What is Left Accelerationism and Post-Work? Interview with Nick Srnicek
I spoke to Nick Srnicek, author of 'Platform Capitalism', 'Inventing the Future' and the 'MANIFESTO FOR AN ACCELERATIONIST POLITICS'. Together we dissect the roots of accelerationist politics of which Nick is known for his work on left accelerationism, its controversial implications, and its ongoing interpretation.
We discuss why he doesn't like the term accelerationist anymore, the trend of many people in crypto world identifying as accelerationists without knowing what it means, and the fight for freedom from work. We also talk about his latest book 'After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time' which he co-wrote with his partner Helen Hester.
Big thank you to Dallas Taylor for helping edit this episode!
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Transcript
Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. I'm your host, Josh. And for today's interview, I have Nick Cernick. He is the author of Platform Capitalism and the book Inventing the Future. And as well, he wrote the, Manifesto for An Accelerationist Politics, the last two with Alex Williams. And he's also the coworker of an upcoming book called After Work, a History of the Home and the Right for Free Time with his partner, Helen Hester, who wrote Xenofeminism. So I think this is going to be a really interesting conversation because, I mean, I think you're one of the, I guess, one of the, I could say, founding figures of kind of bringing forth the idea of accelerationism to left wing political thought. And it's really interesting because I have talked to so many people in the crypto world who describe themselves as accelerationists. And then when I ask them if they've read, some of your work, that tends to be like a blank stare and like, oh, who is that? So, maybe to start, I thought it'd be interesting if you could, perhaps introduce yourself and, yeah, where you're coming from and the work that you've been doing around, accelerationism.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for having me on, by the way. Yeah. I'm not sure I'd describe myself necessarily as an accelerationist anymore, and we can maybe get into why that's the case later on. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. So actually ten years ago now, it Alex and I wrote the manifesto for an acceleration as politics. We're sort of kicked off along with Benjamin Noyes' work, kicked off a lot of discussion about what is accelerationism, what does it mean. And, you know, I think kicked off some fundamental questions for the left as well. You know, what does the left want? So, yeah, the manifesto for acceleration is politics. It has sort of a weird origin because Alex and I were working on this book, Inventing the Future. We'd been working on it for a couple of years and we'd been having discussions particularly with Mark Fisher about, you know, what what's wrong with the left? How can it do better? And we were writing Inventing the Future as sort of response to these questions. And we were asked by a friend of ours, to provide, you know, a small text for this little art, art book that he was putting together. And so Alex and I decided, well, you know, what we'll do is we'll sort of condense what we're doing for inventing the future. We'll condense it down, make it highly polemical and like pure manifesto form. And we wrote it thinking that it would be published in this small art collection and like maybe 10 people would see it. What ended up happening, though, was that another friend of ours posted it online and it just sort of went viral from there completely unexpectedly. We had no idea that it would hit the nerve that it did, but it did seem to sort of spark a lot of, intrigue and controversy and thoughts and people. But, yeah, it was never meant for public consumption in the sort of way that it ended up, happening. I think it's probably for the best that we didn't write it for public consumption because I think it has this like this sort of unfinished edge to it in this sort of, you know, we would have added in more nuances and qualifications and the sort of the, the real punchiness of it, I think, would have been lost if we'd been writing for the public. Mhmm. But so, yeah, it was released and then we've had ten years of people declaring themselves to be accelerationist in in various ways.
That's a really interesting story. I didn't know that. Yeah. I I sometimes wonder, like, I mean, I kind of like it when at least like some kind of like what I think are like important left wing political ideas get summarized into like more punchy points, just because I think it does tend to attract, more people. I think we, on the Left, sometimes have this tendency to be overly academic and then like try to add a lot of nuance to things, which makes it like less, like not able to be understood or consumed by someone outside of, like, the circle, I guess. Yeah. I guess it has that double effect of that it goes viral and everybody thinks that they're in acceleration. It's not.
Yeah. And it also becomes sort of wildly open to interpretation. You know, these these are highly condensed formulations, that can just be unpacked in different ways. So, yeah, I think that's part of its success, but it's, as an academic, I'm also like, ah, I'd like to have more qualifications.
Yeah. That's fair. So, the, I figured it would be interesting to, just recite the first quote for people who maybe haven't come across the manifesto. It says at the very top, it's just like a web page with, I think it's something like 60 points or something like that. Accelerationism pushes towards a future that is more modern, an alternative modernity that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate. So like what, from what I understand about accelerationism is that, at least, you know, the type of accelerationism, on the left is that it's meant to be a answer to neoliberalism or like to, sort of bring to light the things that the left is struggling on during this age of neoliberalism, because neoliberalism has been quite successful in suppressing the left in many ways. And I think we just, like, haven't really figured out a way or, like, a viable path that we can all kind of agree on to, like, move forward. And that's kind of like the the the feeling that I had about, about accelerationism and what it kind of brings. But, but, yeah, then I think maybe it would be interesting to hear from you, like, what do you think of it now as a concept in this moment, and how have you seen it evolve over the years?
Yeah. So I think that that opening quote is a nice little summary. Accelerationism pushes towards a future that is more modern, an alternative modernity that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate. And I would say, you know, the basic premise builds off of Deleuze and Guattari's work. So they talk about capitalism as this deterritorializing force, particularly relative to feudal relationships, and the ways in which the hierarchies of feudalism get completely broken apart, as capitalism emerges in the market forces spread. The point of Deleuze and Gaithery's work though is that it's not just a deterritorializing force, it also reterritorializes society on new structures, particularly something like wage labor. So the fact that, you know, yes, you're freed from feudal relations, but you're also freed from the means of reproduction. So suddenly you have to go to the market, sell your sell your labor time, in order to be able to actually survive under capitalism. And this becomes, you know, the key lynch point of capitalism is that the vast majority of humanity has to go into the labor market in order to survive. They have to generate surplus for capitalists. This becomes, what what Saurer and Maui say that, you know, it's this mode of domination for capitalism. So, yes, capitalism is liberating on one hand, but it's completely constraining and dominating on the other hand. And Deleuze and Gayatri say, well, the acceleration is moment is to push beyond that, you know, to to sort of unbind these things further than what capitalism would allow. And that's, you know, that's what Alex and I took as the basic sort of premise of acceleration is, and is that actually capitalism, for all its ideology of freedom and innovation and lack of constraint, is in fact a highly constraining system, particularly for the vast majority of humanity. And so our argument is that, you know, to get beyond we have to go beyond capitalism in order to actually, bring about the sort of full system of of freedom and opportunity and, actual dynamism. So, yeah, that was, you know, that was the basic sort of premise we took, from it. And then, yeah, we've sort of had, you know, strategic thoughts about, well, how do we do that? And this is where the focus on wage labor becomes quite important. And then crucially, the focus on automation, things like universal basic income, shorter working week, Basically, if wage labor is the key sort of linchpin of the the capitalist mode of production or, you know, one of the key linchpins of the system, undermining that little, you know, structural element, can have drastic effects and can really lead to, potential for a new system. And so that's why a lot of our focus has been on work and wage labor and automation and things like a basic income and a shorter working week is because that to us seems to be one of the strategic points that you can really, leverage and and and focus on to try and, you know, extract ourselves out of capitalism and do something better.
Mhmm. Yes. I have, I have so much to say about that. Like, so for maybe for people in case they don't understand, maybe it would be worth defining a bit what's because it can be complicated terms and concepts for people, deterritorialization and, you know, territorialization?
Yeah. So, I mean, the the simplest way to sort of think about it without going into, like, massive Deleuzian metaphysics in any way. Deteorialization, you can sort of think of as a rigidly hierarchical social system. A rigid social system doesn't necessarily have to be hierarchical, but a rigid social system, which is suddenly starting to change and become something else. It's not just a social system necessarily. So they'll also talk about, you know, sort of, the nature of the self, the nature of identity, and the ways in which it becomes territorialized and the way in which it becomes rigid. But deterritorialization is sort of the process of that becoming something else. Right. And so the argument is that the feudal system was based upon, you know, sort of a lord peasant relationship and, you know, ultimately peaks out the monarch. That sort of system of feudal relations and, you know, relationships of bondage and debt and things like that, that social system was massively transformed by the emergence of capitalism, particularly in England and then elsewhere around the world. But, yeah, market relationships tend to tend to get rid of that feudal relationship of, you know, of bondage and and and and and and and debt, at least in the form that it took in feudalism. But then you start to have, well, this nominal equality of people. So everybody is free to go and find whatever job they want. They're free to enter into any contract that they want. This is the ostensible equality and freedom of capitalism. But, of course, in reality, that's not actually the case. You know, you can't pick and choose exactly what job you want. You might have a selection of jobs. And, of course, there's massive differences between, you know, people's income, people's wealth that they rely upon, and then the massive, you know, class divide between workers and owners of capital. So, yeah, so that becomes the new rigid system of capitalism is that that sort of class divide and its expression in a variety of different ways under capitalism.
Right. So, like, I understand it, you know, maybe quite crudely that there is a like, a territory always exists. There are always, like, as as a social existing social structure, and that is the territory. And, you know, under feudalism, we have the nobility and whoever else. And then with the sort of growth of capitalism as a mode of production and sort of, like, the bourgeois class of people who were previously the artisans, they were able to, push on that social structure and change it over time. And that changing, happens in two directions. One is the removal of the existing social structure, and then the other is the creation of new social structures. And so that's deterritorializing is the removal, and then reterritorializing is the creation of a new social structure. And so this is important, I think, really I think it's just like a and it's an interesting conceptual framework to think about things that, that other thinkers have kind of already identified, I think, in different ways. Like I think, you know, I think it Schumpeter who had this idea of creative destruction, which is also kind of, I think, a very similar thing. I thought he was speaking about it specifically within capitalism. There is creative destruction where there through the competition of of capitalist forces, etcetera. But this is a really important concept, I think for the left to understand perhaps in order to think about, like, the, to understand the process in which if you want to change the system, this is kind of like broad abstract concepts to understand how that would happen. We have to destroy social structures and create new ones at the same time. We have to reterritorialize into something else similar to how capitalism did that to feudalism, I guess. I don't know. Does that sound correct in my offer?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would agree with that. And and I think it is sort of these it's, it's these big historical questions about the shifts between different modes of production. And that's fundamentally what, well, particularly Marxist thinking is interested in, you know, how, how do these changes, have they historically happened And crucially, the strategic question of how might they happen in the future. Right. And, you know, is is is is the model of feudalism to capitalism, is that a model for capitalism to communism or is it gonna be something different? But, yeah, there there is you know, I think one of the the the important points of the accelerationist claim from Deleuze and Gaitheri is that, you know, capitalism is a massively constraining system. It's a system of domination and oppression and exploitation. It's not this system of freedom that, proponents want to present it as.
Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, there, there are some, it's like we we may have solved certain problems from feudalism that a lot of people may have, maybe at the time as a peasant, were pointing out as being huge problems. And maybe we have fixed those problems in one way, but we have perhaps created new ones, in that process. And I think when it comes to maybe accelerationism in the, like, right now sense, of course technology is like an important part of that equation. I think like it's hard to, at this moment, be, like to to not think that technology is not important or that, like, the innovations and the way and the speed at which technology has changed over the past years, like, clearly, there is there has been this deterritorialization or creative destruction happening in our lives that if you've lived for the past couple of decades, you've like noticed like how the way that we relate to each other has kind of changed with the, with smartphones, with like the internet, with all these things. And so there has been perhaps this, destruction of certain social structures, I think, through the Internet. Perhaps maybe you could argue that people have become more aware of, like, their sexual orientation or, like, their gender identity because they finally were able to get getting to know people who also felt similarly. But at the same time, you know, the Internet is a giant surveillance machine. So it was like, you know, but so again, those those processes are are still happening and technology is just like right now, one of the main drivers of that, perhaps you can say arguably.
Yeah. And I think that's one of the more controversial points about the the Accelerationist Manifesto was that it did take sort of an optimistic, perspective on technology. And I think for for a lot of people on the left, particularly amongst academics on the left, you know, the default position is just critical, critical, critical towards technology. And understandably so in many ways because these are technologies developed by capitalists and then deployed by capitalists and used by capitalists. And, you know, they they do serve particular, you know, oppressive and exploitative functions oftentimes. But our, you know, our our point in the manifesto and elsewhere has always been that, well, there's that doesn't exhaust the potentials of any given technology, that there are potentials beyond just simply what, are are developed in it. And this is a point from, you know, science and technology studies, which has long shown that, the the development of technologies doesn't, like, establish and firmly, solidify the potentials of the technology. One of my favorite examples of this is that the, the inventor of the machine gun famously thought that the machine gun was gonna end war because it was just too terrible of a weapon, and people would just be like, well, no. We're not fighting anymore. Didn't happen to be the case, of course. But, you know, the developer's intentions and ideas for the designs don't constrain what's possible.
Yeah. That's so that's like, not not to shill, but, in my book I talk about, I try to use that framework as well thinking about, blockchain and crypto. But yeah, I think generally, there sometimes is this, well, I mean, one, the left for whatever reason has a lot of academics, one way or another in many ways. And academics love to like question and like love to problematize and whatever I's word you want to say, the ways in which things do or do not appear as they, as they seem. I sometimes wonder like, is it like, in some ways I'm just like always back and forth. I'm like, is that a useful thing always to do that? Like, when can we have a place where we can, like, accept that there is, like, going to be, like, nuance and there are answers that we cannot answer right now until we begin to do the thing? Sometimes I think for a lot of people, who like I've met just a lot of people who, like, are ostensibly progressive or like that they like, they like internally, like, they feel like they're on the left in one way or another, even though but they're not going to read, like, tomes of political theory or like whatever else. Like, they're not going to spend the time doing that. And and so like, but at the same time, I think they feel like they can't do anything on the left. Like that there is nothing for them to do. So the thing that they do do is they go and make a startup or something like that because, like, that that's the avenue available to them for creating change in some way or that they feel like they can make change in some way.
Yeah. I would agree. I think there's, you know, there is, sort of a paralysis amongst the academic left in many ways. And I think, yeah, exactly that that that desire to do something, the desire to be, to have some agency in some way ends up getting expressed in these weird ways. Yeah. Oftentimes, sort of turned inwards, you know, vitriol towards the left, as well, which is
problematic in its own way. Sure. Yeah. And then they call themselves accelerationists. But if of course, I think it's like people with with good intentions. So, you know, it's something that I try to like, especially in the crypto world, I meet a lot of people clearly with very good intentions, but they have not, I think, thought completely through sort of the thing that they're doing and, like, how it relates to capital or capitalism. It's just that they're just trying to do their best within, like, the framework that they understand the world in.
Yeah. Yeah.
But, yeah, I think maybe, it would be good to talk a bit about maybe the differences between right and left accelerationism. So there are, I think from what I understand, there is like this kind of, the story that I know about is kind of like the the CCREU in The UK and how there was this split in which kind of Nick Land was kind of representative of right accelerationism, which, from what I understand is like a quite racist one, version of accelerationism. And then Mark Fisher, maybe you could say was like more on the left accelerationist side. But, I was wondering if you can maybe elucidate some of that a bit more.
Yeah. I think it's maybe, it's actually slightly more complicated, I would say, because I think Sure. You know, Mark Mark studied with Nick Land, and, you know, there's that whole CCR group which sort of, you know, a massive creative flourishing of ideas. And and and not just ideas, you know, that people went on to do all sorts of amazing artistic work as well and and scholarly work and all sorts of things. But I think, you know, you have this moment in the nineties. It's the end of history, which everybody sort of mocks nowadays. But at the same time that people were mocking it, it was sort of a lived reality. It was just like, well, yeah, liberal democratic capitalism is the the sort of apex of human society, and The USSR is heading towards it. And, you know, China's having market reforms and turning towards capitalism. You know, there was there was a real sense that capitalism had won, I think, in the nineteen nineties Mhmm. And that there was no real alternative. And I think what you get in CCRU in many ways is a quite sort of, I mean, today we'd call it like an edge lord sort of take on on that moment. You know? You see, what what can we do with this sort of stuff? And, like, what does it all mean? And Nick Land sort of took, you know, Deleuze and Gaitheri and his work on the Thai and stuff, and sort of said, well, yes, capitalism is the the the fundamental driving force of of human history, because actually Deleuze and Gaitheri's work, all previous human societies have had to, actively ward off the emergence of capitalism, as a sort of threat to the social order. And so it's always been this driving force and then eventually it's unleashed and he just sort of ran with the idea of capitalism as the active agent of history and said, well, you know, ultimately there are there are no people. You know, there's no sense of individuals. We're just, you know, we think of ourselves as humans, but actually we're driven by these sort of fundamental biological and social systems which are completely outside of us and driven by the demands of capital. And, you know, there's really sort of, again, sort of an edge lord take on on the end of history. And, yeah, people just sort of built upon these ideas and sort of pushed Deleuze and Gaethari's work into this this end of history moment. And I think at that point, there isn't really a right or a left acceleration ism because in many ways, it is like it's not any sort of, you know, it's not any sort of conservative argument in any way. Like It's an observation. Let it's it's an observation. Yeah. In many ways. And it's not it's not marshaled towards as we see Nick Land doing today, it's not marshaled towards the idea of racial hierarchies or anything like that. This is, you know, the big turn in his sort of thinking. So, yeah, it's it's it's not right or left in any simple sense at that moment. Mhmm. Eventually, I think, Alex and I sort of tried to argue for left accelerationism, what that might mean. And at the same time, weirdly enough, so Nick Land had disappeared for like fifteen years when we wrote the manifesto. He just sort of disappeared off to China. Nobody heard anything from him. I think, you know, he started writing this like column in some Chinese newspaper, which was if you if you go back to it, you can find like sort of classic land. Like there's arguments about let's take apart the Earth in order to make it more efficient. Like, physically take apart the the the entire planetary mass in order to make it more computationally efficient. And then he's, you know, he's disappeared. We write this manifesto. And then a little while afterwards, he starts to get this more public face and he's turned into a massive racist. Or it's always been there and it's just always been sort of hidden. Mhmm. But you start to get this more clear split between the left and the right accelerationism. So the left saying, well, no. Actually, capitalism is not the the agent of history, and that is not the final, you know, the final stage of human history. It's not, it's not this liberating force that it presents itself as. And then you get Nick Land sort of arguing against early Nick Land, I would say. Because early Nick Land is just like any sort of identity, any sort of social structure will just be completely decimated by the progressive force of capitalism. And then contemporary Nick Land is sort of like, well, all that stuff I said about identities and social structures, you know, let's take it back. There is racial hierarchies. And, you know, he starts arguing for this really like, you know, middle aged conservative sort of argument, about the the the the the reality of races and the hierarchies involved in all this sort of stuff. You know, the sort of what was once radical about his thinking, I think has completely disappeared. Anisha's become a boomer racist in many ways.
That's very interesting. But, yeah, to come from, I mean, yeah, Nick Land, as far as I understand, I haven't read that much of him because he's quite difficult for me to understand, of the work that I've read. But, he uses a lot of, like, left like he uses, like, prominent left wing thinkers in order and their concepts and ideas in order to come to very, kind of weird conclusions, I guess. It's almost like I've heard it described to me as like, I think kind of you said it as well, he's like chosen the side of capitalism. That he's like, like no, like, like there is perhaps this, somewhat for some people can feel maybe perhaps a little bit depressing of an observation to make. And so he there's, like, one side where either you can you can be maybe, like, the optimist and say, like, no. If we understand it, then we can change it. Or on the other side, you can just be a bit of a more extreme nihilist and say, we can't do anything about it. Embrace, like, the horrors, I guess, of, of of capitalism, and, like, it's only going to intensify.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think chosen the side of capitalism is exactly, describes him well.
Yeah. But what's interesting as well is that of all all of of the, like, I guess, more most prominent people that I know that would fall under accelerationism, Nick Lamb is the only one to have written something on cryptocurrency. Like, he was he wrote, like, the was it the piece on Bitcoin and how it kind of solved
the problem of time for capital? Something like that. Yeah. I don't I don't think that piece has aged very well, though. I mean, it was it was it was sort of an interesting, provocative piece about, the Kantian the Kantian transcendental and the nature of space here, temporal manifolds and things. And it's it's interesting, I think, but it's, it's it's it doesn't work.
I mean, I think this is so part of the, the, the thing that I observe is that it, it, it, it like isn't the type of conclusion that I would want to go to or anything like that. And it's something that I can argue against, but, against. But I think because he was, like, one of the only ones to have written about, like, cryptocurrency, which has become just like more and more of like a thing that people are interested in and like, I don't know, people kind of, like, looking for answers about the world. I think that I think that, like, in in crypto world, there's just a lot of people who kind of, they are, say, anti establishment. They want to see the world to change drastically, and they're looking for answers. And crypto kind of appears as this interesting place where maybe answers could be created. The only kind of like one of the thinkers that they find is Nick Land, I think. And so like they, then they get into Nick Land. And so like now, I don't know if you've gone that deep into the rabbit hole, but you know, you have, one, especially like one NFT project called Milaidys, which are really into like, accelerationist thoughts from a couple different angles. I don't know too much about them, but I know a lot of them, they have like a very, like a lot of them espouse like Landian accelerationism, in like, it's hard to tell with a lot of these things. Like it feels like half ironic, but then half like, do you actually believe that? And and it seems like they do a little bit. So I don't know. Yeah. I don't know if you have you have any thoughts on that.
Yeah. I mean, I don't I don't know those projects in particular. I think there is, I mean, the the social media does foster this edge lord sort of personality of just, like Yeah. Being provocative for its own sake. And I think that that sort of explains part of it. I mean, I think on on an optimistic level, I completely agree that I think a lot of people in crypto are anti establishment. And Mhmm. There is there is a positive sentiment there to work with. You know, the the existing social order is failing so many people. And, you know, that there is it's right to be critical of it. How you attribute the source of that failure, determines everything else really. Yeah. But, you know, there is there is a certain positive aspect to that that that critical stance. Yeah. I think I think as well you're right about the sort of, you know, you get into the crypto spear and you want to read something interesting on it, and the only stuff that is really written on it is by people from the right. Not necessarily just Nick Land, but, you know, all sorts of other people from the right. And I think the discourse around it is often dominated by those perspectives. And, you know, when you go to sort of left writing on the crypto space, it tends to just be complete denial, denunciation of of any anything of value in it. Right. So I think, you know, that's it's, you know, if you're if you're interested in this technology, the only place to turn off is is towards the right.
Right. Yeah. I think one of the things that's kinda missing, like, I think it's fine for people to have their criticisms. I think it's just, like, politically not useful to kind of outright reject things, in in the way that that has been the reaction with crypto on the left generally. And I think that's kind of why I started, you know, writing and doing podcasts just because I was like, well, I feel like this is a bad idea. Like the way that it's kind of going right now and somebody has to do it. And I made the unfortunate decision to say, why don't I try and do it? I've been trying to put forth like certain things and trying to to bring more people in from a to see a more, I guess, nuanced picture about it or to, think about it in a in a slightly different way. That's what that's what I'm hoping hoping what I'm doing pushes, in that direction, at least.
Yeah. Exactly. I think that's why, you know, your sort of work is so important, to be able to have that sort of voice in the space.
Thank you. Hi, everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the crypto communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you're enjoying the episode or find the content I make important, you can pitch into my efforts starting at $3 a month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist to help me out and join the nearly 100 other patrons that contribute financially, which really helps since making this stuff isn't free in terms of money or financially, which really helps since making this stuff isn't free in terms of money or time. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode and access to bonus content like q and a episodes. You can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in roughly twenty minutes. The current bonus episodes have so far explored plenty of topics, including how co ops and DAOs relate, whether there is a socialist blockchain, a review of previous crypto events I've been to, and recently a video reaction to an episode of The Deprogram. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this episode to help spread the message that blockchain doesn't need to be used to further entrenched capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. So crypto has a lot of people who are or who say that they are accelerationists in some way. And I'm curious, like, if you have any thoughts as to why you you think that is? Like, what do you think it is about accelerationism that attracts someone who's interested in crypto in that direction?
Yeah. I mean, I think one aspect of it, is the sort of the underdetermined nature of the idea. So accelerationism, you say the word and immediately it brings to mind a variety of different things, but it doesn't necessarily point in any one particular direction, left or right or towards any particular ideology. I think what sort of happened since the manifesto and the early discourse around what accelerationism is, there seems to be the sort of very memeable quality to the term. You know, everybody decides they're l ack on Twitter or they're, you know, they're r ack or they're u ack or they're e ack or whatever the case might be. I've seen many letters before the ack.
And you did not know what they were.
And I think I think that's I think it's largely good. I think the the the the multiplication of variance of it, I think, is, sort of, a nicely creative moment, even if most of these variants aren't particularly interesting in and of themselves. But I think so that that's part of it is that it's underdetermined as an idea, and therefore it could be picked up by a lot of different people and sort of give a semblance of it being a more coherent, long established idea than it necessarily may be. The other sort of aspect is, well, acceleration accelerationism. What are you accelerating? The big question I always get. And this is partly why I think the term doesn't really isn't really useful anymore because it is, I think it's a fundamentally wrong question. Yeah. But if you describe yourself as an accelerationist and you wanna say, well, we're gonna accelerate something. You can accelerate anything. You know, this is where you get these variants from. You can accelerate whatever you want. It could be, artificial intelligence. It could be, you know, it could be crypto. It could be whatever the case might be. So I think this has allowed people to really pick up the idea as well to say, well, I this is what I want and I want to accelerate this and therefore therefore, I'm an accelerationist of of this. And it's sort of it's clearly a very vulgar idea and interpretation of it. But I think it allows people to try and present themselves as having a particular, ideology or identity that they may not otherwise have. You know? It sort of gives a name to something.
Right. Right. So I'm I'm curious. How do you answer that question when when you are asked that? What what what are we accelerating and why that's wrong the wrong question to be asking, I guess?
Well, it's it's maybe not necessarily the wrong question. I think it's maybe just, it's a it's a misleading question because I think a lot of people will go on to say, to accelerate the contradictions in capitalism in order to, you know, heighten the conflict between classes and therefore bring about the revolution. It's the most vulgar
version of it. We need apocalypse first to bring about anything. Yeah. Yeah.
I I think I think it's a completely naive idea, but, some people do hold on to it. Then, you know, I I would say, you know, if you're accelerating anything, it's it's it's freedom. I think freedom is at the heart of Alex and I's work. But freedom is not this sort of, it's not this liberal idea of an incompletely autonomous subject. In fact, you know, you have to think about the ways in which we're interdependent with each other. But then it's also I this is where I have a lot of, problems with, sort of classic philosophical ideas of freedom. Freedom is not just something that's contained within us, within our bodies or our minds. Freedom is actually something which is augmented by technologies. So, you know, in inventing the future, we'll talk about synthetic freedom. You know, freedom is something which actually has to be built. It's not something that's, like, you take away constraints and it's just lying there waiting. It's something which requires the the building of proper institutions, proper social systems, but then also proper material infrastructure in order to, to be able to actually expand freedom universally. So freedom is not just a matter of, like, you know, accelerating freedom is not just a matter of giving some people more freedom, but also giving everybody freedom, like an absolutely universal take on on this idea. So this is where, you know, I think a lot of our optimism or maybe not optimism, but our our hope for technology comes from is that, well, technology does allow you to do new things, more things. And so, you know, you have to think about it as part of the project of freedom, of expanding freedom.
I love that. I I want I can't wait to use that in a conversation. Yeah. It makes me think of, like I don't know. I don't know, I guess it appeals to like maybe the sensibilities of someone who is like, I don't know, who considers themselves to be like more on the right or something like that. One of the other ways that I've heard it kind of described is that it's also that it's not about accelerating something. It's the acknowledgment that things are accelerating. That it isn't like, necessarily like a program in itself, but that, like, things are already accelerating and we need to, like, respond to it in some way Mhmm. Of how I've done it. I think that's
that's partly, like, the the unconditional accelerationist approach from from what I can gather. So it ends up being a very fatalist approach because it just says, well, capital does what capital does. And we're just here along for the ride. You know, political action is impotent. Any sort of human agency is basically, you know, an illusion. Therefore, we're just we're here for the ride of capital. And again, I think it's a quite provocative argument and interesting for that. But, I don't agree with and I don't agree that I don't agree, actually, that our contemporary system is accelerating. If anything, I think it's slowing down, which sort of goes against, I think, the the the phenomenological sense that we have of things speeding up and changing rapidly. But actually, if you look hundred hundred and fifty years ago, the ways in which things were changing during the industrial revolution was massively more significant than what we have nowadays. Yeah. So if you look at, you know, a variety of measures, whether it be like, you know, crude measures of technological progress, like how many patents are being applied for and used, It's been decreasing since the nineteen seventies. Economic measures like productivity, which basically say, well, how much is the economy changing? How much are we automating of it? Productivity growth has been declining since the nineteen seventies. You know, economic growth for the leading countries has been declining since the nineteen seventies. Mhmm. We're we're ending we're heading towards a period of more and more economic stagnation, I think, technological stagnation in a weird way as well. You know? Yeah. We have smartphones now, but that's, like, the only major new innovation until recently, I would say, with with artificial intelligence. But, you know, even smartphones are based upon technology we discovered in World War II. You know, there's not, it's not like some fundamental rethinking of things. There's just sort of taking components we've already had and putting them together in different ways.
Oh, interesting. That that observation, I imagine, like, appeals to a lot of, like, I guess, like, petit bourgeois, sentiments that, like, things are slowing down, and if you're, like, a sort of small scale entrepreneur, then, like, that seems bad to you because you won't be able to break into, like, the, I don't know, the stratosphere of of, like, the bourgeois class. You'll be forever stuck sort of, like, at the bottom of the top, I guess. And maybe there's I think there is, like, a certain, yeah, those type of conditions can can create certain sentiments in people like that. And I think there are quite a few people like that in the technology space.
Yeah. One other thing I find interesting, just on sort of that point, Startups, you know, we think everybody is we think there's a multitude of startups, like new startups nowadays. But actually, new business new business formation has been, again, in decline since nineteen seventies. Mhmm. It's weird. It's almost like something happened in the nineteen seventies. You know, this epochal crisis of capitalism, which still hasn't fully been resolved. You know, neoliberalism was the attempt to resolve it, and it did resolve it in some ways. But these fundamental indicators of technological change and economic growth have all been in decline for decades now.
Interesting. I wonder so, like, what I find really interesting is on the left, we'll say everything changed in the seventies because of the start of neoliberalism and neoliberal economic policy. And then I hear a lot on the right, they'll say everything changed in 1970 because we moved away from the gold standard. And, like, they they they you know, there's there's, like, a website, you know, what happened in 1972 or whatever, which all is just like gold standard ended and then everything plummeted. And it looks, I think it looks very convincing for a lot of those types of people. Because it's more, it's also more difficult to explain like neoliberal economic policy that happened in the 1970s at the same time.
So, yeah, I don't know if you had any thoughts on that. No. I I mean, the nineteen seventies were momentous. And, you know, I think the twenty twenties might be as momentous, but we'll we'll sort of see. But I think there's so many things going on that it leads itself open to a variety of different interpretations. You know, again, what is the source of the problem? We can all agree that there's a problem, but what is the source of it? Yeah, I think just on the gold standard point, I mean, the you know, there's a reason that countries left the gold standard during the Great Depression is because it was decimating their economies. You know, it didn't allow for the the the freedom of, you know, things like exchange rate policy that would mean that you didn't have to have half your country unemployed in order to to meet your foreign exchange requirements. The gold standard failed. Like, it's a failure and and for very good historical reasons. And I would just encourage anybody who thinks that the gold standard is a savior to sort of look into that. Yeah. Yeah. Don't believe the,
I'll say the the the bullshit that is generally kind of implied by people like Balaji and these other venture capitalists who are, yeah, kind of espoused like, that are very popular in the crypto world that espouses this idea quite often. So accelerationism, it has a more, let's say, I don't know if like positive is the right view, but like a more accepting view of like technological innovation or progress. But of course right now there has been sort of, like, other trends within the left as you have, people who call themselves, or who are interested in degrowth. So they're, I don't know too much about it, but from what I understand, they're interested in kind of slowing down everything kind of generally as a way to deal with the climate crisis to kind of stop, that we don't need necessarily need technological new technological innovations to solve our problems, but that we can just slow down growth to decrease our, like, output of greenhouse gases. And then you also have people who call themselves, like, neo Luddites. So they would point to the tradition of the Luddites in The UK in which a bunch of workers had destroyed I think they had, like, just bought, like, new machines for these people who were making clothing. And the new machines would then, like, cut half of their workforce. So they destroyed the machines and started this, like, this movement for a short while. But I'm curious if you have, any thoughts on like these movements and whether or not they are, I don't know, are they, are they not as against their anti accelerationism or something or whatever you want to call it, as maybe they they seem? I don't know.
Yeah. I I think they're they're not necessarily as opposed as it might seem. I mean, the neo Luddites, well, the original Luddites, were were just simply workers fighting for their livelihoods
Yeah. Against,
against technology as the most obvious figure of capitalist relations. It wasn't it wasn't necessarily a fight against technology. It was a fight against the capitalists who were installing these technologies. Yeah. And I think the neolinite approach, at least the ones that sort of take that, you know, that facet of of worker struggle as as central, I have absolutely no problem with it. I think Mhmm. I do have a problem sometimes in neolites can tip over into being just blanket criticism of any technology whatsoever. Don't think that's right, but I think there is, a lot of value in in the ideas. Degrowth is interesting because actually, I think suitably interpreted, I I find myself in agreement with almost all of it. And and that might sound strange, but here's the here's the sort of thing. It's like, you have on one hand the the debate seems to be between degrowthers arguing, okay. Yes. Well, we need to, completely let's put it in this crudest form. We need to stop economic growth. And then you have, on the other hand, eco modernists who say, well, technology will solve all the problems. You know, it'll solve all the climate issues. We can do Right. Carbon capture. We can do geoengineering. We can do anything. We don't need to change our livelihoods whatsoever. We can just keep going. And I think there's there's partly this debate between the two gets lost in the fact, that neither is really talking about what time scale they're talking about. Mhmm. Because I think eco modernism rightly points to the fact that the planetary limits that we have right now for resource use or whatever the case may be, the planetary limits are not fixed, that they're actually variable. They determine a lot. They're based upon, you know, at least in part, how efficiently we use technologies and where we're getting our energy from and these sorts of things. So I think, you know, given the potential for technology to change those planetary limits at a certain point in time in some certain future, who knows how long, I think the eco modernist argument that we don't need to change our livelihoods could be right. It's not right. It's not correct at the moment, though. And this is where sort of degrowth comes in and says, well, we do need to actually change a lot of our our habits. We need to think about, you know, how much meat are we eating, how many cars are we driving, these sorts of things. And I think they're absolutely right on all of those questions. You know? Fundamental to any question of the future is, well, is the future livable? I think climate change is, like, the the foundational question upon which any other sort of political, question has to be, set upon. So I think degrowth is is right in a lot of ways. And I think, crucially, they're right in the sense of economic growth, particularly as measured by GDP, is a terrible metric for progress. Right. So they talk about ending economic growth. And I think if you interpret that to mean, let's not focus on GDP growth, I think they're absolutely right. Let's focus on some other measure of growth, which is why I'm not a big fan of the term degrowth because I think they do want growth. They just want growth in a different sense. Mhmm. So degrowth is not necessarily, the best way to phrase that. The other thing I would say is that I think in the most sensible, sophisticated versions of degrowth, you also get a sense that high technology can be used to solve the problems that we face. And that it's not just a matter of, like, a blanket rejection of technology, but in fact of using, technologies in in the most effective and and collectively determined ways. You know, the big problem is that we have technologies that are deployed by capitalists for capitalist purposes, without any sense of any sort of climate externalities or anything like that. But if we have collective determination over the development and use and deployment of technologies, suddenly, I think the question becomes much more interesting. And I think there's another sort of divide here you get between eco modernists who will argue that we need big high technology all the time. And then you'll have others who will argue, well, we don't want any technology. Technology is not the answer. And I think, actually, the answer is really we need sometimes small scale technology. But can it it can be really high-tech, but it it could be local. It could be small scale. You know, solar panels on roofs versus a massive single solar power generating plant. You know, they're both high technologies, but eco modernists would want the big solar plant rather than, sort of distributed solar panels on people's roofs. Mhmm. So I think, you know, degrowth at its best will say, yes, we need to make use of technologies. But we need to use it consciously, and we need to think about, you know, the climate costs that are involved in these sorts of things as well. We can't just simply say, yeah, electric cars for everybody without thinking about lithium, for instance, in the ways in which lithium extraction is devastating to communities and climates around the world. So, yeah. I I have a lot I enjoy in degrowth. Even if I think the term itself is, it leads people astray.
Yeah. I think for for a lot of people, it's, I think there's a a negative reaction because of the because of the term degrowth, because it seems like it because I've heard people describe it as, like, almost implying, like, an austerity that it could fit quite well within, like, a neoliberal framework of austerity because we're degrowing. Like, we're we're decreasing your living conditions because, well, we have to fix the climate, which is not like a positive political vision, I guess.
Yeah. And particularly when, you know, significant parts of the world haven't seen wage growth and have seen austerity, for the past, you know, ten, almost fifteen years now. Yeah. Just to try and sell people a left version of austerity, I think, is is incredibly difficult, and I think is also it it it's it's far too pessimistic about what's possible.
Maybe they just need to change it to, like, just just use the whole meta thing, just meta growth. Just remove the theme maybe. Then maybe and then everyone would be like, okay, let's do that now. Yeah. A rethinking of growth. Okay, I think that's, yeah, that's really I just like really, I think in my ideal world, it would be to where the Left has much more organizational capacity and governance within itself to be able to have these types of conversations or like debates or discussion to be able to like, to synthesize more of these various ideas coming from different places that aren't necessarily as opposed as they like seem to be. I think people just have a tendency to be like, there's there's this thing, there's that thing, there's that thing, and they're all, like, contradictory to one another and they're not going like, you know, they're all fights amongst themselves to have a bigger share of the pie or whatever else rather than kind of like, I don't know if I don't want I don't know if it's necessarily communization, but, like, just coming together to, like, a more coherent framework that no, like, single movement or single, framework could possibly encompass everything.
Yeah. Yeah. I think I think the incentive structures of, well, particularly social media, but also academia sort of militate against this though because, you know, academia requires you to distinguish yourself from others. And social media, you know, engagement is dependent upon being provocative and controversial and, like, antagonistic. What what I do find is that, you know, I think the the sort of slow decline of Twitter is gonna foster this more. But the movement towards more small scale sort of private Internet groups, you know, the Discord, I think, is a pretty good example. You know, there's a lot more smaller sort of groups on Discord, where it's not just everybody in the world goes on to one single social media platform and then, you know, the complete loss of context that happens with with that sort of thing. Yeah. I think smaller scale Internet communities are are, you do get these sort of productive discussions, at least in my experience.
Yeah. Definitely. I I find that also, like, I don't know. People, I mean, one, they use the Internet differently in different contexts. I think also, like, my experience with using the Internet, I mean, just like within the left, of course, is that you have like, anytime I would bring up, for example, cryptocurrency, I would get, like, an instant kind of barrage of, like, you're a scammer. You're what are you trying to sell us? And, like, I'm just trying to talk have, like, a a normal conversation about it. Why can't we have that where it gets shut down, like, quite fast and we can't, like, there's no, like so I had I had to create my own little pocket of the Internet to build a community, just to talk about like this intersection of weird things because neither side, like, necessarily wants to talk about the other one. Yeah. I do find it like quite, quite, like it's been very productive in that way to like have that safe space rather than trying to force everything into the void, I guess.
Yeah. I think the, the desire to be popular and get, like, massive engagement on social media is such a a fool's game in the end. Yeah. Yeah.
So your new book, maybe we can talk about that. It's called After Work, A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. It's coming out with Verso. Do you wanna tell us a bit about it and how it, yeah, how it relates to this, maybe this conversation that we're having?
Yeah. So it's, it's out soon. I wrote it with my wife, Helen Hester. We started it well, I should say Helen started it, back in 2015 or 2016. She gave a talk on what ended up being sort of the basic foundation of the book. And the core sort of problem of the book is to say, well, we had a lot of post work thinking recently. Thinking about how we can use technology to increase free time and liberate people from drudgery and from work. But a lot of that thinking, if not, you know, almost all of it, has been focused on wage work and particularly wage work, which is done by men. So we'll talk about automating warehouses and offices and factories and, you know, truck driving and things like this. But we'll never talk about nurseries or care homes or hospitals in the same sort of way. So you've got this sort of real this real void in the in the discussion around post workers focused on one type of work but completely neglects this other type of work. You get feminists which then point that out. They say, well, you haven't talked about this work. But almost always, feminists will say, actually, post work ideas can't really be applied to to care work, to reproductive labor. So, you know, do we want robots actually looking after our children? Right. Most people don't. You know, the vast majority don't. So, you know, basically, just the discussion ends there. You've got post work on one hand and you've got, you know, reproductive labor on the other hand. And they don't seem to combine in any easy way. And the book is to say, well, they can be combined and they need to be combined, but you have to modify both of them in in different ways in order to get them to work together. And so that's what we try and do. We try and set out, how post work ideas that are fighting for more free time, how can that be applied to care work and reproductive labor in general?
Mhmm. That's interesting. So how how how do we combine? Are we should should we give our babies to the robots or?
Well, there's I mean, there's one way in which we already do give our babies to robots, which is television. You know, we pull up our children in front of TV so we can, you know, do the laundry or make dinner and stuff like that. So, yeah, we do automate childcare already. And I think that's an underappreciated point is that it is and has already been automated in many, many ways. I mean, the the one of the the challenges that we come up with in the book building on, this this scholar, Ruth Schwartz Ruth Schwartz Cohen. So she wrote a book back in, I think, is 1982, if I remember correctly, called More Work for Mother. And it basically looked at, the the history of changes of technology within the home from, like, the eighteen seventies to the nineteen seventies. And it was, in her own words, an industrial revolution of the home, you know, a massive change, the introduction of washing machines and dishwashers and, you know, running water, plumbing and electricity, all these things. The home of the eighteen seventies was massively different from the home of nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, you know, hugely different. The surprising thing that she found, though, was that when she looked at how much work people were doing in the home in the eighteen seventies versus the nineteen seventies, it hadn't really changed. You know, if anything, for some people, it was actually increasing over that time period, which sounds really bizarre because you would think that dishwashers are gonna save you time, washing machines are gonna save you time, but for some reason, they didn't. And the book is a lot of discussion about, well, why was this the case? And so our book builds a lot on that. Why wasn't this the case? One of the key answers has to do with, I won't try and give away our whole book right now. But one of the key reasons why was the, the ratcheting up of standards around things like cleanliness and hygiene. So, yes, you could wash your clothes much quicker with, and much easier with a washing machine. But now you're expected to do it every few days rather than, like, once a month, which might have happened beforehand. In the words of one one scholar on this, laundry went from being a weekly nightmare to an to, like, an endless drudgery. You know, it was just always there. So this ratcheting up of standards meant that, you know, put it in economic terms, productivity was increased, but output also increased. So we're doing more and more laundry. And you find this everywhere. But then in the book, we also talk about, the sort of the forcing of all this work onto individual homes and individual families, the massive duplicate duplication of effort that goes on every single night in people's homes, you know, the cooking of meals and things like that, all these things which could be done in much more time effective and resource effective ways that are just completely gone because we have we've got a society which demands a single family single family home as its model. So yeah. And then we talk about, you know, what might the alternative be? And Vienna is a good inspiration for a lot of this stuff. The sort of model of social housing they have there offers a lot of examples. But, yeah, there's all sorts of ways in which we can try and reduce the work of reproductive labor without reducing the care and without just simply automating it to robots.
So then I imagine part of it is just, like, kind of like the the privatization of care. Could I say could could I say that? Like, that people are expected now to, whereas maybe in the past, like, you would have children, like, maybe in your village or your tribe or whatever and every you know, they have the what what is the phrase? Like, it takes a village to raise a child or something like that. That was something embodied more in, like, earlier human civilizations, whereas today it's expected, like, you almost you personalize your child or like, you know, you have like a privatized ownership of your child and how you, you know, what you input into them and what you get out. And you're expected to give them the best of everything in such and such way. And you can only do that by you yourself kind of providing everything for them rather than kind of having more, I don't know, socialized form of of taking care of children?
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I think ownership is exactly the the right framework for what's going on right now. Like, it's, there's so much implied and often explicitly actually this, the idea that the parental child relationship is like a relationship of ownership. Right. In fact, owning an asset of human capital is effectively what the parental relationship has become. And then we'll follow some that as well. You have to invest in that asset and you have to, you know, put time and money into your little bundle of human capital. And that's the way childcare is seen so often nowadays. Rarely explicitly will parents say this, but they do act that way. And if you go to policy people, they do talk literally about children being human capital. And we need to invest in them for it to get a good return on investment. It's it's just the way these things are seen. Yeah. It's it's a quite mutated form of childcare, I think, and and and parental child relationships nowadays.
Right. Yeah. I think there the lack of realization that the social structures that we have today are quite new and have not been, like, tested long term, I guess. And the expectations of them are quite strange actually in human history. Yeah. But I hate, I hate this term human capital. It drives me nuts. I used to a company I used to work for had an entire department called human capital. And, I don't know, every time I heard it, I was going insane. I couldn't believe people were just like, you know, and that was supposed to be like the, on the surface level, kinda like, I don't know, the the more happy department, you know, it's human capital. Drives me nuts. But, yeah, it's true. I mean, and we we are already treated as capital or as being part of the process of capital in many ways as it exists. Now it's just kind of, like, creeping more and more into like, as workers we are, and it's creeping more and more into everything else. And in a world where if you have decreasing, maybe social welfare benefits, then it's like, you better hope that you're and, yeah, if you, if you don't have the money yourself, then better hope that your child will, you know, help you survive, through, through retirement.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
As did this, I imagine like this must have come out of like your own experience of having a family. Like, yeah. I don't have one, so I can only observe. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, yeah. So Helen and I have three children now. But when we started writing the book, we didn't have any children.
Did you have were your kids, like, to help you write the book?
It definitely didn't help. But, yes, yeah. We we were I was looking back at the contract, the initial contract we signed for the book, and it was supposed to be done, before our first child was born. That was the idea. It's like we would get the book out before we had children. That didn't happen. And then three children later, we finally commissioned it. Many, many, many sleepless nights later. Yeah. I mean, they they've been, you know, instructive in their own ways about the burdens of childcare, but also the massive joys involved. And even the ways in which the apparent burdens of childcare can become their own source of joys in in completely bizarre ways that you you might not expect. But, yeah, I think it's given us a a a very nice perspective on a lot of these issues.
Yeah. I imagine it must have shifted some things, by having that that experience.
Yeah,
yeah. Another kind of aspect about, like, when I read the title of your book that I don't know if you had, like, commentary on, but one of the things that I think a lot of people notice is that there has been this creeping and accepting that more and more of our time should be doing things that make us money. That like, you know, if you look like, you go to any, like, kind of like, what do you call it? Like, a hustle culture type of video, it's like gotta have your job and you gotta have, you know, a hobby that makes you money in order to like, you know, really make it in life. I imagine this, this has to be like, I mean, this is just like a very bizarre thing that people have kind of just like accepted as being reality, as being like an okay thing that everybody needs to do. You know?
I I I think hustle culture is, like, ideology in its purest modern form. Mhmm. Because I think, you know, what it's effectively doing is it's saying to people, who are in positions of, like, struggling to make money and struggling to make ends meet typically. It's saying to them that you just need to work harder in order to be able to to make ends meet. It's it's explaining their situation to them. You know, you haven't worked hard enough. Yeah. It's sort of raising them up and above others. It's saying, well, you work hard and you work you you'll you'll be able to be a success, and everybody else is lazy compared to you. So there's this sort of, like, this this hierarchy that emerges within it. And then it justifies the sort of endless slog that is necessary in order to to work in capitalism today. So it's it's ideology in its purest form. It just justifies the existing state of affairs. Yeah.
Yeah. It reminds me of, like, I think, Gramsci talking about hegemony and, like, imposing kind of the cultural standards of the elites onto, like, down in order to, like, have people comply or think or normalize kind of, like, the social structures of the elites in in in some way as being, like, the ideal way of living or of being, if I understand correctly.
Yeah. It's it's it's the reality of so many people's lives. You know? The your primary job doesn't make enough money. You need to go and drive a taxi on the weekends. You need to be a delivery driver. You need to do all these other things in order to make ends meet. Yeah. It's the reality.
Yeah. But as like, as far as like its relation to accelerationism is the idea that there has been this kind of like, you like increased use of technology in certain ways and many ways it has not necessarily produced the, the way that technology has been introduced and used in the privatized home has not induced the type of gains that you would expect, but that, you know, basically we can live a life in which we do care for our children in the ways that we want to, in the ways that are necessary for a human to become an adult, while still being able to reduce the amount of drudgery that we are
succumb to, I guess. Yeah. I I I think it is possible, but I think probably not possible under capitalism. I I I think one of the interesting things we come across in the book is long histories of, you know, more sort of, communal groups of people, thinking of, for instance, like the the Quakers in America, these small communities who end up living together and the massive inventiveness that people have, towards the domestic sphere when when they're given the opportunity to. You know, numerous technologies developed by these communities to try and make the domestic drudgery much, much easier, and to to alleviate a lot of that burden. But we don't have for the vast majority of us, we don't have the the time or the resources to be able to actually do or think about these things. Mhmm. So, you know, part of part of the alternative is to to give people those technologies, to give people the ability, and the capacity and the the the necessary environment and resources to be able to, develop their own ways of alleviating burdens. Yeah. There's there's history is littered with these examples, but, they're they're driven by people on the ground, users, workers, you know, individuals, rather than by sort of top down corporations trying to sell you a product.
Yeah. Fair. Is there any last things you would like to mention before,
we close it off? No. I think that's about it. I think, I mean, I will say, I think, sort of situating after work within the the longer sort of accelerationist history, I think, you know, it's it's it's again focused on this idea of freedom. And free time is fundamental, like, foundation for freedom. You know, freedom isn't found when you've got a boss hovering over your shoulder telling you what to do, or, you know, today, you've got an app telling you when you need to be at some place. That's not freedom. You know, freedom fundamentally comes from outside of work. It comes from free time. And so the book is a way of, you know, trying to argue and think about ways in which we can expand freedom, not just through wage work, but also through this unwaged reproductive labor.
Nice. Yeah. Freedom comes from free time. I think that's a a nice, succinct, yeah, phrase or arguments put forth towards, your hustle culture friends or something. I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
All right. Well, thanks so much, Nick. Really great to be able to talk to you. Is there anything you'd like to leave with the audience? Like any plugs? Where can people find the book where they can find you?
You can find the book wherever you want. It's in all the usual spots. I'm sure it'll be pirated soon as well, so I'm sure you can get it for free if you need to as well. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me on the podcast. Of course. Yeah. Thanks so much.
