Gail
Thanks for the opportunity, and I really appreciate the difficulty of getting
these ideas into a coherent form. I share Mike Spencer's frustration with the
construction of the sentences, but as I have struggled for over ten years to
get these ideas across, I can empathise with your group. I should say that I
don't share Mike's contraction of your last sentence. I don't see what you are
struggling to describe as being some sort of return to small village life, I
see it as a reinvention of some of the good parts of that life in a 21st
century context. I do think he has done a somewhat admirable job in contracting
the first three sentences, and I repeat his versions below. But I don't think
he has captured enough of the intent, so I am going to make a few more comments
below his three.
1. The world is unstable and the future promises to be chaotic,
yet we find it hard to believe it can get any worse than it already is
though it very well may.
2. We have to learn to do necessary and useful stuff for
ourselves, invest in the tools to to it; do it for ourselves;
do it for or with our neighbors when or as appropriate; and
encourage our neighbors to reciprocate.
3. See 2. Doing this will make us happier and better off in
general, especially if all our friends and neighbors do the
same.
Mike focuses on the "doing necessary and useful stuff for ourselves" aspect of
your four paragraphs. I think your conception goes beyond that (and you try to
reflect that in your paragraphs, which is why they do become so convoluted).
What you are trying to capture, I believe, might be approached from the
scarcity/abundance frame. If you believe that "work" or "jobs" are scarce -
both in the absolute sense and in the sense that 'good jobs' or 'good work' is
scarce - then what we currently do makes sense.
If you believe, however, in abundance - then our systems might organise
themselves so that people can make and do what makes sense to them and their
current circumstances, confident in the knowledge that if their attitudes or
circumstances change they can move to something else which now makes sense to
them.
If we could capture this in Mike's first three sentences I think we would have
made an improvement, and I would try to capture your fourth by saying:
4. and if we do this we will all feel as though everything we do in our
lives, including all of our work, provides meaning to us, to those with whom we
interact and to the world.
regards
Charles Brass
Chairman
futures foundation
phone:1300 727328
(International 61 3 9459 0244)
fax: 61 3 9459 0344
PO Box 122
Fairfield 3078
www.futuresfoundation.org.au
the mission of the futures foundation is:
"...to engage all Australians in creating a better future..."
----- Original Message -----
From: Gail Stewart
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 12:12 AM
Subject: [Futurework] Four sentences and a request
Hello FWers,
This may be a bit much to ask (and indeed is half in jest) but I would very
much welcome help from the members of this list.
I find myself, among others, having promised to produce four sentences (and
no more than four sentences) for a group that is thinking about the future of
work and is looking for practical proposals.
The deadline hasn't quite arrived and meanwhile any comments on the following
four sentences would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Gail
Four Sentences:
1. The current bimodal character of projections of the future -- on the one
hand densely urban, high tech and widely networked (in short, more of the same,
intensified and accelerated), on the other hand environmental and energy
disruptions, population crashes, smaller communities and much hand labour --
makes it difficult to project the future of work and discern appropriate
educational and other personal and public policies.
2. However, given this high uncertainty about the perhaps not-so-distant
future in which any one of us might find ourselves (whether conditions of
flood, famine, or fortune; among friends or isolated in disoriented crowds of
strangers; scratching a living from the soil or living securely and
well-informed in a world of agricultural surplus and discretionary
expenditures), it appears that the focus on the future of work might perhaps
most viably and sensibly be on the self-organizing and entrepreneurial
capacities of the individual person rather than on large collectivities of
workers such as are often envisioned, e.g., "the labour force," and
furthermore, in such circumstances, that the issue of the future of work and
practical proposals for it might most effectively be addressed as an issue of
risk management.
3. Emphasis on the competent self-organizing individual facing an uncertain
future might suggest children lovingly nurtured and schoolchildren supported in
learning (as well as immediate and continued self-education on the part of all
of us) in order to gain complex capabilities including how to grow and preserve
food, use hand tools, be cyber- and media-literate, flexibly problem-solve,
adjust creatively to change, work cooperatively with others, and be able
communicate safely, whether over distances or face to face, with all kinds and
conditions of people by recognizing their human dignity and one’s own and thus,
suggestively, to point personal and public policy toward not only the need for
sustaining the abolition of the unequal degree of human status that
distinguishes slavery but the need for the abolition of situations where one
person works for rather than cooperatively with another -- in short the
abolition of “jobs” and “employment” in favour of individualized contracts to
mutual advantage (as indeed is already a practice for a substantial number of
persons, including many playing roles in the upper echelons of corporations) --
and for pursuing this personal and social path not only for emancipation and
personal freedom and mutual respect of everyone owning and allocating their own
personal time and energies and knowledge, entrepreneurially, with respect to
work (as, in the developed democracies, we own and allocate entrepreneurially,
through mutual enfranchisement, our personal social, political and religious
lives) and for working with others (including one's elected representatives in
government), for the development of the social infrastructures that support
such “working in dignity,” (with the not inconsequential byproduct of greatly
improving the functioning of the market for “work” and thus improving the
productivity of work which might then be used to reduce the needed amount of
work in the world, even while the remaining necessary component in society of
unwantedly boring, or arduous or unhealthy or high-risk work receive their due
respect and acknowledgement) but also for the purposes of political
stabilization by creating a large entrepreneurial class interested in
preserving the worth of its human assets of life, liberty and health and thus
anxious to preserve peace, order and good government.
4. Thus "work," through such a mutually agreed (Wilberforcian) restructuring
of the social order abolishing the capacity of one person to make an “employee”
of the other could, nurtured by appropriate social insurances and supportive
family, community and public policy, be helped to evolve from its current
commonly perceived condition as a functional disutility detracting from human
satisfaction (and all too often a one-sided exploitation of socially inferior
and perhaps depersonalized employees) into an activity perceived as involving
the mutual fulfillment of a social contract between persons sharing
entrepreneurial considerations, concerned to protect and wisely invest their
personal assets of energy and health and (irretrievable) time, thus leading
further to “work” being increasingly perceived as continual re-creation, a way
of life, even daily re-creation in the form of accruing human experience and
development in a society in which one's dignity and enfranchisement is valued
by oneself and others, with human time, energy, knowledge (including knowledge
embedded in technologies) and creativity perceived as valued inputs and also,
with multiplied effect through combination in the activity of "work," as
producing the desired output of enhanced human health, energy, knowledge, and
creativity, the net accumulating as assets of fruitful experience, wisdom and
social and environmental diversity and enrichment, as humankind ecologically
co-evolves with its knowlege and environment, using the new coin of human
dignity as the economy catches up with the polity in assuring universal
enfranchisement of its participants and training or retraining people for
"jobs" as "employees" becomes replaced by a more respectful approach to their
capacities and a more helpful approach to their well-being in an uncertain
future.
Gail Stewart Ottawa 070813
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