270911: Notes on "A World Without Work"
Clara Collier, in Asterisk, argues that post-singularity life will be basically aristocratic. Once physical drudgery's performed by robots, we'll all do relational work—which, at its best, means mediation and emotional work, and at its work looks like gossip and Machiavellian scheming.
I am reminded of the OG Thomas Jefferson quip about how American democracy is gonna fall apart as the country urbanizes, it'll just become European petty court politics.
I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.
(Which is why Turner's frontier thesis was such a big deal. Now all the world was to become a dinner party of the Eastern Establishment.)
I'd say Jefferson's right, except... I've read enough about 19th C American politics to know that the 2020s are actually very tame, very placid, very polite and civil in contrast.
Collier mentions a French courtier, Saint-Simon, being "obsessed with nuances of heredity" is funny after spending the summer on a geriatric island in Maine, where retirees spend their weekends at the historical society doing genealogical research.
Most of his life was spent in incomprehensible litigation over which families might be entitled to a certain heraldic emblem or whether parliamentary magistrates could wear a particular bit of ceremonial headgear in the presence of dukes.
Rings true; a big part of Surrogation was about the shift from what Goffman calls intrinsic games (man v physical forces) to extrinsic games (man vs man, other intelligent beings). Social gaming, fashion, semiotic performance, communication all extrinsic. American spectrum from Western frontier life (hacking at trees) to Eastern urban life, palace politics, court dramas.
In this world, nobody goes to the theater to appreciate the genius of Molière or Corneille. (That’s the kind of thing Voltaire points out in his own history of the period, which is how we know he’s hopelessly bourgeois.) They go to see who else is there, and what they’re wearing, and whether what they’re wearing could be construed as a statement of allegiance in some ongoing factional conflict.
True—but we already live in this world. Welcome to Bushwick, baby!
The central activities of one’s life all involve preserving and defending one’s own place in that system.
As excess energy is freed up, we should expect a lot more zero-sum game-playing in society. We are already quite plagued with it; I remember very clearly riding a train in to Dublin from Tralee. It was a three-hour train, packed with young people heading from town to city for the weekend. I assumed they would party, crash in a hostel, and be home for Sunday dinner, but I didn't ask.
Nearly all the young women spent their three-hour ride applying makeup. I'd never seen anything like it. The ceiling of the train cars were reflective as a mirror, and I could see groups of girls in adjacent booths, doing their hair, lashes, eyebrows, foundation. They were like Renaissance painters; the skill was terrifically impressive, and a terrible waste. Sexual competition is fairly fixed-sum; the fixed-sum dynamics are already chaotic, and causing a lot of suffering in the dating pool; and we should only expect this to get worse in a post-work world. Finding ways to artificially cap red queens, or stigmatize zero-sum play, is important.
(Gambling, which Collier mentions later in her piece, is another fixed-sum game—but "refined" hobbies like chess are little better.)
What we want then are forms of status denomination (1) with desirable byproducts, (2) over a quantity that grows.
Claude contributes:
The mechanism Collier identifies but doesn't name is portability. Work supplies an impersonal, third-party-auditable scoreboard, and the decisive property of such a scoreboard is that your standing on it travels with you: a welder's competence, a diploma, a shipping record all get you credit among strangers who know nothing of your biography. Relational credit is non-portable by construction. It exists only inside the group that accumulated it, which means exit destroys it, which means nobody exits, which means the only available enforcement technology is the one you use on people who can't leave and can't be fired — gossip. The West Enders and the Russian princes spend their days doing the same thing because they are both running norm enforcement in a no-exit regime. Read this way, markets are not primarily an allocation device but a reputation-portability protocol, and the post-AI problem is not unemployment but the collapse of transferable merit. Everything else follows mechanically: if credit can't move, communities become sticky, boundaries become policed, and voice degenerates into ritual.
It is worth pointing out that the 1980s lunch-club women, or Gans's Italian-Americans, or the courtiers at Versailles, are all materially dependent on their relationships.
Ostensibly some degree of social standing (e.g. citizenship) will be necessary to unlock AGI benefits, should they arrive. But there will not be quite the same combination of precarity and limited belonging.
Sports are an interesting alternate case study: status is more or less constant-sum, but scoring is roughly objective and non-relational. Chess remains popular despite machine dominance.