Making a living reloaded

[nadia]

I agree it’s vague. Here let me try a rant.

I got increasingly annoyed reading the paper to the point that I had to let off steam in the form of a rant It is far from perfect and I would appreciate holes being poked into it

It’s not your fault. No one knows how to fix it. We’re trying to figure it out together. Come help.

Unpaid internships. Minimum wage work with little prospects for personal or professional development. A freelance lifestyle of working around the clock to chase contracts, produce the work and then chase the clients to be paid. It is true that there is a lot of exploitation on the labor market, that many are in a situation of work subordination without rights and are excluded from the privilege of "having a steady job". At the moment a "steady job" is out of reach for many people. Perhaps the job paradigm of our parents generation is running out of steam, perhaps it isn't.  Actually let me rephrase that. The Job paradigm is already not accessible to many of us. This has implications for how we think about society and the role of the state in ensuring that the basic conditions for ensuring that we can enjoy the priveledge of going about the business of living our lives in peace, relative prosperity (read you have a roof over your head, garments to protect your body and are not starving) and personal freedom. Peace, relative prosperity and personal freedom. Things that most people in western Europe take for granted.

We all know that many of the challenges we are facing in our daily lives are heavily influenced by large structural challenges that act on a global scale. The pace at which conditions are changing is a key factor in our ability to react appropriately: many people are caught in the middle as they have neither been prepared for what is to come, nor had enough time and experience to be able to navigate it successfully. Formal education was pushed as the main ticket to a promising future, but in many directions formal educational institutions are coming under attack and access to them is becoming constrained. Whatever the underlying reasons we  cannot rely on formal education to equip our young, and not so young, with skills required to make a successful navigation to autonomous adult lives.

Well can’t we just get more young people to innovate, start companies and create jobs?

Well, there are three major problems with that line of thinking. The first is that it assumes that we as society, and especially traditional markets are good at recognising, supporting and rewarding our innovators. The second is that it assumes that tomorrow’s innovations increase or at least do not lower the demand for human labour. The third is that tricky little issue of our only having one planet of natural resources to sustain us and the reasoning above presumes that the young have no right to devise alternatives to the growth paradigm that threatens their very ability to survive.

Markets <3 radical innovators?

Given that we all agree that we need a lot of innovation to solve large urgent challenges like global warming, ensuring food security, dealing with the fallout from financial crisis, upgrading our educational systems to better prepare our young…we can’t afford to lose any of the talent and skills we have. In fact radicalism is a cheap way to try new things that with small probability may work. But it costs a lot in personal terms as the sources of support that are practically accessible to new kids on the block acting outside the formal spaces are few and far in between. Whether or not promising initiatives can come to fruition depends on many different factors. So we need to learn to recognise the value of this work and come up with ways of supporting it which do not rely on market value. Because the traditional markets are just not doing the job.

Five cases:

1. Doing good for the common good: especially in the cases where the output of the work is a contribution to the commons or the common good. E.g. Hexayurt and or occupy as taking care of
2. Doing something radically new or that threatens the market position of an established player: Private sector you have IP lawsuits threatening the hell out of everyone and raising barrier to entry. Monoculture and risk aversion:  Lack of access to funding/ financing opportunities (compare to China’s black finance market) with banks preferring speculation to risky investment in radically new initatives.. Jacky and the model.
3. Lack of social maneuvering space: criminalising squatting, killing of social infrastrucutre and projects which have community support, argument making clear that enclosures of commons as a threat to innovation friendly ecosystem.
4. Sorry state of finance: Lack of access to financial support [See Michel Bauwen’s article on underground access to finance in China..]. (Tie to banks not investing in innovation) and general distrust of  exploring alternative currencies like bitcoin.
5. Most labour policy targetted at incentivising employers making it easier or cheaper for them to hire people but not rewarding individuals to explore alternative paths.

Where are the real allies?

In part due to the professionalization of education we see that formal educational and research facilities face decreasing autonomy and access to resources. Some argue that this is due to education having been a playground for different political and technocratic interventions and changing priorities (see Swedish jounalist  Maciej Zaremba’s excellent investigative series on the sorry state of Swedish public education). Others would point the finger at more political presence in education with members of the scientific and academic communities increasingly having to dance to the tune of funders political objectives: places that  fact that once served as sanctuaries for the priveledged few giving them the resources autonomy to pursue groundbreaking work and make great contributions to culture in Europe. Others till would fault the formal education community for failing to adequately equip young people with the skills neccessary in order to be able to  form frames of enquiry and means to test the relevance of what they were being taught to help them navigate their way in the world. They are made to feel as though they are somehow to blame if they don’t manage to live up to older generations, and the immediate social environments, unrealistic expectations of constantly ascending career trajectories.

 

Europe needs a space program?!

So Jacky mentioned this during Edgecamp, that Europe would need the equivalent of a space program to stay together. And around a month later I heard someone from the European Commission (Florent Bernard, Innovation Policy Officer) say the same in his TEDx talk: what will the big achievement of our generation be? The European Project 1.0 achieved peace. By interweaving economic interests of member states but the big driver was centralising the administration of  steel production.

 

I think a sense of purpose is a core issue. Beyond the narrow focus in phases. For example in Education that manifests in the progression: being good equals the progression: get the grades, graduate, get into university, pass the exams, get the degree, get a job, shut up, put up and pay your taxes.

It is true that there are many people with autonomy and integrity who are doing important work contributing to the social, physical and mental well-being of people in their communities. They are doing things like exploring alternative ways of living and better coordinating between what we produce and the needs that are out there. Some, Like Alessia, are fighting political battles against enclosures of common resources that better equip us to be able to weather more dire economic prospects. Some, Like Licas, are committed to addressing needs such as ensuring food security in urban environments or equipping communities to better coordinate volunteer efforts to keep health systems going in areas where essential services are cut. As the state retreats on parts of the social contract we need to be asking ourselves who is responsible for ensuring that our communities are providing for our basic needs? And how do we get resources that are currently, or should be, put aside for this to people doing the work?

The reason I ask is that it seems that at the moment our young, and the Edgeryders among us, are currently bearing a disproportionate amount of the cost but are offered little support in return. They are pushed to become more “employable” in a shrinking market where demand is contracting, i.e. there are not enough jobs to employ everyone period. They are also pushed to be “entrepreneurial” and “innovative” and faulted for not “starting new businesses”. So is it possible to start asking some bigger questions that frame all the smaller policy hacks or initatives that we can patch together? What would your big questions be? And would you be up for trying to get answers to them?