A World Without Work

from quick meme

The title of this opinion piece, "Why Do People Waste So Much Time at the Office?," intrigued me, but it was not until I got to the end of it that I saw what, to me, was the really compelling concept. The author, Peter Fleming, is a professor of Business and Society at City University London and wrote the book The Notion of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself. "... Work," he writes here, "has become ritualised and detached from the practical things it was invented to accomplish.
   "... A job simply grants us access to man-made vouchers we call money. We then redeem these so we can then purchase life.
   "How many vouchers we obtain and what we have to do to get them is the political question par excellence under neoliberal capitalism. But it's this growing disconnect between labour as a biological/social requirement versus work as a cultural artefact that has seen it take on a life of its own, spiralling out of control, taking over everything else.
   "Herein lies the work paradox. At the very moment it is glorified as the highest civic virtue (on both the political left and right) it is drying up at an unprecedented rate."
   And now here's the kicker: "Like it or not we are moving into a post-work future. According to some
estimates, half the eligible global workforce is currently unemployed.
   "Technical innovations are exponentially automating routine manual labour and now cognitive work too. Our work-centric society is swiftly becoming obsolete. No matter how much governments bribe the business sector with tax breaks and subsidies to keep people employed in needless jobs, the necessity of work is rapidly disappearing.
   "As a society we probably secretly know all of this. But we have no idea what to do next.
Almost all of our institutions have been built around the mythology of work. Our very sense of self-worth is based upon it. It is almost taboo to even question work.
   "Regardless, the possibility of a jobless future might soon be a reality. It's up to us to decide whether this future is going to be a nasty nightmare (involving corpses frozen at their desks) or a beautiful paradise of play."

   There full article is here: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32829232