A happy citizen and his dog by Hokyoung Kim
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I watched my favorite porn for techno-optimists the other night — namely, the classic that is “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” It’s the best for a multitude of reasons (wildly competent leadership! adventure! autonomy!) but the most interesting part about it is the Star Trek world itself. Everyone is free from material needs, society is peaceful and pluralistic, and Earth is but one inhabited planet. Some people — regular citizens — live lives of peace and autonomy back on Earth. Our heroes work for Star Fleet, whose mission of “going boldly where no man has gone before” motivates their relentless exploration of the galaxy and adherence to a strict set of values.
Star Trek is a Pinterest board for aspirational engineering projects — the flip phone was invented thanks to enthusiastic fans. But if you’ll indulge me in some futuristic Pinterest-boarding, I’d like to borrow from the way Star Trek characterizes future attitudes towards work.
Here’s a little example that describes this Trekian attitude perfectly. Commander Riker is meant to be the male sex symbol on the show, and he’s a bit of a ladies man. A woman — AI generated, might I add — attempts to seduce the First Officer Riker. But Riker doesn’t have the time to canoodle with hotties. He has a job to do! As he refuses her, he declares that work isn’t just important to him, it *is* him. He’s entirely consumed by it, and he loves it.
How could a utopia like Star Trek have a workaholic? By today’s standards, Riker’s relationship to his job is toxic and a reason for therapy. Much of the discourse today is about working less, about drawing the right boundaries between the self and the work. Your job should not be who you are. You should be “engaged but not attached” to the work you do. The New York Times’ issue on the Future of Work was headlined with “The Future of Work is Working Less.” The Atlantic’s issue on “work as the new religion” suggests that American society is suffering from “workism,” or “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.” Our generation is particularly confused by this divide. We grew up in a culture that tells us these messages while simultaneously telling us to follow our dreams and pursue passion. I think many of my peers remain caught between these two ideologies.
But Riker isn’t similarly torn. Obsession with work isn’t toxic in the Star Trek universe. Star Trek can lay the groundwork for a Commander Riker to exist – a total workaholic within a utopia — because it has a much more nuanced view of work than we do today. Specifically:
It doesn’t conflate economic anger with fulfillment anger.
It doesn’t conflate work with the conditions of labor.
Let’s dive into these ideas in a little more detail.
We’re frustrated with the way work is today, and that’s why we’re trying to do less of it. I think this frustration comes in two types:
Problem one, economic anger: One type of anger comes from the connection between food, shelter, and healthcare with employability. It’s epitomized by the famous story of Maria Fernandes who died at the age of thirty-two while sleeping in her car in a Wawa parking lot. She worked shifts at three different Dunkin’ Donuts and slept in her Kia in between shifts. She died from exhaust fumes and gasoline inhaled while she was sleep, all the while wearing her white-and-brown Dunkin’ Donuts uniform. Maria’s death became a symbol of the exploitation of the working class in America, where one job wasn’t enough to pay the rent and put food on the table. After the pandemic’s stimulus checks, we saw that workers were refusing to go back to these low wage jobs.
Problem two, fulfillment anger: The other type of anger comes from the feeling that work isn’t fulfilling. Steve Jobs told a generation of people that if they loved their work, they’d never work a day in their lives, and so these people entered fields like technology expecting to find that exhilaration and fulfillment. Instead, many of them found bureaucracy in revolutionary’s clothing. You’d do the same bureaucratic OKRs and memos, but your VP has a tattoo sleeve, your director has a microdosing hobby, and your manager calls himself a “hacker.” You’re a cog, but a cool cog! Instead of a revolution, workers found conformity draped in the dead symbols of a prior generation’s counterculture. Work demands time and devotion, but it is hard to justify that time and devotion amidst the bullshit.
All of this is happening against the backdrop of reinvigorated conversation about AI, which seems to threaten both types of anger. Will it take our jobs away from us? “Society writ large” was fine with automation when it was going after the textile mill worker in 18th century England, or improving the lives of a steel worker in 20th century Pittsburgh – but when it comes to cognitive work? Our cognitive capabilities are such a big part of what makes us human—they are the most remarkable of all of our capabilities, they’re what distinguish us from animals. We hold them close. But now, it may be possible to have your OKRs written by ChatGPT. You might identify as an artist, but does your conception of the self change when AI can write a better screenplay than you can?
The most simplistic possible solution to all of these problems is the narrative that we should “work less.” It’s a solution prescribed to fast food and technology workers alike. Books like “Work Won’t Love You Back” by Sara Jaffe state that finding meaning in work itself is stupid, that “love is too grand a thing to waste on work.” This is patently false. “The problem with the doctrine that it’s stupid to look for meaning in work—a form of false consciousness to find purpose in your job—and rare to love what you do is that it’s wrong. All sorts of people doing all kinds of work like the companionship they find in the workplace, the chance to get out of the house, the feeling of doing something, the sense of accomplishment,” says Jill Lepore in a anti-consensus take in the New Yorker. It’s possible in all kinds of careers — from a plumber to a chief justice. The doctrine of “work less” conflates labor with the conditions of labor. I may love building great software, but I can also think my compensation is unfair, that my peers were unfairly laid off, and my manager is unnecessarily forcing bureaucratic clap-trap upon me. Telling me to “work less” is to ask me to disengage from the real problems in my workplace.
When we look at science fiction’s most attractive visions for the future of work, they first and foremost involve breaking that fundamental relationship between employability and survival. Maria Fernandes isn’t a relic of 2014 — today's typical American worker earns around $44,500 a year, close to what they earned in 1979, adjusted for inflation. The effects of this exploitation even affect the white collar class of workers – I certainly have made employment choices solely motivated by my access to healthcare or liquidity. It’s hard to have discussions about the future of work, even in technology and other high paying fields, without accounting for that economic leverage.
Americans’ relationship with welfare and even potential Universal Basic Income is fraught, but the idea is surprisingly well accepted in Silicon Valley, where YCombinator’s UBI research was one of the hallmarks of the “new YC” under Sam Altman. It’s hard to miss the relationship between potential AI revolutions and UBI: while we have every reason to believe that this wave of automation, like the others, will come with a “job shift” rather than a job contraction, even Sam Altman admits that we don’t know anything about what it will look like. If we can automate most tasks, there’s reason to believe there will be fewer high quality jobs available to workers, and even less reason for them to earn a sustaining salary. We’ll have newfound prosperity and productivity — maybe we’ll get close to a post-scarcity world — but will need redistributive methods to ensure it doesn’t go to .01% of people. There’s an urgency to act: aside from its humanitarian implications, inequality will also lead to economic stagnation.
I call this emerging relationship with work the “Citizen.” This person receives Universal Basic Income or even a Friedman-esq negative income tax from the state, but also provides some amount of Universal Basic Meaning to their community. They perform civic duties that help the community function, which can stretch to include a set of (paid) jobs that allow one to “clock in and out.” It’s not far-fetched! We’ve actually already done something similar. In 1938, the Works Progress Administration under Roosevelt created similar jobs for citizens during the Great Depression, where citizens were able to build roads and bridges, preserve and analyze historical records, conduct government surveys, sew clothing, crunch numbers for national statistics, or even perform theater. The jobs were interesting, valuable, and respectable, but they weren’t all-consuming. In our future world, citizens may do everything from educating fellow voters, to creating art and leisure tools, to beautifying National Parks, to serving as supplemental education providers for children in the community. Or, they may just collect their benefits and do the bare minimum duty (imagine future jury duties, but more involved.) That choice is what so many people dream about.
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While the Citizens are living their lives, the “Vocateurs” will be working. Vocateur is from the Latin word “vocare” which means “to call.” As defined in another science fiction utopian world by Ada Palmer, a “vocateur” is someone who loves their job and work as an all hours passion. It’s an essential part of the equation for society, and reflects something about the human experience: some jobs, some work really take everything you have. It’s not for everyone! In the vocateur’s ideology, it is not enough to live your life with your family and community. Solving important problems is how you create meaning.
Richard Hamming, the award winning computer scientist, Manhattan Project member, and obvious vocateur, would say, “with apparently only one life to live on this earth, you ought to try to make significant contributions to humanity rather than just get along through life comfortably—that the life of trying to achieve excellence in some area is in itself a worthy goal for your life.” Without the vocateurs, the society somewhat stagnates. The concept of the vocateur makes clear that both kinds of relationship to one’s work are good and worthy of respect. Being a vocateur is a struggle — aside from the time and sacrifice it takes, there are necessary conditions for labor that produce the excellence desired. But as Hamming would say, once again,”I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself.”
When I ask myself if I’m a vocateur or a citizen, I so clearly identify with being a vocateur at this stage in life. That said, I imagine there will be seasons in my life where I am one or the other — sometimes being the ambitious and dedicated vocateur, sometimes leaning into the community and becoming a very present parent or voter. But the biggest determinant of my pursuit actually is the conditions of labor for my vocation in technology: am I creating or finding conditions that allow me to pursue my best work? Vocateur employees aren’t excuses for the employer to abandon all obligations – struggle doesn’t mean that management can exploit employees. In fact, that obligation may be way higher in their case. It’s especially interesting in “care” work, when going above and beyond for little to no compensation becomes the norm in the industry (public school teachers, I’m looking at you.)
An interesting topic — let’s talk about the conditions for labor for vocateurs — next Friday! On Fridays, you can expect to receive a longer piece like this one. On Sundays, I’ll send out a “10 Things I Consumed This Week.” Comment below — I’d love to hear what you think!
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Does it have to be a binary or can I be both?