The restless ape

The past, the present, and the possibility to reimagine the future of work culture.

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Sometimes, when work gets rough, I indulge in a self-pitying thought experiment where I ask myself what is my evolutionary brain trying to tell me? How much work (and what kind of work for that matter) is actually true to my human-ape nature, and why does this not feel like it? 

Then I doom scroll for an hour on a tiny supercomputer holding a million Libraries of Alexandria, only to be reminded how far we’ve strayed from our would-be-nature. The questions remain valid, however. In fact, in Tedd Siegel’s Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society the author explores the personal, cultural, and historical reasoning behind this quite common reality. 

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The issue with work today

We surely cannot fit all jobs into the same category. After all, some people save lives while others sit at a desk writing copy all day… ahem. But to understand our current relationship with work, we must first agree on a definition of what work is to us today. For this purpose, Siegel uses the noun phrase work as we know it understood as “wage labor under neoliberal capitalism in the digital age”, which can fit most employment nowadays. Even if you don’t work in the digital realm, we are living under the boot of the digital age, and even the most analog of jobs are influenced directly or indirectly by virtuality. So whether you work in front of a computer or not, your feelings towards work, economy, and society in general may be affected by a bunch of people who do. 

According to Siegel, work as we know it is often:1. Poorly distributed—you either have too much or too little (check).2. Arbitrary and purposeless—tasks rarely face scrutiny, and when they do, they’re ignored (check).

It’s been like this for the past many years, but as long as the pay comes in, the machine keeps moving forward and so should you. 

Or should you? 

Typically, Siegel suggests, workers were offered two paths: either you lean in and work with the system to maximize and optimize efficiency, or you find tools of “palliative care”. The more forward-thinking companies will even provide the latter for you, with scheduled mindfulness sessions, monthly mental health checkups with your manager, or lunch-break yoga sessions at the company gym. You’re gonna die working here anyway so why not try to be at peace with it… or so they say. 

But something is shifting. It has been for a while, and while some may argue that it started with the COVID-19 pandemic, the truth is we had it coming and it only became apparent when the evidence came to slap us across the face. 

Workers figured out they had a third option: refusal. It would take, however, a very narrow mind not to see the privilege in this… just refusing to work? Ok 1%. 

That is not the case though. The great refusal, as per Tedd Siegel’s commentary, comes in many different ways. 

Yes, there was the great resignation or the big quit seen in the US with employees quitting en masse largely due to frustrations that surfaced through the pandemic. There’s that, from which not much was learned (more on this later), but there’s also many other emerging trends of workplace resistance to which employees have turned to in light of a generalized dissatisfaction with current working conditions. 

There is quiet quitting, where employees reduce their performance to the bare minimum. 

There’s loud quitting, when they express their frustrations around the workplace making their discontent known as well as their intention to leave. 

There’s career cushioning, coming from the trend towards mass layoffs that came very shortly after the big quit, where employees use company time to learn other skills in case their name comes up in tomorrow’s bad news bulletin. 

There’s the work-to-rule movement, where employees are refusing to do any tasks that fall outside of their job description and encouraging others to do the same. 

The list goes on. 

There are several options for those who don’t have the luxury of just flipping the table—but is that a win for the people? 

You would think “Hell yeah, stick it to the man, that’ll show’em.” But you open the news today and it’s another mass layoff at another billion dollar company. 

Conspiracists will say these are nothing but fear tactics to scare you into keeping your bullshit job—to keep quiet and eat it. But whoever’s been on the market lately looking for a job can confirm how messy it is out there. The system is broken and while on one side you have my aunt Dennise saying “No one wants to work anymore,” on the other you have my buddy Billy applying to a hundred jobs a day since Q2 2023. His LinkedIn profile shines for a strong portfolio, a good network of contacts, and a dusty old Open to Work signature. 

Then there’s the dawn of AI, of course, and the fact that the replaceability of most jobs seems less improbable by the hour. Whether you’re a doomsdayer or an adopter, the truth is humans will largely lose against the machine in a race towards efficiency. Which leads us to the concept of a post-work society, which, as utopian or dystopian as it may sound to you, has quickly passed from science-fiction to political science in the library aisles. 

But, what does post-work actually mean? It may sound radical, and critics are quick to argue that without work, society descends into vice. A valid concern. But what happens if and when humans become the main bottleneck toward ultimate efficiency? What becomes the point of a 40-hour standard work week when a robot could do it in less?

A post-work world doesn’t necessarily mean all work becomes obsolete. It also suggests softer scenarios of transition. Two examples of this, which we can already see today, are:

• Industry 5.0: A concept built on the integration of automated machinery into, for example, factories. In this iteration of the industry, humans can delegate repetitive or dangerous tasks to the machines and step into the creative roles that allow for even further innovation (allegedly). 
• Companies adopting the 4-day work week with increased results in productivity and efficiency.

So there’s the possibility that a post-work world isn’t entirely post-work, but more like a post-work-as-we-know-it world (as per our previous definition). 

What then is work as we don’t know it? And what does this mean to the economy? If the value of a product or a service lies within the human labour it hides behind, what happens then when the latter is removed? 

IF = No human labour time… then—what is value?

Post-work theorists offer distinct solutions, from stakeholder economies where everything is “investable” to the implementation of “universal basic incomes”. Some optimists suggest post-work could also mean post-scarcity, while others don’t believe in such a thing. In his book, Tedd Siegel asks what if work had a purpose different from capitalization or profit making?

A good way to answer some of these many questions is to explore how we got here in the first place. 

Human history (Director’s cut)

You know the story: And then there was light, a dolphin swam out of the water, became hunter-gatherer, mastered fire, discovered agriculture, kings, peasants, revolution, internet, and brainrot. The usual narrative with slight alterations from the Bible to Hegel to Harari, who dares to challenge the personal benefit of agriculture, but still concludes on it as a collective pursuit towards human perpetuity. The myth of civilization, or the breakthrough discoveries of our own past that made us realize the inevitability of inequality, war, government, and other systems of oppression. It’s a simple story that helps explain a lot of how humanity works today. 

It may be, however, limited. 

Enter The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow. In their book, the Davids are quick to throw us off our known and shared pasts through a simple premise: what if the 10,000+ years of human history were not, in fact, all that linear? What if the thousands and thousands of civilizations that lived and thrived had different ways of living? What if human history was not all the same story, but rather filled with playful possibilities? 

We grew up learning about the ancient empires. Books on the history of civilization touched upon a couple early ones and then fixated on the Greek and the Romans. Then you have world history classes where you learn about what happened in Europe A.D., a couple revolutions, and then the world wars. 

Of course all this has an undertone of the tired all phrase of “history is written by the victor’s.” Again, maybe true, but most likely limited. 

The problem is not what is being written, but what is not. And I don’t mean the silenced secrets of conspiracy. I’m giving historians of the time the benefit of the doubt, considering how the nuances of everyday life of the conquered might pass up as unseen. Things that, in the eye of the victors could be irrelevant, not newsworthy, or simply not understood. Egalitarian agricultural communities, civilizations that mixed farming with hunter-gathering practices, or horizontal ways of governance could all be easily passed up on since in their narrative, “That’s not possible” or “they’re just doing it wrong”, and so quickly forgotten. After all, it was mostly the conquerors who did the publishing after. 

In their book, the Davids present what the last 30 years of archaeological findings suggest. They come forward with proof of how several peoples built civilizations without the need for dominance structures. They challenge the myth of agriculture as an irreversible step towards inequality and reject the stiffness of the current story of human history. Armed with evidence and bibliography, they state that the inevitability of our current structures is a myth, not a fact. 

Powerful myths, however, “are not divorced from science”, Wengrow says. There’s truth in them which gives them strength and credibility. But what if we dared to explore the new evidence? The one that says humans’ transition into an agriculture-based society was not sudden, but gradual. The one that says that some of these first systems were largely egalitarian for hundreds of years. That they had art and community practices and awe-inspiring buildings. 

What if human history offered us options? What if, all of a sudden, we saw our current systems as a choice rather than just the way it is?

Luckily it’s not all lost. We still have examples of communities today around the world who’s human experience differs greatly from that which globalization has set as the standard. 

This is where again, my aunt Denise comes forward to say, “But they don’t have Iphones. They didn’t make it to the moon.” To which I say: the only reason the western mind thinks of its way as the vessel of progress, is because it made the rule with which progress is measured. The western world defined what progress meant and then erased any alternative that looked different.

Sure, the Iphone is great. Probably the best invention of capitalism (and its biggest curse), but wouldn’t it be interesting to see what other systems could come up with if they were allowed to flourish? The story of humanity made us believe no other system could ever do, but the latest findings of anthropology, as presented by the Davids, beg to differ. 

Some years ago I came across this interview on the weaponization of hopelessness. It talked about how perpetrators of power benefit from people giving up. Specifically, it talked about the environment. For example, how a big oil company could face resistance from people when people were shown an alternative. How people will fight back when we believe we can win. But then, when the balance is broken and the way out seems an impossibility, we won’t. “It’s hopeless”, we say, as we lower our fists and just accept whatever big oil feeds us. And then they win. So the big oil company, in this cautionary tale, benefits from making us believe we can’t win. They benefit from spreading hopelessness in order to reduce resistance. 

And listen, me personally, I try not to believe in the royal they, “That’s what they want us to think, man”. I don’t support many conspiracy theories or ideas of machiavellian power pulling the strings. But I do believe that these things, the results of these actions, can happen out of people following their own convictions. I don’t think most people are actively trying to hurt others. Some may, of course. Some people suck. But others, (in my opinion most) might just truly be convinced that they are doing the right thing, be it fighting back against the man, or doing what’s necessary to keep their jobs in a big evil corp. People go on with their lives trying their best, and then sometimes they realize too late (if ever) that they were playing for the wrong team all along, leaving us with broken systems, and for the case concerning this particular article, broken history books. Biased or incomplete books that have made us think this is our only possible reality. Books that gave us an interpretation of freedom that very quickly has turned into domination or subjectification, leaving really very few options to disobey or, even better, to reimagine. Made us think it is hopeless to do so. 

So we don’t. 

But neither the authors of this book nor the author of this article subject to hopelessness. Because when we zoom out, we realize that the history of humanity is not in the books, it’s being built everyday, and we are a part of it. But when they make us think our lore is so limited, we quickly accept it and take a step back. We accept our role too easily and we limit our life to working hard enough to pay the bills and enjoy life when there’s a chance. Because that’s the system we built, the one we keep building everyday. 

And so the restless ape hustles, because it truly believes it has no other choice.

But to refuse today could also mean to dig in and explore the new findings of anthropologists. To rethink the future with a wider perspective of what is true to our past. At the dawn of a new era, we have the possibility to do so. And in David Wengrow’s words, “Perhaps it’s not too late to begin learning from all this new evidence of the human past. Even to begin imagining what other kinds of civilization we might create if we can just stop telling ourselves that this particular world is the only one possible?”

Sources:

• Books mentioned in this article:
  • Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society (2023, Tedd Siegel)
  • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021, David Graeber, David Wengrow)
• Commentary and quotes from:
  • Story Behind the Story | Episode 49: Tedd Siegel – SIGNS OF THE GREAT REFUSAL
  • The Next Big Idea Club | DAWN OF EVERYTHING: The True History of Humanity with David Wengrow
  • A New Understanding of Human History and the Roots of Inequality | David Wengrow | TED
• Other sources
  • Interview on weaponized hopelessness

Featured image: “The Effects of Chloroform on the Human Body” Richard Tennant Cooper (1912)