American Dream, Hacker Ethic and Occupied Society

I recently got my hands into the Global trends 2030 report by National Intelligence Council (USA). The report contains multiple scenarios, one of which is a worst case scenario (dystopia) and one the best case (utopia). This is a rather old fashioned approach to scenario writing, because usually the world and the choices in it are not black and white. The same applies to this report as well.

Interestingly, the utopia scenario where all the citizens of the world are more or less able to seek the American dream ends in a situation where the global climate is getting more and more challenging. The report does not address this too clearly, only mentioning it briefly. Nevertheless, the message, unintended or not, is clear: we have to change priorities in measuring success. The Chinese should never think that American dream is their dream. If they do, global carbon emissions grow by 140%. If they, instead, pick the more moderate and less advertised European Dream, their emissions grow 30%. The latter is a crises, but it’s a crises we might be able to deal with.

The European Dream, dictated by Jeremy Rifkin (an American), means seeking gezelligheid through sustainability, connectivity and respect of human rights instead of racing for greater individual wealth.

Another reason for changing the way we measure success is that there will be less work in the future. The American dream leans to the fact that by working more you archive more. But there is a fallacy in capitalism, already noticed by Marx, which prevents us from working more. This fallacy is often referred as technological unemployment.

When the salaries of the Asian workers rise, it makes more and more sense to relocate factories back to where the end market is. The catch is that it makes sense to every factory owner to automate the factories as much as they can. The work that left to China is never coming back, even though the factories might return. Millions of factory workers are already laid off in China and replaced by automation! Further, digitalization and automation are taking jobs away from the service sector as well. This is not a bad thing to the individual – humanity, slowly, gets rid of the repetitive and boring tasks and we have more and more free time. However, this shift is severe for capitalism and to society that live on its mercy, because when there is less work, there is less salaries and thus less money in the market to purchase the goods produced by the factories. While it makes sense to each factory to optimize and hire as few people as possible, and while it makes sense to the society to let machines to do the work that previously had to be done by man power, the total purchasing power of the society starts to decline, leading to a situation where the automated factories make less and less profit, further reducing the total purchasing power of the society. This vicious circle is global and demonstrates the major pitfall in our current economic system.

Capitalism seems broken, but I’m no economist and the system is of course thousand times more complicated than I described. Nevertheless, unless someone is able to point out a mistake I made with my premises, I stick to the fact that past success is no guarantee of future prospects – the system is broken.

Marx’ solution, communism, hasn’t been successful either. Slavoc Zizek mentions in his recent documentary that mankind is able to imagine what would happen in an asteroid apocalypse but unable to imagine even a slight change in corporate capitalism. A good point.

Because of the American dream, we empower ourselves as parts of the society through our work. When the number of people without work grows (while, for now, production capabilities grow simultaneously), the number of people who don’t identify themselves as “useful” parts of the society grows as well. An old book called Hacker Ethic by Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen shows the shift from Lutheran work ethic (finding a meaning through working) to Hacker ethic (finding a meaning through project itself or its impact).

Despite the fact that Himanen is criticized these days due to his recent books, I think hacker ethic is a concept worth thinking about.

The hacker ethic is a shift in values although it is hard to know how global it is. Can we imagine the similar shift from the empowerment perspective, from the society point of view? When the workless (or those working without finding a meaning from it) seek new ways to empower themselves as useful parts of the society (a meaning), new structures are born. This can be seen as more efficient use of the cognitive surplus (such as writing wikipedia, see Shirky 2009) or through creating new kinds of communities (such as anonymous, which creates its own rules in what is meaningful – lulz – and what is not).

Our planet and global society is a system, and any system can only optimize one output. I suggest we (the planet) aim to optimize our achievements in science and technology, because that drives us to improve conditions and education of everyone. Imagine how many potential geniuses live in the slums of Mumbai or lack education in Mali.

In the world where collaborative development is the one and only goal, it makes no sense to try to employ people in repetitive tasks. Work (or even combined production) should not be the goal. There are good things in capitalism despite that. For example, competition is a good way to compare ideas and maximize their effectiveness. But how do we manage competition without purchasing power, which we cannot have if most people are not working. How do we create equal and heterogenous society (the best possible growing ground for big ideas) if only the elite is able to work?

I believe we don’t find the meaning from work, because there is no more work to do. It makes sense to automize everything.

Small companies are not the answer for unemployment, even though that seems to be the current belief. The small size of the company just indicates its ability to do only small projects, and we need big projects.

Perhaps we need to get rid of the concept of work as the only way of belonging to the society and getting rewarded. What on earth are we going to find as a substitute?

I believe we cannot find the meaning from the government or public sector either. The society is chaotic, and the noncompetitive structures of the society, spread across the whole society as communism or not, are not resilient enough. The public sector might have to grow, though, because of the need for huge projects which are the right use of the tax money. Make a big dam, travel to mars, relocate a city. We need to do these things and for now only the governments can do that.

What is left? Our free time used in collaborative projects: the third sector. What if the third sector grows and occupies the society?

What if we take the hacker work ethic and use it to renew the social contract. The third sector (I’m using the term broadly to mean any useful activity such as writing Wikipedia) could occupy the society by creating new kinds of efficient rhizomes of collaborative help and consumption. It does not increase the potential systemic productivity but uses the productivity resources more efficiently by fragmenting work, collaboration and speciality. It also uses other resources, such as cars and houses, more effectively. Empowerment is project based but ideology stays the same from project to project, evolving.

This collaborative network of projects with European Dream as a vision and Hacker ethic as a reason to act could offer a platform for meaning and create resilient, efficient, open and smart societies.