond my understanding why workers aren't regarded as actual owners of the results of their labor, at every station in industry, commerce, and real estate. Factories should be owned by their workers. Stores should be owned by their employees. Apartments should be owned by their tenants. And not speculatively, not with shares on the open market but with actual distribution of net profit, a cash rebate of sorts on the time spent making or selling goods and services and turning the concept of landlordship on its disgustingly overinflated head.

But that's just my two cents fifteen dollars.

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