" “>

I wrote up this draft in 2018 and (clearly, nerd) didn't post it. Here it is, mostly unedited, for your potential enjoyment/derision. -Ed.

I often tell this story when ferrying people around and the subject of jobs come up. A long time ago, I used to get really mad at people who didn't follow through on their commitments. In consulting and IT work, my targets would often be vendors and service providers. I would angrily tell them how they were violating the terms of their contract and, due to their incompetence, were costing my client money for every minute they continued to fail at their singular job.

Needless to say, most vendors didn't like me. Shocking, I know. 

As a child I'd heard, among many others, the old saw of not putting the horse before the cart. When you think of it literally, it makes functional sense. After all, the cart can't pull the horse. However, when you shift the perspective on the term "put", the axiom takes on a wholly different meaning. Don't think of "Put" as a positioning directive, but a values one. I had an epiphany one day where what I had been told by dozens, if not hundreds, of people all came crashing in on me to make sudden sense.

I suddenly understood that you put the horse's needs before the value of the products you have in the cart because, without the horse, you can't get the valuables to market.

We know what happens when horses are abused. Surprisingly, horses don't like being abused, but I wasn't putting the service providers horse in front of my client cart, I was abusing it. It was in that moment that I decided I would dramatically change how I dealt with vendors, which would lead me to a completely new way of dealing with people in general. It's called RESPECT.

I made myself hyper-self-conscious about how I would talk on the phone and started actively forcing myself to be nice, respectful, and patient. It wasn't easy. I was pushing my brain to behave in ways it was unaccustomed, but I recalled how I had taught myself to whistle very loudly with my fingers when I was nine. It took me three days and almost all of my free time, but I did it, and there was no skin in that game. I saw my schoolmates do it and badly wanted it myself. I applied the same focus to my new/old problem.

Unsurprisingly, I found that I got far more positive results almost immediately, and some queries regarding what I'd done with Tyler and could they expect that Tyler to be on hiatus permanently. These direct results were the spurs I needed to dive in more, and over a few weeks I was able to make it an easy part of my daily interactions. The process of respect became my daily driver. It took another year or two for it to seep into my life overall, but it did, with some exceptions. Suffice it to say, absolutes do not exist. One could even say that the absence of absolutes is the only true absolute.

Mind. Blown.

" “>

Despite being deep inside the artificially warmed folds of Holiday Happy-Ganda Season, I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st. If the image above wasn't enough to convince you of the sheer janky-ness of this "concept", check out the lede from the official press release:

A leading platform for fandoms and online communities has partnered with an independent bedmaker to create the ultimate ‘TV Binge Bed’. The ‘TV Binge Bed’ includes self-cleaning sheets, a ‘Netflix and Chill’ setting, and for those who don’t want to leave their bed at all, an optional built-in potty. The expected retail price of the bed is from $14,999 (£11,321). The unique product is being developed after the platform found that the amount of time individuals spend in bed bingeing their favourite shows has increased by almost a third (31%) since 2020*.

- The offending Press Release, 2021. Word for word...

My first question is, what is an "independent" bedmaker and why not name them? And it's not a stretch, knowing the website this is coming from, that 31% of the 1,000 respondents to their survey would want something like this as it was, I am sure, described. And yes, they are asking $15,000 for a product clearly designed by a teen in the throughs of puberty with enough experience in Adobe Photoshop to be dangerous and not enough sense to ask logical questions. Take this line from the body of the presser: 

[REDACTED] is offering the unrivalled bingeing experience with the luxurious four-poster king size bed that also includes a smart 32-inch flat screen TV, built-in surround sound speakers, folding trays, charging points, and places for storing food and ‘private things’.

- Mega Ultra LOLZ0rz

This is simply ridiculous. How would anyone other than the obscenely wealthy justify purchasing such a ludicrous bed based solely on these hideous Photoshop mock-ups? How is it the makers think that a stupidly tiny 32” flat-panel smart TV would be attractive to anyone who binge watches enough television to warrant spending $15k on a bed with an (optional, mind you) toilet? They even know the dimensions of a King-size bed, for crying out loud, and even taking the four-poster configuration, they should easily be able to fit a 55”, or maybe even a 60” set in that space. 

Then there’s the starting price of $15k. That’s truly obscene. 55” OLEDs are going for about $1,500 on Amazon. So, where’s the $14,000 go? You can get four-poster bed frames for well under $1,000. All of the gizmos and cubbies are effectively nothing compared to the mattress, which can cost a few thousand alone. Decent surround soundbar systems are around $500, though you can spend more. Then there’s the toilet, which is completely beyond me why they would add this other than to have people like me talk about it, only costs a little over $100.

So, screw math and all that. This only works out to about $6,000-8,000, tops, and that’s with the fix for the shit TV they’re offering!

This sounds more like a capitalist's fever dream rather than a legitimate product. 

PS: I’m not mentioning the PR firm or company offering this because I don’t want to give them any PR, but merely point out the insanity of it all. I’m sure it won’t be hard to figure out what website is behind this, but I’m not going to contribute. 

PPS: Reading for the day, I’m Black but look white. Here are the horrible things white people feel safe telling me. Humanity is what you make of it, and America has a sizable population that makes it terrible for Black people. I imagine if white people had been enslaved and oppressed for hundreds of years, they’d likely feel differently. Instead, we continue to “allow” this to happen. ALL Americans who believe in equal rights need to stand together. Unfortunately, almost none of us stand for anything aside from the shade we post on social media. 

PPPS: Social media is not a replacement for social justice. -Ed.

" “>

I originally wrote this piece in 2017 and am reposting it now because I believe the idea is critically important to the future of humanity and the survival of Earth and humanity. -Ed. 

We should come to grips with the idea as soon as possible. We are, after all, heading for a rather dramatic shift in human thinking. We need to figure out how we humans are going to formulate our societies as soon as we have self-driving vehicles of all stripes, artificial intelligence running everything, smart grids that deliver all manner of clean energy, and robots that deal with all manner of work. We will be living in a version of the dystopian we’ve all seen in movies, but it won’t be quite so dystopian.

It will be a world without work.

Of course, that won’t happen overnight, and the way our future unfolds will come down to what we do as the human race in the next 20–30 years. Believe me, you, that’s not nearly as long as you might think. I turned around yesterday and was rather shocked to discover I’m 49! It seems only yesterday that I was watching Star Trek (well, it actually was yesterday, but that’s not what I’m getting at.) And it’s really Star Trek that forms the core of my ideas around what a world without work would look like.

A World Without Work, Not A World that Doesn’t Work

So, Star Trek. If you go back and watch all of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager, the theatrical films, you will… have watched a lot of media… but you will also have noticed something interesting. Every once in a while, there are discussions of money and jobs and values. Well, there’s a lot of talk about values, so mostly the rare bits about money and jobs are the important thing for this discussion, though it dovetails nicely into values.

You see, in the Star Trek future, Earth no longer has jobs or currency. Now, it’s important to note that there is no real discussion about how this arrangement operates (though such a discussion may exist in the books, which I haven’t read), so we really only have the glimmer of a wonderful future where everything is clean and safe and educated and includes space travel and science, and all manner of amazing things.

How?

It’s actually rather simple, which is why it’s surprising that there is no visual Trek canon (cannon?) that covers even the basic details. Now, this is where it gets a bit knotty, because it’s all about democratic socialism, and I mean that in its purest sense. The Trek future of the Federation and most things are really good is because everyone decides that life is best managed when everyone shares in the growth of that civilization.

No Jobs But Stuff Still Gets Done?

From a deeply philosophical place in the minds of people who think for a living comes the idea that people organize, make things, make scientific advances, run restaurants, clean up garbage, create art and music, work in office jobs, manage stuff, and build things big and small because they are good at it and it needs to get done.

Here’s a hint: Take the money out of it.

First, go listen to Yuval Harari over at TED. He’s a fascinating guy and what he has to say makes a load of sense. (If you make it to the end, which I really hope you do, just know that I don’t necessarily agree with his ideas about drugs and video games.)

Now that you’ve done that, do you see it?! I think you do. That’s because money is a wondrous, danger-filled myth that creates the entire scope of power and control in this world, and it only works that way because we let it. This fiction, like so many others we have created over thousands of years, is very, very powerful. Yes, we all believe in money, but it’s not like a religion. It’s more like the air we breathe. And, much like air, if you take money away, we die.

So, we work.

Since money is the core tenet of our global belief in its myth, we must trade our sweat in order to get some. This creates another fiction; power or, if you prefer, control. Those with the most money have the most control and, as we can see today, that control is a very destructive force, so we need to get rid of it, but if we do that, then there’s no more work. Right?

Not exactly. Humans are resourceful and we have a number of inherent traits that guide us towards the sense of safety, contentedness, and fulfillment we all desire. When we are hungry or thirsty, we eat and drink. When we want to explore some new place, we screw up the courage and we set out. When we need to get across a large body of water to find what’s on the other side, we build boats. When we want to get from one continent to another, we build planes. When we want to find out what’s in that inky black over our heads, we build space ships.

We are, as a large group of like beings, insanely inventive and resourceful, and that is the key to a work without work. That former work will become desires, and there will always be people who will want to fill the roles we need to make society operate as a whole. You want a salad bowl? Someone will make one for you our of wood or pottery or glass. You want to design a new kind of space craft to get to Mars? Someone will learn everything it takes to do that for you, if you let them learn how without restriction.

It’s The Values, Stupid

The foundation of our success in a post-work global society will be values. We all need to get on the same page when it comes to how we will organize to produce everything we do now, and more, but without currency being the driving force. That brings us back to Star Trek. How do they do it, in this fictional universe of the future? They just do it. I know that sounds simplistic, but it’s really at the core of this entire argument.

There will always be people willing to do something, anything, to not be stuck at home watching TV or playing video games or taking drugs all day long. In universal basic income studies in more forward thinking countries that ours they are finding that the preponderance of participants who have all of their basic needs met, go out and get a job or volunteer instead of just sitting on their asses. So, yes, it’s true that some people will choose to do nothing, but even the smallest samples have shown that most people cannot.

That is a core value.

The shape of our societies won’t really change all that much. There are those fictions that are quite successful because they work, are inclusive of all people, and don’t rest on the idea that power is the only thing of value in this world. Universal healthcare is one such result, and it is common in most first-world countries on Earth, and even most second-world countries float some kind of healthcare-for-all.

But what do we do with people who make things? That’s also surprisingly easy. Let’s say Julia is an forklift operator at an appliance plant just outside of Riverside, CA. She gets up at 7AM every, Monday through Friday, and heads in to the plant to start her shift at 8:30. She works until Noon, takes lunch with some co-workers at a local sandwich shop, and gets back to work at 1PM to move around more large palettes of sheet metal. She wraps up her day at 5:30 PM, stops at the grocery to pick up her food order, and goes home.

At no point during the day did Julia ever pay anyone for anything and she wasn’t paid a dime for her work. Yet, that evening, she can go on a date with her fiance to a nice restaurant and go see a movie. How is this possible? It is possible through a sharing economy that involves zero money anywhere. Everyone she meets during her day has a nice home to live in, access to all the food they want, and no limitations on the kinds of recreation they can consume. There is no ownership, per se. Yes, Julia “owns” her home, but that’s because she selected the home she wanted to live in and it was available. She can keep the home as long as she likes, or choose to move somewhere else and live there.

No, It’s Not Communism

At its root, Communism is based entirely around money. In the old CCCP (that’s Communist Russia, to you Millennials), the government owned everything and “evenly” distributed it to the citizens. The reality was that there was no equality and there was an enormous amount of paranoia instilled in the populace in the name of control and fear, but that’s beside the point. A world without work where people do what they choose to do, learn as much as they want, and contribute to the betterment of society as a whole is not the same thing.

For our new society, we’d need to get rid of a few things for it to work. Here are some of those things:

• Homelessness
• Inequality of all kinds
• War
• Famine
• The lack of access to healthcare for many, many millions
• Oppression
• Dictatorships and monarchy
• Genocide
• Ethnic cleansing

No, that doesn’t mean that we get rid of homelessness by getting rid of the homeless. We put them in homes. Voila! No more homelessness. Some of the other things will, of course, require more complex solutions, and there’s a lot of work to be done to start moving in this direction, but if we all just believe, we can make it happen.

So, now that I’ve realized I’m starting to ramble and this is my first essay on this new blog, I’m going to wrap it up here. What are some of the things we can start doing now that will lead us in the right direction for a more positive, inclusive, and constructive future where we follow our dreams and can actually have them come true? What are some of the six billion things I left out because I’m a monkey in a tree who only desires a banana?

Let me know, and share this around. It would be nice to see some of the ideas presented here start to infect more people :)