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Sorry, I meant to reply to the parent of the post I replied to. Also, Dan Pink talks about "Autonomy (not Challenge), Mastery, and Purpose".

On Autonomy, think about our hunter/gatherer past and how much autonomy most people had when hunting or gathering or doing other basic tasks:
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/a...

AC wrote: "A post-scarcity society, where labor becomes decoupled from the product, would result in a society of manically depressed people who are simply to bored to live."

People keep saying variants of this, and there may even be some truth to it for some US Americans whose whole notion of self-esteem has come to be associated with their job or their income. However, in general, being a good parent (or grandparent), a good neighbor, a good friend, a good volunteer, and a good citizen and informed voter can take about as much time as people can put into it. So, I think people who suggest this probably have little experience trying to actively do those sorts of things to any great extent (especially parenting young children).

As another counter-example, young children are able to keep themselves amused with something a s simple as a cardboard box. Also, as yet another counter-example, most people used to have to be farmers (90% 200 years ago), but now that essentially nobody (2%) is a farmer in the US, gardening is the most popular outdoor hobby. Likewise, now what manufacturing jobs are going away (down from about 35% to 15% over the past 50 years), the Maker movement is resurging and people are playing with Arduino and home 3D printers.

Many people can find endless things to do for personal reasons if they want to and are not already beaten down by some oppressive regime (and often even if they were, and have time and support to recuperate). In your own example, you point out older people taking different approaches to free time. If someone is feeling ill and listless amidst abundance and free time, it is more likely due to lack of vitamin D, lack of adequate iodine, lack of Omega 3s, lack of enough fruits and vegetables, lack of enough sleep, lack of enough exercise, lack of enough community, too much junk food, too much of other addictive stuff, etc..

Look at it this way -- as Marshall Sahlin's wrote, hunter/gatherers worked short hours (with little supervision) and were the original "affluent society". So, some of this would just be returning to the better parts of that model.
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/a...
"Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present-specifically on those in marginal environments suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker's hours, notably less than modern industrial workers (unionised), who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week."

Still, it is true that a nation of schooled individuals, taught always to do what they are told and only what they are told, may have trouble making the transition back to freedom and self-direction.
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"

And it seems true that challenge, mastery, and purpose are essential to true motivation (see Dan Pink's RSA Animate talk on motivation). The question is, in a world of robots than can do everything humans can and more, will humans still find challenge, mastery and purpose?
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

I suggest they will, at the very least by raising children, learning new skills, being social, and making their own fun. However, even Iain Banks in the Culture Series has to invent a "Special Circumstances" group for people who wanted a big

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an [institution]. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

However this could be fixed in our society with a basic income (and/or other changes):
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Every age has its challenges. Twenty thousand years ago, there was no malaria (a side-effect of agriculture), no threat of nuclear war or bioterrorism or nanotech or robotics run amok, communities and familes were probably stronger overall than in industrialized countries, people ate more vegetables and so had little cancer, diabetes, gout, or heart disease, people got a lot of sunlight and so autism and allergies were probably very rare, people who "worked" did so directly for themselves and their families and communities without some complex bureaucratic supervision alienating them from what they were doing, education was very hands-on, religion was likely more a direct experience connected with nature and community for most people, the planet seemed like an endless vista for growth with free land everywhere relative to the number of people, addictions as a "pleasure trap" were harder to get stuck in, etc. etc.. Oh, sure, there were bad things about those times too. My point is not that such times were uniformly "better" (where would we be without twenty-thousand years of dog-breeding to create "man's best friend"? :-), just that the issue is more nuanced than you suggest -- some things have improved greatly, but other things have gotten worse in some ways for a large percentage of the population. Increasing addiction rates are just one sign of social stress and a dysfunctional economic system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Consider as an example of a conflict between an old way of living an modern society:
"Christian Missionary Deconverted by Tribe"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3q6Cid1po

And:
http://www.ishmael.org/origins/Beyond_Civilization/
"Civilization, in effect, represents an attempt to improve upon tribalism by replacing it with hierarchalism. Every civilization brought forth in the course of human history has been an intrinsically hierarchical affair--in every age and locale, East and West, as well as every civilization that grew up independently of ours in the New World. Because it's intrinsically hierarchical, civilization ben

Think about an isolated hunter gatherer society. They spend all of their time trying to survive.

Huh? Modern (e.g. 1950s) hunter-gatherers, living in lands unsuitable for agriculture, spent around 20 hours per week gathering food. How else would they have had time to develop art, culture & language while colonizing the globe? Agriculture was a huge step down, requiring ~100 hours a week until very recently. Quality of life suffered dramatically, but farming supports far greater populations, so it became dominate through military might (and drunkenness). Here, and here are some interesting articles on the topic.

By me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems. The text for the presentation is here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf "

I've been wondering if I should include attention and reputation in there too?

So, there are alternatives to the exchange economy. Also"
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6928744.ece
"Former teacher Heidemarie Schwermer has lived without money in Germany for 13 years. Our writer finds out how she does it."

Think also about did people live before money existed?
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

But back then not all land was "privatized" and hoarded and rented for money... So people could hunt and gather.

Note also that "money", like fiat dollars, is essentially imaginary.
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

To agree with you: http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"The Original Affluent Society... Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times. ... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

And "The mythology of wealth"
    http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"All of the "laws, ordinances, customs and usages" that regulate control over resources and relationships between people -- including their business relationships -- are nothing more than a set of rules invented by the imagination of some human being -- frequently one who has been dead since the middle ages. Those rights are frequently exchanged for -- get this -- printed pieces of paper with pictures of dead people on them. Where is the value of those pieces of paper? The answer is in your mind, in the mind of the person you are "bargaining" with -- and nowhere else. Itâ(TM)s all a big game. It is our mythology, and it is no more real than belief in Zeus, Hera and Aphrodite."

On the wheels coming off our system (scary, but incomplete as it ignores automation and the general decline of the paid value of most human labor, so it will be worse):
http://www.aftershockeconomy.com/
http://w3.newsmax.com/a/aftershockb/video.cfm

On moving beyond that (by me):
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

See also:
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

A key idea of free and open source technologies is that they are ultimately so much better and easier to maintain, that if only one person in a thousand feels like contributing (say, with Debian), that makes more than enough productivity to support everyone.

But what about all the "slackers" who will consume without giving back? The answer is just, "So what?" Why not have pity on such people who are stuck in such an embarrassingly juvenile state of mind?

If a few can supply the many, then, so what of the slackers? Who cares? Why build a whole mythology around slackers? And surprisingly, there may be less slackers than one might expect, because when you have the freedom to make things your way, without a "boss", there is often a lot of fun to be had in making things. Just look at all the kids making free music for the internet these days. Or people writing web pages. :-)

Examples like the Israeli Kibbutzim have already shown in the past that even with hard manual labor, there are always a bunch of schmucks (like maybe even myself and my wife, or many others already working in non-profits :-)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html
who are willing to work hard even with apparent slackers in their face. Sure, Kibbutzim had problems with slackers, but modern automated robotic technology changes the nature of that situation:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=agricultural+robot
(and without bringing in migrant laborers to exploit and expose to pesticides). And how hard can it be to sit in your GPS-driven air-conditioned tractor and listen to free music? Or even make some more music of your own in between keeping an eye on how the robots are doing?

We're may be about to see an entire change *back* to the way things used to be.

This is the world the prospective college student is probably imagining these days as in their future -- or will be soon. :-) Robot tractors. Free music. GNU/Linux everywhere. Slackers who only take stuff and don't make stuff as being "so junior high" or "so nursing home". Essentially, these kids are imagining (or will soon) a John Lennon "Imagine" sort of world -- with abundance and security for all. With robot tractors able to get higher yields from less land and less water through precision farming, why fight so much about the agricultural fields or river water? With nanotech solar panels and nanotech near-perfect insulation, why fight about the oil fields?

Here is part of a sci-fi story about the flip side of that "Imagine" world kids are thinking about, where it all goes horribly wrong, say, with a Stanford-led elite unable to let go of a fear of scarcity, and instead using the robots to guard most of the world who are kept in "welfare" prison camps:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna4.htm

"Time to turn around Jacob Lewis105. There is construction in the next zone and, for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed." There were a hundred reasons the robots gave for making you turn around. Construction, blasting, contamination, flash flooding, train derailments, possible thunder storms, animal migrations and so on. They could be quite creative in their reasons. It was all part of their politeness. If you turned around you were fine. If you made any move in any direction other than the one suggested, you were immediately injected and woke up back in your room. I had only tried it twice.

To me, "post-scarcity" means the end of rationing the basics for everybody, where wha

The NYTimes article, not the paper itself, makes this typical leading statement: "For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence."

That is false, at least as far as hunters and gatherers. See, for example:
"The Original Affluent Society" -- by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied. ...
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

Hunter and gatherers has much more free time than most people today -- and time is also a form of wealth.

"We are at the present time living in an age of mass extinction. Each year, more than 20,000 unique species disappear from this planet forever. This represents more than two species per hour. Species extinction is the fuel that supports the ever increasing progress of the machinery of civilisation.

Individual humans are for the most part insulated from the reality of species loss. Alienated from the natural world, guided by anthropocentric attitudes, the average human being is unaware and non-caring about the biological holocaust that is transpiring each and every day.

The facts are clear. More plant and animal species will go through extinction within our generation than have been lost through natural causes over the past two hundred million years. Our single human generation, this is, all people born between 1930 and 2010 will witness the complete obliteration of one third to one half of all the Earth's life forms, each and every one of them the product of more than two billion years of evolution. This is biological meltdown, and what this really means is the end to vertebrate evolution on planet Earth."
. . .

The Politics of Extinction Remain a parasite OR become an Earth Warrior.

"Like a run-a-way train, civilization is speeding along tracks of our own manufacture towards the stone wall of extinction. The human passengers sitting comfortably in their seats, laughing, partying, and choosing to not look out the window. Environmentalists are those perceptive few who have their faces pressed against the glass, watching the hurling bodies of plants and animals go screaming by. Environmental activists are those even fewer people who are trying desperately to break into the fortified engine of greed that propels this destructive specicidal juggernaut. Others are desperately throwing out anchors in an attempt to slow the monster down while all the while, the authorities, blind to their own impending destruction, are clubbing, shooting and jailing those who would save us all.

SHORT MEMORIES

Civilized humans have for ten thousand years been marching across the face of the Earth leaving deserts in their footprints. Because we have such short memories, we forgot the wonder and splendor of a virgin nature. We revise history and make it fit into our present perceptions.

For instance, are you aware that only two thousand years ago, the coast of North Africa was a mighty forest? The Phoenicians and the Carthaginians built powerful ships from the strong timbers of the region. Rome was a major exporter of timber to Europe. The temple of Jerusalem was built with titanic cedar logs, one image of which adorns the flag of Lebanon today. Jesus Christ did not live in a desert, he was a man of the forest. The Sumerians were renowned for clearing the forests of Mesopotamia for agriculture."
. . .

You're probably right as far as you go.

What's the next step? It really is a choice ultimatly between police state enforced copyrights or a gift economy where you can compose as much as you want and that (among other things perhaps) is the gift you give to the world, while other things you need to feed and clothe and house yourself and your family are otherwise free to you (being gifts from others). It helps if people diminish their desires somewhat too -- and pursue a life of voluntary simplicity. Neolithic hunter/gatherers had lots of time for music, apparently:
    "The Original Affluent Society" -by Marshall Sahlins
    http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

Using modern technology, see Bob Black's essay here on "The Abolition of Work":
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ... I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they'll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. ... What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."

That's the bigger picture IMHO.

For more on your point, see:
    "The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
    http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
    "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
and:
    "CLAWS: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery"
    http://www.whywork.org/
    "If you start asking yourself "why work?" you may see a connection between wage slavery, misunderstandings of leisure, lifestyles based on consumption, corporate welfare, education that often amounts to little more than conditioning, and the global social, environmental, and economic crises we are now facing. We hope that the materials we feature here will encourage critical thinking about such things. This site is primarily about ideas and encouragement, so our focus is more philosophical than practical. However, ideas and action go hand-in-hand, so we're currently expanding the "practicality" sections."
and:
    "THE ABOLITION OF WORK" by Bob Black
    http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
    "Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
or:
      _The End of Work_
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0874778247/002-64 49219-7760050?v=glance&n=283155
  "Global unemployment is now at its highest levels since the Great Depression. Rifkin (Biosphere Politics, LJ 5/15/91) argues that the Information Age is the third great Industrial Revolution. A consequence of these technological advances is the rapid decline in employment and purchasing power that could lead to a worldwide economic collapse. Rifkin foresees two possible outcomes: a near workerless world in which people are free, for the first time in history, to pursue a utopian life of leisure; or a world in which unemployment leads to an even further polarization of the economic classes and a decline in living conditions for millions of people."

James P. Hogan has several sci-fi novels envisioning an alternative positive future (e.g. _Voyage from Yesteryear_)

On a more serious note, because farming is more dependable, and causes less wear and tear on people, than hunting and gathering.

Actually, as anthropologist Jared Diamond discussed in his essay The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race the transition to agriculture was really bad for people's health, and resulted in an instant decline in stature, dental health, and lifespan.

And agriculture caused much more wear and tear on the body. It involves highly repetative tasks that the paleolithic human body isn't built for, tasks based on brute strength rather than the endurance that is more valuable for hunter-gatherers. There's more on that here.

You said it yourself, farmers have more children. Do you really think they reproduce more, or that their children have a better survival rate?

Farmers do have more children. Hunter-gathers have fewer for various reasons:

One of these factors is long-term breast-feeding.(32) As I have mentioned, foraging women carry their children on gathering treks, into rivers, through forests, sitting around the fire, and they feed them on demand for the first three or four years of their young lives. This practice offers yet another facet of the elliptical whole of the natural world: it not only provides the nurturance necessary for the child's physical and psychological development, but can trigger the secretion of a pituitary hormone that suppresses the mother's menstrual cycle. As Lee puts it, the child's frequent stimulation of the breast is "rather like carrying your contraceptive on your hip."(33)

Other contributing factors to low birthrates among nature-based women include a noticeably late onset of menstruation, as well as extended periods when the blood cycle simply disappears.(34) Contemporary researchers attribute these physiological conditions, in part, to the high-protein diets and lean bodies of hunter-gatherer women and, in part, to the strenuous demands of walking long distances while carrying equipment, mounds of plant food, and children--physical conditions that are reproduced among today's female athletes who also report fewer periods and irregular cycles. The upshot of all these factors is that family size is small, the pressures we typically associate with child rearing are more relaxed, and population remains low--because for every woman of reproductive age, a new child arrives but every five, six, or seven years.

The survival rates vary.

So agriculture spread because farmers were too stupid to realize that they could get by perfectly well being hunter-gatherers and with less effort? I don't think so.

The growth of agriculture was probably led by emerging elites, as discussed below, who benefitted from controlling a stockpile of grain. And it spread because agriculturalists have more babies, and need to spread and get more land to feed a constantly growing population.

If they move to an area that doesn't have much game or plant foods, they get hungry. If their luck is bad for long enough, they starve and that's the end of them. Once they get hungry a couple of times the novelty wears off and anything that'll prevent hunger starts looking pretty interesting. Like agriculture even if you have to work more then 2-4 hours a day.

This simply isn't true, because of the wide variety of possible options hunter-gatherers have. They choose from thousands of species in every terrain and ecological niche. That diversity moderates the effects of droughts or severe weather. In contrast, early agriculturalists were depen

In an individualist way, Paul Graham is ignoring the bigger picture, and just advising individuals on how to have a better life in a failing society. There is nothing wrong with that kind of good advice by itself, and it is good advice, but it lacks social context, lacks long term planning, and lacks a way to make things permanently better for people without a lot of social advantages needed to follow that advice (let alone have time to read it).

From:
http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."

Bob Black then goes on to say most work is unneeded, most of the rest can be made into fun, and the small remaining amount no one wants to do can be automated.

We have the system of "work" we do as a holdover from an agricultural feudal mindset coupled with a scarcity driven ideology (where dollars are really "ration units"). Compare this with, for example the better parts of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, see: "The Original Affluent Society -- by Marshall Sahlins"
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
for a description of life in a world where there is abundance for all with only a limited need for other-directed "work", where the productivity of the surrounding (living) system far exceeds that of collective human needs.

I don't see we have much of a good alternative to a post-work "utopia" for all;
"Utopia or Oblivian -- by Buckminster Fuller"
http://www.bfi.org/node/17
we either build the world Bob Black envisions (or something like it, whether Bucky Fuller's ideas, or see James P. Hogan's _Voyage from Yesteryear_ novel for a related perspective,
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/voyage/baen99/tit lepage.shtml )
with abundance for all people, or, alternatively, by following the status quo off the cliffs of either pollution or warfare, humanity (though probably neither life nor intelligence nor humans) will perish in a world driven to destruction by putting abstractions like profits or nationalism ahead of basic human needs (including the basic human need not to be bored or demeaned eight hours a day). Does it all have to change in one day? No. You can build a better world bit by bit -- and that's one thi

There are two different ways to rationalize your way into doing nothing about it: you can either pretend the problem doesn't exist, or you can pretend that we are powerless to do anything about it. I'm willing to bet the Easter Islanders used both techniques to make them feel better about their little deforestation problem. These days we look back at the Easter Islanders and say "how could they have been so stupid that they couldn't see what they were doing to their home?" It was all right in front of their eyes, they just chose to look away.

I'm not predicting doom and gloom. I'm only saying that global warming exists, it is a real problem, and denying it won't make it go away. Our actions have consequences. If your knew your house was infested by termites, would you ignore the problem until your roof fell in, or would you take steps to fix it?

I imagine this future-vision might be true, if so, for all intents and purposes, there will be no reason, unless one chooses, to work/create again. I think scenarios like this really urge us to deeply look inside ourselves (as creative, artistic beings) and ask: Why do I create? Why do I invent?

Maybe for the answer to this question about the future, we need to look into our hunter/gatherer past.

The Original Affluent Society -by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognize that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

What did hunter/gatherers spend their time on? Well, there was "work" in the sense of knowing what they wanted to gain from the machinery of nature around them, and then actually getting it. So, the equivalent of going shopping at the grocery store and then going to the fridge for a beer. Even with matter replicators, there will be the issue of what to replicate and what to do with it -- and matters of taste and aesthetics may play a big role. There was the work of child rearing -- something that takes a lot of time and attention. There was the work of singing and dancing and sharing joy and culture and storytelling -- something that will still be needed. There was art and expression. And there was impressing the opposite sex and various status contests. So, there is still a lot of things to occupy time. So I am not worried about that aspect of finding things to do -- because humanity was originally adapted to those conditions of abundance anyway.

A few related issues: agriculture likely arose with increasing population pressures and the invention of the militaristic bureaucracy based in cities -- and anthropologists now recognize that healthwise this was a step backwards for most people as skeletal remains show a decrease in stature with the transition to agriculture resulting from a less varied dies and related famines from depending on one or two major crops which could fail. So, advanced technology can in theory let us go full circle back to the old ways. And a related point -- the "garden of eden" story is present across many cultures -- perhaps reflecting this universal history of being forced to abandon more desirable hunter/gatherer ways for the toil of agricultural either because of increased population or at the spear point of the imperial tax man. Head taxes forced much of Africa into starvation in the last few hundred years, as European powers imposed taxes on the native populations (or else they faced imprisonment or death) and these taxes could only paid by working on European-owned plantations for low wages instead of keeping to their usual subsistence lifestyle. Thus was Africa turned from a continent of hunter/gatherer affluence to one of Agricultural/Industrial poverty through (among other things) taxation without representation. http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch02.htm

So, I have no real worries people will have unresolveable problems with affluence -- it is the crushed life of industry and agriculture that seems to be causing more of the problems, with parents not having enough time for their children, and citizens not having enough time to engage in civic duties and neighborhood activities, and people turning to drugs or television to escape for a while the horror and meaninglessness and pain and humiliation of it all.

So regardless of future reasons, I'd say one reason to invent right now is to try to bring back the better part of those times (and there were bad parts of those times too of course, superstition, infanticide, parasites, so let's hope for doing better the second time around).

ITYM Man, Bytes, Dog.

Piracy: a crucial part of viral marketing.

Pirates have been given a bad rap, historically. History is written by the victors, remember. Many of the pirates from the great sailing age freed slaves and the indentured, set up their own kingless mini-republics and functional anarchies, and would appear more modern to us than their other contemporaries.

See this excert from TAZ on pirate utopias or this article or google it. And of course if you're really into the spirit of things, you could goof around reading No Quarter Given.

"They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment" - D. Defoe

Funnily enough, not only is it a lie to compare making backups (or copying CDs from a friend for that matter) with "thieves and murderers of the high seas", but the fabrication of the image of "pirates" being only thieves and murderers by the empires of the 17th/18th century has never been the whole truth either.
This may serve to show that the piracy issue was not that simple even then.
Strangely, given the amount of studies done by non-establishment historians on topics that seemed "not worth it" to taditional academia, very little serious research has been done on so-called Pirate Utopias. Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey, has done a bit of research and seems to work on a larger project.
BTW, I strongly recommend Hakim Beys works to everyone who is interested in often complicated, very very strange and interesting writings on anarchism and related topics like magic and love in history and everyday life. IMO that stuff fits better to Free Software people than Ayn Rand, but that's me. Maybe try a chapter from the Temporary Autonomous Zone on the first settlements in Roanoke or an essay on the Assassins

Although I'm as wary of romanticizing the 'noble savage' as anyone, I have to say that ethnographic evidence bears this out. See for example the essay The Original Affluent Society, by Marshall Sahlins at the University of Chicago.

Anecdotal evidence aside, the anthropological evidence is that people in hunter-gatherer societies had much more leisure time than had previously been assumed. The !Kung-San (Kalahari bushmen) are a modern example of this: they work less than 20 hours a week, but have ample food.