I found out the other day that Numerical Control - ie CNC machines - were pushed by the US Air Force as a means to break shop floor unions. The early ones had no economic advantage but DID shift the type of labour from the floor to the office (who weren’t unionised).

Just a fun thought when one considers “software is eating the world” and AI/ML trends.

#Union #Tech #AIEthics

Might as well post some of my art so this place doesn't stay empty during these early days.

"Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!"

This pangram (a sentence using every letter of the alphabet) is so much more bad-ass than the stupid "quick brown fox" that I had to illustrate it. A tribute to master Jean Giraud (aka Moebius).

#illustration #moebius #digitalArt #fantasyart

for a long time, the fediverse has cultivated a culture of strategic illegibility & guided the technical affordances to aid in this illegibility: those who try to become part of the fediverse by making genuine connections are welcomed, but those who try to make large lists, indexes, or archives, or who try to optimize reach or scale-up size, are treated with suspicion

this makes a lot of sense: the culture of the fediverse is a refugee culture. for the first decade, people came here because they felt unwelcome or excluded elsewhere. maps that are readable to outsiders can be used to find and exterminate the vulnerable.

now, for the first time, most people on the fediverse don't understand why people might not want to be found by everyone

Work and Play As Social Constructs

(A very long post about work, play, sex, and capitalism.)

The other day, my kids were playing at a children’s garden that had an old-fashioned water pump. Their play included pumping and hauling water. They chose, for fun, an arduous physical task that we ordinarily think of as toilsome work.

Have you ever been to the beach and built a sand castle with kids? Sometimes the kids wander over and help for a bit and sometimes wander off to do something else, possibly for hours. Then the waves wash it away.

They often play this way. I’ve seen them build structures, haul rocks, and dig channels for water. Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee it: play, by children and adults, is often incredibly laborious. We frequently enjoy activities as leisure and entertainment that would, under other circumstances, be seen as the most grueling labor.

Sports. Hiking. Tough mudders. We cook for our friends as we might for wages in restaurants. We lift heavy objects in gyms as if we were beasts of burden. We pitch tents whilst camping as we might as itinerant nomads. I research and write long posts like this one as if I were getting paid. (I’m not.)

But most of us do not experience play as work, and I know that I do not experience work as play. But they’re often the same exact activity! It is not the activity that constitutes work, then. It’s something else: the context, the choice.

When my children play, they do so spontaneously, according to their own whims. They start and stop and restart whenever they want. Maybe they wander off to do something else and then wander back later.

That is not how we experience work under capitalism.

Wage labor is not merely an agreement to perform a task for payment. It is the sale of abstract labor power: you show up at work at a time chosen by your employer and labor according to their whims in conditions chosen by them. You become an instrument of *their* agency.

Some people today hunt animals for recreation. There was a time when almost all people hunted not for recreation but for subsistence, acquiring meat and pelts and bones for tools. Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors perceive hunting as compulsory toil?

Anthropologist Marvin Harris (by way of Widerquist and McCall’s “Prehistory of Private Property”) observed in 1977 that:

“In most band and village societies...the average human being enjoyed economic and political freedoms which only a privileged minority enjoy today. Men decided for themselves how long they would work on a particular day, what they would work at—or if they would work at all. Women, too, despite their subordination to men, generally set up their own daily schedules and paced themselves on an individual basis. Every man and woman held title to an equal share of nature. Neither rent, taxes, nor tribute kept people from doing what they wanted to do.”

(https://works.bepress.com/widerquist/117/download/)

Do hunter-gatherers perceive of hunting as work? They must hunt to eat or, as we might put it crudely, “work to live.” Is it then toil? Or is it, for them as for modern recreational hunters, play?

I have cats and they love to play at hunting. They will sometimes wake me up in the middle of the night to play at hunting, begging me to toss stuffed mice or shine a laser pointer dot for them to chase. Does a cat hunting for food experience that effort as work, or play?

David Graeber, in his essay “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?” identified play as, essentially, the entire point of being alive:

“To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company.”

(https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun)

We’re encouraged by ideologues like Steven Pinker to think of the past as a nightmare of toil and hardship and misery over which modernity is a paradise. But what if it is modernity that is the aberration, and our “natural” state is one of a playfulness that we’ve lost?

Consider this description, of all things, of the sex lives of the Aka and Ngandu hunter-gatherers of the Central African Republic: they conceive of sex as “night work,” a pleasurable and taxing effort to produce children:

“Aka and Ngandu believe that sexual desire, coupled with sexual activity, is the ‘work of the night,’ less arduous and more pleasurable than the ‘work of the day’ but work nonetheless; as one Aka male succinctly put it, ‘The work of the penis is the work to find a child.’ Another Aka male and female shared similar views; the man said, ‘I am always looking for a child, it is pleasurable, but it is a big work,’ and the young woman noted, ‘It is fun to have sex, but it is to look for a child.’ Several informants compared the work of getting food to the work of searching for a child: ‘Getting food is more difficult, but both are lots of work. Sex life is not as tiring as work during day; the work at night is easier because you can make love, then sleep.’ Sex is the work of ‘searching for children.’”

(https://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/documents/75/2008_sex_paper_iUhJd0R.pdf)

These communities explicitly identify sex as a form of labor akin to their daily subsistence activities, which might lead us to conclude that they view sex toilsome work. But what if this is not a “lie back and think of England” situation? What if the conflation of work and sex in these communities tells us not that they view sex as toilsome as their daily labors, but that they view their daily labors as fun as sex? They explicitly identify sex and passionate and pleasurable:

“Robert Moise, an anthropologist who conducted research in the same village, was kind enough to share the following story with us about a song the children developed about orgasm:

Some children were walking in the forest one day and suddenly they heard some strange sounds in the distance. So they crept stealthily over in the direction of the sounds and they discovered two adults from their camp who were having sex.

They decided to hide at a comfortable distance and watch the proceedings. The conversation between the two adults is then recounted and it goes something like this:

Suma (man)—How do you want it?
Saki—Oh, I want it big.
Suma—How do you want it?
Saki—Oh, I want it long ...
Saki—Oh, Suma, its so big and long ...
They continue to have sex, each time Suma thrusts (ba), he says, “Engba- di?” (Did you come?)

They continue to have sex until both of them have orgasm. The children crept away and then took off, running and laughing. They then made up a song that recounts the event, whose chorus is “Ba! Engba-di?” “Ba! Engba-di?” “Ba!” (the male act of thrusting) and “Engba-di” (The literal translation of Engba-di refers to the state of having your eyes roll up in your head, i.e., the moment of orgasm).”

(https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/128939/1/ASM_31_107.pdf)

If sex is work and sex is fun to the Aka and Ngandu, do they then conceptualize all of their labors as fun? Does their life consist of *play*?

The alternative to wage labor is not “shriveling up and dying.” It’s effort by one’s own choice, at one’s own discretion, under circumstances of one’s own choosing, in the same manner that toil becomes play at a child’s whim.

“In general, hunter-gatherers do not have a concept of toil. When they do have that concept, it derives apparently from their contact with outsiders. They may learn a word for toil to refer to the work of their neighboring farmers, miners, or road construction workers, but they do not apply it to their own work. Their own work is simply an extension of children's play. Children play at hunting, gathering, hut construction, toolmaking, meal preparations, defense against predators, birthing, infant care, healing, negotiation, and so on and so on; and gradually, as their play becomes increasingly skilled, the activities become productive. The play becomes work, but it does not cease being play. It may even become more fun than before, because the productive quality helps the whole band and is valued by all.”

(https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/200907/play-makes-us-human-v-why-hunter-gatherers-work-is-play)

It’s not the pumping and hauling of water from a spigot that is toil, even if we must do it to survive. It’s the *choice* of whether to do it at all, and when, and under what circumstances and conditions. Capitalism is not unique in compelling labor. But it is unique in the insidious control it extends over every aspect of our lives while still telling us that we’re somehow free.

The natural human impulse is to make, create, explore, experiment, and play. We don’t need a profit motive. We don’t need discipline. When we're left to our own devices, with no other expectations or obligations, we build sandcastles. We can't stop ourselves.

Hello y'all 👋✨

🙋 Do you have a friend that works in the game industry and is looking for work? Share them in this thread!

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IT'S THE FIRST #HireMyFriendMonday ✨