by Victor Evink
A lid fits every pot, they sometimes say. It is no different for new ideas. Effective sharing of abundance and knowledge can help find the right match. For ideas, and therefore also for people and work. This is how things sometimes come about that were previously thought impossible.
In Calvinist Holland, perhaps even more than elsewhere, ‘hard for little, never grumpy’ has become a popular motto. “The earth [is] cursed for your sake” reads the Bible almost right at the beginning, when man is thrown out of paradise. “With toil you shall eat thereof all the days of your life; thorns and thistles shall he cause to rise before you, and you shall eat the crop of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the earth.” Firm language.
**Abundance: a utopia? Abundance also once existed, in the Garden of Eden, where everything literally grew on trees and man could go through life carefree and already picking fruit. Such a situation would come again one day, but only as a religious expectation of the future, where God Himself makes everything new. But until then, labour is a sacred duty, a kind of asceticism that will be repaid tenfold in heaven. Laziness while enjoying the good life is not only morally reprehensible but also impossible for the Calvinist. “He who will not work will not eat.” Medieval representations of Cockaigneous Land, where roast pigs frolic before you like walking rollers, are a utopia in the literal sense of the word's original Greek origin: ‘ou topos’, or non-place - a world that fundamentally cannot exist. A form of this thinking is so deeply branded in our cultural consciousness that abundance often remains difficult to understand.
Never work again
Yet some do believe we will never have to work again in the near future. Even earlier in history than you might think. When the industrial revolution first enabled the production of food and goods on a massive scale, the thoughts of intellectuals sometimes already strikingly identical to contemporary predictions of pop futurists like Yuval Noah Harari. But unlike today, the idea that machines will soon make humans obsolete was not a spectre at the time but rather a hopeful prospect. Future dreams based on abundance were also popular in 20th-century cultural avant-garde and science fiction. Let's take Star Trek again as an example. In the Star Trek universe, it is Replicators, a kind of magical 3D printers that can conjure any possible object atom by atom out of thin air, that provide the crew with basic necessities like food, fresh air and drinking water. “Machines of Loving grace“, the Californian poet Richard Brautigan called this kind of technology in 1972: mechanical supreme beings who will eventually free humans from the primal curse and bring them back to paradise. Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys goes even further. His speculative design - a life's work he worked on from 1959 to 1974 - for a fully automated playground-city spanning the globe, he called ‘New Babylon‘, as a kind of techno-hedonistic counterpart to the Biblical New Jerusalem, in which the homo ludens, the free, playing man, would soon replace the working, bourgeois man as the new cultural ideal.
Economically redundant
Although mechanisation and automation have indeed taken a flight of fancy, none of these futurists have seen their dream come substantially closer. While the economic prosperity of the 1960s brought more overall prosperity and leisure, a society-wide decoupling of labour and wealth never materialised. On the contrary, after the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, the gap between large, increasingly international companies on one side and working people on the other only widened. And while the internet did create opportunities for new forms of work and business, the platform revolution came amid a situation where social functions such as communication and transport had become new market territory. That way, this new prosperity, especially in data and artificial intelligence, could concentrate in the hands of a small group of Silicon Valley tech companies. Therefore, the away-automation of more and more forms of labour is currently anything but a utopia. Except in the role of consumer, a growing group of people worldwide, often without realising it, are on the verge of becoming economically obsolete. And then what? This is where my theoretical story gets personal.
Distance to the labour market
Due to a disability in the autism spectrum, I have what is known as a ‘distance to work’. This means not being able to meet the basic level of a salaried job. After all, pay is based on what an average worker should perform. The fewer jobs relative to the number of applicants, the fiercer the competition. And the higher the average level, the tougher the demands. In my own field, for example, the theoretical sector, an educated generation competes for a limited number of jobs. Those who eventually want to enter salaried employment as researchers or consultants will first have to earn their own spurs to do so, and then face a lot of personal responsibility and high time pressure. In the practically-oriented sectors, much comes down to speed.
Both of these pitfalls have become glaringly obvious to me. For instance, the plastic factory where I once worked had to constantly slow down the machines, which were spitting out a constant stream of lids - or even turn them off, because the plate had already filled up again and lids were starting to get stuck between the wheels. “You are an incredibly nice and intelligent young man,” said the manager in a film-worthy performance review, for which I was called to the little office after only a few days, “but I think you can see for yourself that this is not going to be it here.‘ On the other hand, after a research internship, I also failed, without proper guidance, to independently turn my project into an academic publication, and thus gain the confidence for a PhD.
Who pays determines
Since then, I started making art. I wrote about underground music, developed a business plan for a cultural city lab, archived trends in visual internet culture and tried to get started as a DJ producer. In doing so, I was lucky to be able to fall back on the WAJONG, which I had happily been assigned a few years earlier. Ideal, you'd think: less pressure to apply immediately, and enough space to be able to develop things that were important to me. But something kept bothering me. “We are not a cultural subsidy” the UWV said with some regularity. “You may well have a hobby, but the idea is to reintegrate, to participate in society again.” And somewhere, I can't blame them. Running up against the economic limits of the things I undertook, and tried again and again in other ways, raised the question of what that means then, ‘participating’, if you are at the same time economically redundant. In the municipality of Rotterdam, they had already figured that out. There, street sweeping, plant picking or cleaning is part of the standard reintegration package. Those who refuse no longer receive benefits. After all, one good turn deserves another, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.
In the light of a near future in which a growing group of people could start developing a distance from the labour market due to automation, the question of how we will not only fill our time but also pay for it (and at what cost) is more relevant than ever. Many advocates of a universal basic income look to the government as the most obvious solution to redress the balance between big business and citizens, whether working or not, and thus to unleash a potential for creative possibilities that the avant-garde dreamed of a century ago: freedom of time fulfilment and extra disposable money. The red-hot NFT market last year, which was partly driven by the US Covid aid packages, is actually already a foreshadowing of this.
Sharing abundance as an alternative
Yet the question is whether it is necessary to wait passively for such an intervention from outside or above. Existing economic processes, however efficiently designed, already automatically create such untapped potential for abundance every day. Targeted sharing of this can provide a basis for growing a reality that seems able to flout basic economic laws. I realised this now seven years ago when, during the time I was frantically trying to get that research paper on paper but could no longer sit in the university office, I walked into Seats2meet for the first time. I not only found a workplace and inspiring environment there but, at that time, I could even join them for lunch without having to pay with money. Milton Friedman would probably have found all sorts of things about that, but for me it has been life-changing.
Hatching value
The basic principle that everyone possesses potentially relevant knowledge, regardless of one's social position, and is given the confidence to be part of a dynamic knowledge ecosystem, creates a kind of social incubator. It gives non-conventional ideas, which at the time do not yet fit well into the economic environment, the chance to quietly be able to develop, improve and cross-pollinate, and thus find a place in a new reality taking shape collectively. Such ideas, or the people who develop them, are actually a bit like the plastic lids I used to have to sort out and throw away because they were not quite stamped to the standard and thus did not fit well on the equally uniform trays. But instead of just being able to turn the machine slower, or off, abundance and effective knowledge sharing enables them to be able to find the right match. Who knows, it may even allow them to package something surprisingly new. This takes courage, trust, creativity and a long breath. But fortunately, time also abounds.
