The light-and-dark character of heteromation provoked some soul searching on our part, and we wonder about emancipatory changes that could reconfigure heteromation from marginalized labor to equitable employment, relaxing the moral imperative of certain forms of paid labor as a necessary part being a good person (discussed in chapter 11). Now we contemplate a particular vision of a future of work, and of life more generally, by sketching a utopian design. As we have seen, much heteromated labor is freely chosen, enjoyable, interesting, challenging, and rewarding in a surprising number of ways. At the same time, heteromation, with its low returns to workers, is a driver of economic inequality.
Some reject utopias as nothing more than fantastical scenarios. But we agree with sociologist Erik Olin Wright that “real utopias” are essential imaginaries for discovering ways to define and enable real change.1 Drawing on eclectic sources, we propose a real utopia, followed by comparison with proposals that are more reformist in nature. We move beyond heteromation, considering the economy as a whole, in fact, pushing all the way to the planetary limits that fundamentally constrain economic activity (see Georgescu-Roegen 1971; Hornborg 2014). Underlying the economic inequality Piketty so thoroughly documents is the despoliation of the very Earth itself, and the resources upon which all human economic activity, and indeed all human life, depend. Capitalist projects are set in motion so that the rich can discover how much richer they can get, an absurdist endgame of accumulation by dispossession, exploitation, heteromation, and other forms of accumulation.2
Considering the magnitude of the problems this accumulation has caused, we turn to the work of steady-state economists who theorize the economy as part of the global ecology. These economists insist that we cannot proceed intelligently until we acknowledge the finiteness of Earth’s resources. Herman Daly (1991) and Douglas Booth (1998), in particular, examine how we might bring economic activity into balance with the Earth’s carrying capacity. Culture and society can grow and develop in unlimited fashion, they say, but resource use and waste accumulation cannot. The laws of thermodynamics prevent that. Booth (1998, p. 156) observes:
As the economic system expands, it places increasing demands on the global ecosystem for energy, materials, and ecosystem services. The global ecosystem, however, has a fixed capacity to provide such services (Daly 1991). As a consequence of economic expansion, the global ecosystem suffers from excessive exploitation, and, as a result, its capacity to provide inputs to the global economy is diminished.
Contemporary Marxist thought also includes ecological approaches (e.g., Burkett 2003), and while there is disagreement about the role of natural resources and ecological processes in the dynamics of capitalism, Hornborg (2014) points out that squabbles notwithstanding, the ecological approaches stand with the subdiscipline of ecological economics and proponents of a steady-state economy in demanding an accounting of natural resources in theories of economy. It is neoclassical economics, Hornborg wryly observes, that “does not seriously consider material constraints on economic processes,” (2014, p. 91)3. The neoclassical paradigm is, needless to say, the dominant paradigm, the 800-pound gorilla compared to which the other approaches are small if scrappy contenders. In this book, we have emphasized labor as the foundation of economic value, a touchstone necessary to explain the development of contemporary digital technology. But we recognize, with scholars such as Burkett and Hornborg, that analysis of the Earth’s resources is indispensable to any broad theory of economic activity. The realities Booth delineates frame the discussion.
This chapter constitutes something of a small manifesto. It might turn out that the ideas will be of little interest to readers whose primary goal in reading this book is to think about heteromation as a computer-mediated labor relation. We wrote the chapter, however, because critiques such ours often evoke the response: What is to be done? We do not, of course, have simple answers to this question. But we consider how the kinds of labor that are currently heteromated could be embedded in more equitable labor relations. We push questions of labor out to a larger context, exploring proposals for a guaranteed basic income, new forms of subsistence, and a true sharing economy. We believe that the disciplinary pressure to work that Weeks questions might be altered by implementation of some of these proposals.
We begin back in the 1980s, when Austrian philosopher André Gorz wrote a small but insightful book sketching a utopia that would address technology, economy, and inequality. In Paths to Paradise, Gorz (1985) envisioned a more relaxed economy and society. This society would reverse the accumulation of wealth and power into the hands of an ever-smaller group of elites, and give everyone some room to breathe and live. Gorz welcomed automation, suggesting that we could reconfigure the economy to favor the masses through the use of technologies to relieve workers of certain forms of burdensome labor, and reduce time spent at paid labor. Release from long hours of work, and from debilitating or stultifying labor, would be traded off for less consumerist ways of living. Gorz reckoned that with low-consumption lifestyles, and in the company of robots, most of us could work about five months a year. Weeks asked why we work “so long and so hard.” Perhaps the answer is that we do not necessarily have to.
A life with less labor in the 40-hour-a-week model of disciplinary control would be a big change from the way employed Americans typically work.4 If we ceased producing the extraordinary volume of cheap and obsolescent junk that ends up in landfills, and reduced mobility and other energy sinks, we would not need to rouse ourselves to spend 40 stressful hours a week in the factories and call centers and warehouses that rob us of time with our children, the elderly, the infirm, and, indeed, with ourselves. A new cell phone every year is not part of a program of Gorzian simplicity, nor are extravagant levels of international travel, nor driving large vehicles to the grocery store. A basic guaranteed income is in the program, as well as a state that safeguards basic rights, including education and healthcare.
Gorz was adamant that the status games and aggressive competition woven into the texture of contemporary capitalism must stop if we are to build a saner society. He noted that status seeking stimulates consumption and the desire to accumulate wealth. With unchecked competition, the objective must become to drive everyone else out. Increasingly, contemporary capitalism does just that. Wealthy, powerful oligopolies (Suarez-Villa 2015) have gained even more control than at the time Gorz was writing. Competition does not occur on the level playing field mainstream economics imagines—rather, a small number of corporations exerts massive influence over media, the legal apparatus, and government (ibid.).
Countervailing forces to inject socially aware values into discussions about the society we hope to have are diminished when there is control by the few (Suarez-Villa 2015; see also Stiglitz 2014). The damage democracy suffers in these circumstances is appalling, as Morozov (2011), Suarez-Villa (2015), Brown (2015), and others have discussed.
Suarez-Villa (2015, p. 252) reports that oligopolies are accompanied by an astonishingly lopsided distribution of household net worth:
The top one percent now has more private net household wealth, or net worth—the value of all assets possessed, after taxes—than the bottom 90 percent of the population, a situation that is almost unprecedented in the US. Only in periods preceding major crises, such as the 1920s, or in socially distressed nations—the kind that are usually thought to be ruled by oligarchies—can similar statistics be found.
Thomas Piketty has written at length about the funneling of wealth into the hands of a smaller and smaller number of very wealthy people (2014). He addresses inequality with proposals for redistributive mechanisms of global corporate taxation—which, as he notes with admirable good cheer, have been derided as utopian. While his proposals lack the sweep of Gorz’s notions of refashioning society from top to bottom, Piketty’s ideas constitute an important critical device for slicing into the complexities of what is going wrong in today’s capitalism. The ideas are not mere procedures, but percipient critiques with ramifications beyond tax policy. Most important, they urge us to ask questions such as “Why don’t we have these tax policies now?” They make visible a complex set of concerns we must begin to address.
Considering the realities these scholars (and others) have documented, the alternative to articulating paths to paradise and designing real utopias is to fold our cards now, yielding to powerful interests that would dictate practically everything. Such a course of inaction on our part seems reckless—in catastrophic ways, capital’s markets have not worked. Huge numbers of people remain impoverished in the world today. We are caught in an unmistakable and terrifying downward spiral of environmental devastation. In the United States, home of the least regulated system of capitalism, forty million people live below the poverty line. Over two million are incarcerated. Mortality rates are increasing, a shocking reversal after decades of improvement.
A working market should not produce these outcomes. The objective of society—a path to paradise in broad outline—should be to shift the capitalist emphasis on growth in material throughput to emphasis on the growth and development of human persons and cultures. Such a society would not tolerate the outcomes we have mentioned. Petcou and Petrescu (2014, p. 264) clarify that the needed transition is not to be thought of as “sustaining” the current system, but as addressing “societal change and political and cultural reinvention … [including concerns of] inequality, power, and cultural difference.”
How can such a transition be achieved? In the following dicussion, we propose some ideas, and then critique some others.
Moving beyond concerns of today’s economy, we consider historical trajectories of civilizational rise and fall from which we might grasp priorities for action. Archaeologist Joseph Tainter has studied these trajectories across time and space. Using the detailed, precise methodologies of archaeology to examine a range of historical societies in his sweeping book The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), Tainter shows that all civilizations eventually collapse, declining over a period of decades or centuries. For rich countries, decline will result in less material abundance as we push the limits of the Earth’s resources necessary for economic activity. Many poor countries, or at least large populations within them, may be said to have already entered decline, or even collapse.5 Eventually, we will turn away from capitalism as it is practiced today because the Earth cannot sustain its excesses (Daly 1991, Booth 1998, Vandermeer 2011, Robertson 2012, IPCC 2013).
But it is not necessary for our society to end in abject collapse. The societies that Tainter studied—the Maya, the Mesopotamians, the Minoans, the Inca, the Romans, the Egyptians, and others—did not possess the resources of science, history, and technology that we have amassed in the last 500 years. These resources have the potential to be usefully deployed to fashion a transition from the current, unsustainable system, to a new system based on designs for real utopias. There is no guarantee we can accomplish such a transition, but it seems likely that we have some time to plan, at least within typical Tainterian time frames.
But where to start? Probably we should begin with the means and the mode of subsistence production. Wright (2009) observes that capitalism initiated its domination by dispossessing workers of their means of production. Harvey (2003) draws attention to capitalism’s strategy of accumulation by dispossession in which workers’ once-autonomous activities are (forcibly) brought into circuits of capital—for example, economic upheavals have driven people all over the world from subsistence farming to cash cropping. As we enter the shaky political economy arising within a destabilizing natural and social environment, it seems prudent to disrupt such processes, finding ways to once again control of our own subsistence. Even if we reject the moral imperative to work that Weeks discusses, basic needs must still be met through some form of labor.
Most fundamentally, we need to eat, regardless of anything else that is happening in our lives. Surely, however, we are long past thinking about producing our own food? Current environmental trends indicate that food production is, in fact, something we should absolutely be thinking about. Air and water pollution, soil erosion, the destruction of fisheries, and precipitous drops in populations of wild species such as bees to pollinate food crops, are rapidly degrading the natural resources upon which all food production depends. These externalities, from which no part of the globe is spared, put food security in peril. Processes of resource degradation result from modes of agricultural production that depend on nonrenewable resources—fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. These substances are not only nonrenewable, they generate massive ecosystem effects such as polluted waterways, oceanic dead zones, and 29 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (Vermuelen, Campbell, and Ingram 2012).
In California, to take but one instance, rice farming in the Sacramento Valley deploys aviation as a core technique: “Flying at 100 mph, planes plant the fields from the air” (Fox 2015). In addition to the fossil fuel for flying planes, rice production requires enormous amounts of water in a region of low precipitation. All of this, and yet most of the rice is exported, and few workers are employed (Fox 2015). The objective of such industrial agriculture is to generate wealth for the few. Scarce public resources (water allocations) are deployed to create this wealth, but the wealth is not distributed to the populace through employment.
Hornborg (2014, p. 92) observes that the increasing crop yields stoking optimism about feeding the world’s billions “have primarily been based on imports of guano, phosphates, oil, and other resources from extractive sectors of the world economy.” These resources, extracted from finite supplies, cannot sustain agriculture in the long run. Transferring the practices and machinery of this mode of production to poorer nations, instead of innovating ecologically sensitive techniques and employing local labor, is primarily a means of capital accumulation as corporations seek new markets for their products. By contrast, research on informated techniques of food production such as “computational agroecology” (Raghavan et al. 2016) and “printable gardens” (Takeuchi 2016) promises to provide some of the necessary innovation for a return (albeit a technologically inflected one) to at least some subsistence food production.
Basic subsistence also requires the manufacture of everyday tools, household items, shelter, transport, and so on. Recent computing research has addressed means by which we might begin to recover autonomy of production. A philosophy of “DIY” informs work on “making,” hacking, craft, undesign, repair, and reuse, signaling a desire to counter massification and restore some autonomy.6 “Maker” culture (Ratto 2011, Bradley 2014) promotes local production using 3D printing to fabricate clothing, shoes, implements, machines, craft materials, and much more.
These dual efforts in computer-mediated subsistence agriculture and DIY manufacture are attempting to discover ways to return fundamental processes of production to the masses, that is, to distribute the means of production. Capitalism distributes primarily consumption. The extent to which a viable system of distributed production is possible remains to be seen. Co-optation is always a threat, including powerful interests that would heteromate the labor involved in these efforts. We believe, though, that the developments we mention have the potential to recover individual and small group production of daily essentials, reversing, at least to some degree, accumulation by dispossession, exploitation, and the intensification of heteromation.
It seems unlikely, however, that everything will be non-market—wealth must be generated and circulated to sustain civilization. If it is not, we will end up in small, poor, isolated, regional societies. We might, for example, produce a piece of train track on our 3D printer, but to lay track from point A to point B, a larger, cooperative, regulatory unit (supported by taxation) must exist, or we cannot connect the links to build an infrastructure.7 Advances in human rights, such as greater acceptance of LGBTQ individuals, result from social movements scaled at national or international levels (see Nardi 2013). For such reasons, it does not seem desirable to restrict society to small units or to go overboard on localizing production or governance. Tainter (1990) observes that collapsing civilizations result in exactly such small, regional units, which eventually collapse or are conquered by more powerful societies with superior organization.
In realist Gorzian fashion, then, we envision that labor beyond subsistence will go to government and corporations.8 Together, the state and corporations, properly managed, could produce basic services such as railroads, schools, healthcare, goods that cannot be 3D-printed, and so on. Would these institutions be managed any better than they are today? We believe that if they are not, the environmental collapse inherent in current economic practice will lead to chaos. As Tainter documented, most societies eventually collapse. We optimistically assume that with advances in science and philosophies of human rights, we have some chance of finding ways to transition to a system more like the steady-state economy Herman Daly has envisioned.
Interrupting processes of capitalist accumulation would relieve the pressures of too much work for too little reward (Gorz 1985, Nardi 2015). In concert with a resumption of subsistence activity, a basic guaranteed income would contribute to a non-negotiable safety net. This safety net requires taxation and well-regulated corporate activity. The basic guaranteed income, also known as “social income” or “universal basic income,” is being tried in Finland, the Netherlands, Canada, and elsewhere. Historically, it has many precedents; for example, in the United States between 1862 and 1986, fully 10 percent of the land mass was given away by the government for homesteads.
The social income has demonstrated its appeal to at least some members of both the right and left sides of the political spectrum. On the right, the social income upholds libertarian values, rejecting the nanny state which attempts to anticipate and supply specific needs. The social income advances a bracing “40-acres-and-a-mule” mentality: individuals are given basic resources, and they figure things out for themselves from there. The state need not concern itself if a citizen decides to play video games all day and live on a small income. It’s too expensive and intrusive to find out what the citizen is doing (see also Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2016).9
Over on the left, a basic income policy declares that no wealthy nation should allow any citizen to live in dire poverty, and everyone should be guaranteed a minimal living. Conditions such as homelessness, for example, are unconscionable in this view.10 The social income, then, gives people the means to act responsibly for their own well-being in neoliberal fashion, yet guarantees that no one falls over the economic edge. Milton Friedman liked the social income because it dismantles expensive means-testing bureaucracy. Martin Luther King liked it because it favors a more equitable society. We are thus hopeful that such a solution could take root, given the political bedfellows who have, over the years, championed various forms of this type of wealth distribution.
The extent to which capitalism would have to change its game as we tread a path to paradise is unknown. Contemporary, winner-take-call capitalism is not playing the long game. Its lack of care for the planet, disregard for the billion among us who go hungry, and tolerance for increasingly endemic global economic precarity make it as shortsighted as a quarterly report.
However, certain favorable portents indicate that capitalism could be moved toward less avaricious versions of itself. Alternative styles of corporate management, including employee-owned corporations and benefit corporations, have already established a firm legal basis; they do not need to be invented or legislated. Such corporations could reduce the trend toward oligopoly, while leveraging capitalism’s special nimbleness and bottom-up creative ferment. Schemes like global taxation that keep the lid on concentrations of wealth (such as those Piketty suggests) seem essential if some form of capitalism is to be viable. Or a new system must emerge. Capitalism organizes society—nothing more and nothing less—and it can be changed or even abandoned.
In suggesting a return to control of subsistence, we want to be clear that we are not proposing a romantic attempt to recover lost connections to nature or a simpler, preindustrial society. That would be preposterous. No one wants to go back to a world without obstetrics or recorded music or washing machines. We must discuss a real utopia that combines elements of previous social systems with new elements such as the internet and robotics. In particular, the legacy of exploitation of living bodies manifest in agrarian societies is incompatible with modern ethics. That exploitation is no longer needed—it is now possible to insert technology into more equitable and environmentally sensible programs of economic activity. The healthful physical activities of subsistence farming might be encouraged, and we might develop trimmer, stronger bodies as a result, but we need not return to the arduous labor that once wore peasants out at an early age and would prevent participation of the elderly and disabled. An interesting technical challenge, for example, would be to develop technologies such as robots for subsistence agriculture that engage a variety of participants at differing levels of physical robustness.
Now we must discuss some of the practicalities of a real utopia, examining new materialities of production and distribution and the role of formerly heteromated labor in sustaining the parts of civilization worth keeping. The solutions we propose either exist now or are present in current research agendas, although some of them are rather unusual.
Most of us know little about growing our own food. Gardening and smallholder farming have hardly died out, however, and efforts such as permaculture and perennial polyculture (Ferguson and Lovell 2014) are increasingly relevant. The scientific study of agroecology is concerned with creating “self-sustaining, low-input, diversified, and energy-efficient agricultural systems” through techniques that promote biodiversity (Altieri 1999, p. 30; see also Vandermeer 2011). Instead of fossil fuel–based industrial farming techniques, agroecological systems utilize ecological principles and expertise about local conditions. Unused capacity for sustainably growing food in private and public lands can be leveraged to shift a significant portion of food production to techniques such as perennial polyculture that support cultivation of fruit and nut trees, grapevines, berry bushes, and perennial food plants like artichokes, asparagus, leeks, rhubarb, and herbs. We can envision a wide diversity of environments, from urban/suburban smallholders to larger farms full of productive, sustainable food-producing ecosystems.11
To fulfill this vision, new technology is necessary. Agroecological practice is complex and takes many years, sometimes decades, of hands-on experience to master. It relies on precise knowledge of local conditions, including “biogeochemical conditions, climatology, plant, animal, and insect species, topography, soil ecology and chemistry, agroforestry, water management, inter- and intra-specific plant competition, terraforming, sunlight requirements, and plant propagation” (Raghavan et al. 2016). Climate change creates the need for continual new knowledge. Industrial agriculture, by contrast, depends on brute force inputs of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. It is a more standardized, portable methodology, but one with increasingly expensive externalities.
Computing systems that extract, systematize, and distribute knowledge of bioregional conditions and practices of cultivation have the potential to make agroecology scalable (Raghavan et al. 2016). Diverse formal and informal systems have the necessary knowledge, but this knowledge is scattered and inaccessible. Communities of local growers, for example, collaborate and exchange information online, and their knowledge and support could be scaled up to encourage people to learn about ecologically sensible food production. Copious data from government databases and the scientific literature could be curated and made accessible (Raghavan et al. 2016). Takeuchi (2016) addresses the same problem of scaling subsistence agriculture, offering technologies based on 3D printing. Both computational agroecology and printable gardens have the masses in mind, seeking to develop practical ways for anyone to grow food, even those with little agricultural knowledge.
The intensive consumption that began in the era of massification has run its course, at least from an environmental perspective. We must provision ourselves with basic material goods, but the finiteness of the earth’s resources indicates that we cannot keep treating its services (topsoil, clean water, minerals, fossil fuels, animals such as bees and bats) as though they are inexhaustible. Recent critical thinking in the field of human–computer interaction including sustainable HCI (Blevis 2007, Brynjarsdóttir et al. 2012, Knowles et al. 2013, Dillahunt 2014, Joshi and Cerratto-Pargman 2015), undesign (Baumer and Silberman 2011, Pierce 2012), and repair (Maestri and Wakkary 2011, Jackson 2014), has upended taken-for-granted assumptions about the inevitability and desirability of contemporary consumerist lifestyles. In “simple living” groups (Håkansson and Sengers 2013), for example, people choose thrift and simplicity, creating lifestyles and practices that could inform plans for broader societal changes. Ecovillages re-skill residents in methods of food production and shelter fabrication (Nathan 2008, Cerratto-Pargman, Pargman, and Nardi 2016). A recrudescence of the 1970s social movements of voluntary simplicity and appropriate technology are visible in such efforts. Steampunk devotees practice reuse, repair, and recycling in their communities. Notably, they engage in constant “critical reflection on the role of technologies” in society (Tanenbaum, Desjardins, and Tanenbaum 2013, p. 109).
Products designed to be repaired interrupt cycles of planned obsolescence, a phenomenon first observed in the 1950s by Vance Packard (1960). Repair decreases profits but promotes environmentally sound practices and the self-reliance that underpins workable systems of subsistence production. These approaches indicate that “motives of consumption,” as Marx called them, are social productions—they are not “natural” or given. We should see them as such, and consider how they can contribute to environmental sustainability and the provision of basic necessities for all.
Isn’t the “sharing economy” gearing up to help us gain more equitable economic structures, lowering barriers to participation and distributing wealth? In the case of companies such as Uber, the sharing economy seems a way to push risk to workers, as Robert Reich (2015) has explained. The millions of dollars in venture capital that underwrite such enterprises belie the intent to “share.”
But a different, genuine sharing economy is emerging in practices of computer-mediated freecycling, barter (Knowles et al. 2013), and timebanking (Bellotti et al. 2014). These projects implement peer-to-peer solutions for redistributing wealth outside markets (see Bradley 2014). Freecycling can be as simple as a neighborhood listserv where people announce their castoffs, and neighbors drop by to pick them up. In many cases of peer production and distribution, the technologies exist, and it is a matter of people developing practices for using them.12
We believe urges toward usage of such tools is growing. Even where technical solutions are not yet in place, people are expressing strong interest in innovative means of sharing within communities. For example, in Japan, there is a local currency community in the city of Ueda in the Nagano Prefecture that organizes economic and social activity around the invented local currency, the maayu:
[The residents] use a maayu bankbook to keep a record of exchanging services and goods. Exchange using the local currency includes, for example, taking care of pets while the owner is away, guiding people in mountain vegetable hunting, fixing the handles of kitchen knives, giving rides, trimming trees in yards, and selling home-grown vegetables, homemade wine, and unneeded wedding gifts [!] … When this group created their own local currency, they also started a market called “maayu ichi” (maayu market) in order to have a place for members to meet face-to-face once a month. There, participants bring things they want to sell, including homegrown vegetables and homemade meals, and they eat together occasionally. … Through this and other projects, members became better acquainted with each other and the community became solidified. (Ueno, Sawyer, and Moro 2016)
Gui and Nardi (2015) documented similar sharing activities in a town in Devon, United Kingdom, where people organized workshops to share knowledge about gardening, fermenting vegetables, repairing bicycles, beekeeping, and the like, as well as undertaking larger projects such as building and repairing houses for low income residents. As in Ueda, the social activity and neighborliness that blossomed from the economic activity were as important to residents as the practical services (ibid.).
The postwar years of massification and related developments discussed in chapter 3 interrupted attitudes informed by an ethos of DIY/sharing/self-sufficiency—attitudes that had been commonplace in earlier generations. As the economy began to rebuild after the war, the recovery eventually entered a kind of overkill that promoted a fierce consumerism, as capitalism, and its attendant culture, lost all sense of balance. Powerful interests refused to take seriously the dislocations of frenzied economic activity which were eroding environmental and social sanity. Those dislocations continue to plague us today. Yet it is a hopeful sign that DIY sensibilities were not stamped out entirely. We find them still, experiencing a revival in cultures as varied as Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Perhaps Marx would not be surprised at the problems that concern us today. Caffentzis (2013, p. 237) recalls Marx’s observation that social systems based on money entail heavy costs “from depressions, famines, and slavery to police, prisons, and execution chambers to banks, stock markets, and all sorts of expensive ‘financial services’.” With contemporary phenomena such as volatile stock markets, escalating police violence, and untrustworthy banks and lenders, Marx’s observation is more timely than ever. Reducing dependence on these institutions seems prudent, sensible, even necessary. The costs of current markets with their relentless monetization of nearly everything, and the avarice that results from the cocooning of the extremely wealthy from the effects of their activities, are rarely taken into account when examining the so-called “rationality” of markets.
At present, the new (or revived) materialities of production and distribution we have discussed are scattered and piecemeal, occurring in little islands of enthusiasm. Their value lies in the knowledge they generate, which can be used now and in the future. This chapter, as a mini-manifesto, has emphasized proposals for actions that do not require organized social movements with agendas easily defeated through corporate-funded legal action.13 We have instead drawn attention to activities that can be carried out by individuals and small groups that nonetheless constitute substantial, practical responses.14 Even if the tax schemes Piketty proposes (and other such reforms) never materialize, there is still much to be done in our own backyards, basements, and community spaces.
We take inspiration from rapid, mass turnarounds such as the Victory Gardens cultivated during World Wars I and II15 which produced almost half of all consumed fruits and vegetables during the war years. Nearly instantly, these efforts transformed food production, as Americans were inspired to grow food for themselves so that commercial production could go to soldiers and the starving populations of Europe (Hayden-Smith 2014). Rapid change is possible. Producing our own food is possible. And so is making our own everyday items. When we can print customized objects using open-source software without corporate mediation, perhaps we will do so, just as people only one or two generations ago possessed skills in sewing, knitting, carpentry, woodworking, leatherworking, machine repair, and blacksmithing. (Production is, of course, easier with a 3D printer.) We note that practices of winemaking, tool repair, and gathering wild foods are still present in Japan.
It is perhaps ironic that in this age of massive networks, individual and small-group efforts loom large as key methodologies of change. The neoliberal economy continues to actively perturb traditional forms of mass resistance. In the United States, for example, recent legal decisions have disempowered unions, once a formidable source of resistance. TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) will shift even more power to corporations. Finding ways to circulate new ideas and practices outside these structures, which stack the deck against all but the wealthiest, is a challenge before us.
It seems, though, that we might have at least one trick up our collective sleeves, and that is to turn neoliberal ideology on its head by taking our “freedom” and using it to learn subsistence techniques, to educate ourselves about peer-to-peer methods of production and distribution outside markets, and to adopt open-source software alternatives that empower us to use the technology for our own ends.16
These activities, of course, require computing machinery and digital networks. It would be possible for powerful interests to withhold, or to price us out of, for example, the rare earth minerals required for computing, or to otherwise manipulate the system. Capitalists are well organized in robust organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank. Select heads of state and global corporate managers jet to meetings at venues such as the World Economic Forum where class interests are given an annual airing. There is indeed reason to be concerned that existing powers would attempt to derail the sorts of activities we have been proposing.
However, ideas for countermeasures also exist, and we must pay attention to them, because if we do not maintain a level of optimism and practical engagement, paralysis is likely. With respect to the all-important project of sustaining widespread access to the internet, Raghavan and Hasan (2012, p. 1) discuss what they call an internet “quine”17—a design for an independent, self-reproducing internet:
The Internet stands atop an … industrial system required for its continued growth, operation, and maintenance. While its scale could not have been achieved without this reliance, its dependencies—ranging from sophisticated manufacturing facilities to limited raw materials—make it vulnerable to disruptions. To achieve independence requires an Internet quine—a set of devices, protocols, manufacturing facilities, software tools, and other related components that is self-bootstrapping and capable of being used by engineers to reproduce itself and all the needed components of the Internet. In this paper, we study how such an Internet quine could be built. We also attempt to identify a minimal set of such tools and facilities, and how small and inexpensive they can be made.
The authors conclude that internet technology relies on widely available resources, with a few important exceptions such as gallium (for semiconductor fabrication), which occurs in sizeable deposits only in Australia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, and Venezuela. Despite potential shortfalls of such minerals, Raghavan and Hasan (2012) point out that we have manufactured so much computing equipment already, that for the foreseeable future it will probably be possible to build what we need with salvage.
Raghavan and Hasan observe that a quine could interoperate in a flexible manner with the current internet (although performance might be less than what we are used to). They note that hobbyists have been manufacturing radios for decades, and we could do the same with the internet. More broadly, research on “computing within limits” (Pargman and Raghavan 2015) is beginning to examine how we can maintain technical infrastructure with some independence. For example, Patterson (2015) reported that intermittent energy availability in Haiti has led end users to take more control of infrastructure, thereby changing labor relations and social life.
Following Gorz, the utopia we have been sketching requires a state and a corporate sector (the two eventuating, we hope, in something like a steady-state economy). Within state and corporate sectors, some of the types of tasks that are currently heteromated could provide employment. A new labor relation would be necessary, one that does not marginalize workers, but would provide a fair return for labor and a share in governance. This labor would no longer (by definition) be heteromated—heteromation would wither away, shifting the kinds of work it now organizes to a more equitable basis. It is the labor relation that needs changing, not the labor itself. As we saw with modders, citizen scientists, graphic designers, writers of political commentary, video producers, and so on, the work may be engaging—the problem lies in inadequate compensation, protections, and participant control.
Computer-mediated labor could materialize as what Alvin Toffler began to envision in 1980 as the “electronic cottage.” Microwork in systems such as Mechanical Turk, were it to return a fair wage and offer worker protections and worker inputs to decision making, has a place in a future economy. Working at home on a flexible schedule and performing modular tasks could benefit those engaged in childcare or eldercare, the disabled, the chronically ill, and others for whom full-time employment outside the home is undesirable or impossible. Such arrangements require a social income so that workers are not driven to self-exploit and can enter employment relations in a relaxed, productive manner. We believe the economy will continue to be organized around computing for many years (or centuries) to come, and that formerly heteromated labor will be needed, providing useful employment. Kathi Weeks and Bob Black questioned the need to work under regimes of capitalist discipline to achieve moral standing—we suggest that compensated, computer-mediated labor might begin to alter the idea that a 40-hour-a-week job is the basis of propriety and respectability.
A positive development in this regard is the ILO’s report on work-on-demand which argues that “casualization and informalisation of work and the spread of non-standard forms of employment” require labor protection: “[F]undamental labour rights to all workers irrespective of employment status” are essential (de Stefano 2016, p. 111). De Stefano points out that vested interests would like to categorize on-demand work as something other than actual work (as fun, or as “extra” income that supplements a real job), but that that is hardly the case. The ILO takes a firm stand on treating on-demand workers as employees entitled to benefits such as a minimum wage (de Stefano 2016), a hopeful sign pointing the way to a sensible society—perhaps even a society on a path to paradise.
Since the 1980s, when the brief postwar golden age of responsible capitalism ended, moderate, reformist proposals for mitigating the dislocations of capitalism have been put forward, and, to some extent, mainstreamed. These proposals are genuinely critical of contemporary capitalism and dissect the problems insightfully. But, at the same time, they seem hesitant to deeply imagine change.
One key reformist influence is the work of sociologist Amitai Etzioni, who perceived the hard edge that capitalism was developing in the 1980s, and in response, wrote a book, The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics (1988). Here Etzioni proposed “communitarianism” as an alternative basis for society—a way to alter the ugly, competitive mood that seemed to be driving out common decency. Communitarianism would shift employment from corporate enterprises to volunteer work, and to work in non-profit and nongovernmental organizations. These venues, Etzioni argued, could ground our lives in “moral,” noncommodified social relations.
Though well intentioned, this proposal puts the onus on the masses to become “better” people, living their lives within a “moral” universe of nonprofit and volunteer work. Burdens of change are placed on the shoulders of the people, who are given little real power, with the ruling classes more or less let off the hook. Caffentzis (2014, p. 265) argues that communitarianism defeats the logic of its own critique—it is more likely to brace up capitalism than to take away the hard edge:
[N]ongovernmental organizations inspired by [communitarianism] have rushed into the various catastrophes caused by neoliberal structural adjustment policies around the planet (from Detroit to Somalia) to save “humanity.” But, in this process, they have also helped save “the market” and, by the same token, the very policies that allowed for the development of such catastrophes.
Propping up the regime, though far from communitarianism’s hope, is the likely outcome of urging people toward humanitarian efforts responsive to, and ultimately complicit with, capital’s blunders. The discourse of morality nudges us toward choices such as assisting with short term disaster relief that appeal to our better natures, but that do not transform the material basis of everyday, practical life. Until we have control over our basic needs we will always be chasing capitalism’s tail (and ultimately we will have to reckon with capitalism’s demise from which the rich will have plans to shield themselves).
A second reformist influence is Jeremy Rifkin, whose ideas on work have developed over many years and are presented in his books The End of Work (1995) and The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014). He proposes a future in which capitalism recedes, giving way to a “sharing economy” that will bring “free” things to all. Rifkin (2014, p. 21) says:
[M]illions of prosumers are freely collaborating in social Commons, creating new IT and software, new forms of entertainment, new learning tools, new media outlets, new green energies, new 3D-printed manufactured products, new peer-to-peer health-research initiatives, and new nonprofit social entrepreneurial business ventures, using open-source legal agreements freed up from intellectual property restraints.
Nothing could seem more revolutionary than “free everything,” delivered from productive collaborations taking place in a plethora of different activities within the zero marginal cost society. Yet Rifkin leaves capitalists in charge of automated agriculture, manufacturing,18 and service industries such as insurance and banking. How free will those goods and services be? Rifkin shifts attention from the intricacies of a real economy to his notion of a sharing economy, arguing that capitalism will not hold a candle to the plenitude and innovations of the Commons, which he illustrates with a stream of disconnected examples.
Though Rifkin believes in free stuff and the power of the masses to create a Commons-based economy, his cases are often constructed on contradictions. For example, he reports that research on 3D printing is financed by “the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and NASA” (Rifkin 2014, p. 96)—hardly bastions of the Commons. These powerful institutions are not likely to gracefully fall back when their role in funding the creation of technologies such as 3D printing is complete, nor will the resultant technologies fail to bear the imprint of the ideologies and interests of these organizations.
Rifkin predicts, probably with justification, that in the future the majority of workers will have been replaced by machines. He suggests shifting labor to a “third sector” between the public and private sectors—that is, shifting to non-profit and volunteer work! It is difficult to see how there could be that much volunteer and non-profit work to do, yet both Etzioni and Rifkin argue that this is the way forward. Gorz’s proposal that we work five months a year at societally necessary labor (teaching, construction, healthcare, plumbing, and so on) seems to make a good deal more sense.
Viewed critically, the notions of “sharing” and “community” that frame Etzioni’s and Rifkin’s schemes appear to conceal a bigger picture that is rather terrifying. In moral economics and the zero marginal cost society, capitalists control the core sectors of the economy, while workers are shunted to jobs creating new forms of entertainment, helping out at disasters, and so on. Capitalists, managing their machines with a small number of workers, make decisions about food, manufacturing, and essential services. Ceding basic economic functions to capitalism and marginalizing workers to volunteer and non-profit sectors would seem to encourage capitalism to continue down the road of environmental irresponsibility and social inequality it is currently traveling. Rifkin (2014) remarks that climate change threatens food security, but he seems not to connect this observation to the automated agriculture he would have capitalists manage.
“Prosumers” in the Commons can only do what they do if their subsistence is in place, either through their own production, or through the portion of a wage that is necessary labor-time (as discussed in chapter 3). Assuming we do not return to a completely subsistence-based economy, necessary labor-time must come from a job or a welfare transfer based on someone else’s labor. Can the non-profit, volunteer realm provide this labor? Caffentzis (2014, p. 73) points out that this is, in fact, impossible: “The capitalism resulting from Rifkin’s ‘new social contract’ [i.e., the nonprofit third sector] is impossible, for it is by definition a capitalism without profits, interest, and rents.”
Rifkin’s vision entails another mystification involving the millennial generation’s putative capacity for “empathic engagement” (Rifkin 2014, pp. 281, 284). Millennials, says Rifkin, naturally choose cooperative, Commons-compliant actions organized around the Internet of Things. Rifkin’s zero marginal cost society emerges as a strange brew—empathic engagement; technologies that somehow appear, exogenous to capital’s interests; free goods and services; a Commons without visible means of support; and capitalism without profits.19
A third reformist influence is the work of economists Piketty (2014) and Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2011) whose careful research reveals important current and future trends. Piketty drives home critical points about inequality, demonstrating that wealth is accumulating in fewer and fewer hands. The argument is solid and essential, but reformist in proposing taxation as the key remedy (as important as this remedy is). This approach does not acknowledge the larger global complications in which we are mired. Piketty has obviously been asked what the thinks about the world’s big problems, and he devotes a few pages to climate change in his book, admitting that climate change is “the world’s principal long-term worry” (2014, p. 567). But he says only that “no one knows how these challenges will be met” (p. 567). Of course, Piketty makes no claims that he has answers. Yet we cannot but hope for broader perspectives and further wisdom from one of our most astute observers.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s analysis (2011) shows that automation is reducing the number of conventional jobs, and that there is no obvious sector to absorb the surplus labor, as there has been in the past. Their findings are particularly useful in countering the “new jobs have always come along” argument (see also Gordon 2012). However, despite the rigor of their analysis and their advocacy of a social income (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2016), their main proposal is quite limited, i.e., better education to address massive job losses. But what jobs are we to be educated for? MOOCs and similar solutions cannot do much if the number of conventional jobs requiring education continues to shrink. As technology gets smarter and the pool of labor becomes increasingly global, it will be more and more difficult for workers to win the “race,” as Brynjolfsson and McAfee call it, even with superior education.
Graphic designers are a case in point. A cohort of elite, sophisticated workers, they compete in design competitions they cannot win, even with impressive education and experience. There’s no dismissing the graphic designers as impractical, artistic types when we consider that software development, once thought an impregnable fortress of employment, is being heteromated through the development of techniques of crowdsourcing (LaToza et al. 2015). Indeed, it seems that fewer and fewer jobs promise what we now consider normal employment. Hence, we affirm the sanity of Gorz’s proposal to drastically reduce the amount of time a person spends performing the labor required for the remaining necessary jobs that support society.
A fourth reformist influence is the writing of commentators such as Naomi Klein (2014). These commentators are deeply concerned about the ill effects of contemporary capitalism, but their proposals for change tend to look back, not forward, and are psychological in nature. Klein, for example, suggests that fundamental change requires refiguring narratives and worldviews. Specifically, the masses should adopt attitudes reflecting ecological attachment to place (as in traditional societies) and they should participate in local economic activity. While Klein’s exposition of the problems of capitalism is forceful, her notions of change are atavistic rejections of modernity and industrialism. She finds hope in indigenous people’s struggles against industrial capitalism. But these are disconnected, doomed movements of the dispossessed. She says, a bit sentimentally, “When what is being fought for is an identity, a culture, a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their grandchildren, and that their ancestors may have paid for with great sacrifice, there is nothing companies can offer as a bargaining chip” (2014, p. 342). But cultures all over the world have been decimated by capitalism precisely because they have no bargaining chips. The Dark Mountain Collective in the United Kingdom espouses similar views, proposing that we need new “stories” about how to live. Their writing and artwork celebrate nature and places far from the grit of cities and the bleakness of poverty-stricken rural areas.
We are in sympathy with these perspectives, which spring from concerns very similar to our own, but their nostalgia ends up unintentionally obscuring the role of the the ruling classes in creating the problems.20 We think it more likely that we can devise ways to use digital technology in an end run around at least some aspects of capitalism by producing our own subsistence and looking to methods of peer distribution of goods and labor. We can try to shade capitalism down into more civilized manifestations, such as corporations owned by employees or focused on societal benefits. And we can reform taxation as Piketty suggests.
Is this a “new story”? It doesn’t seem like it’s new; people “did for themselves” to a great extent prior to World War II, and taxes on the rich then (and into the 1950s and 1960s) were much higher. We think what is needed is to scale up pragmatism and common sense. The planetary destabilization contemporary capitalism increasingly produces feels like the antithesis of common sense.
Drawing widely from Gorz, Marx, and recent research in computing, we have proposed a somewhat radical vision of transformative change. We do not conceive of “overthrowing” anything, but rather of detaching certain key functions from capitalism, moving them under our own control to interrupt capitalism’s frenzies. We have proposed a real utopia that modifies the socioeconomic system in three ways: (1) it recovers control of subsistence through digitally mediated food production, local fabrication, and computer-mediated means of distribution; (2) it implements a social income; and (3) it moderates work arrangements to reduce work time and offer the option of labor in the electronic cottage at fair wages. These changes would avoid the deficiencies of most reformist proposals, which accept (perhaps unconsciously) that the sunk costs of current capitalist structures cannot be abandoned and are to be left in place. Our vision aims to begin to reverse the consequences of accumulation by dispossession, exploitation, and intensified heteromation, a move we regard as essential for serious social and environmental renovation.
This vision of a real utopia, though we call it “revolutionary,” is not really so far-fetched. After all, when capitalism began, methods of accumulation were far less entrenched, and their impacts less widespread and intense. Braudel’s (1979) descriptions of early capitalism in Europe during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries reveal a great number of varied arrangements, at least some of which both sustained moderate profit and secured worker autonomy and fair wages. A balance between waged work and production for family and community emerged, even if it only occurred by accident, and even if it only occurred under certain historical conditions. Workers who tended their gardens and animals, and earned modest wages through paid work can perhaps be aspirational for us as we evolve new ways of using computing, as well as more socially responsible forms of socioeconomic organization. The objective is to mediate processes of production and labor with a greater degree of fairness and with a view to future generations.