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!

If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist), Mastodon (@theblockchainsocialist@social.coop), or Bluesky and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

Hi everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. I'm your host, josh, and for today's interview I have Nick Sernick. 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 co-worker 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.

Speaker 1: 0:41

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 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 asked them if they've read some of your work there 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.

Speaker 2: 1:21

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.

Speaker 1: 1:31

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:33

But yeah, so actually 10 years ago now, alex and I wrote the manifesto for an accelerationist politics. We sort of kicked off, along with Benjamin Noyes's 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 accelerationist 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 what's wrong with the left, how can it do better, and we were writing Inventing the Future, a sort of response to these questions, and we were asked by a friend of ours to provide a small text for this little 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, 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.

Speaker 2: 2:46

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 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 the sort of unfinished edge to it and the sort of you know we would have added in more nuances and qualifications and the sort of the real punchiness of it I think would have been lost if we'd been writing for the public. But so, yeah, it was released and then we've had 10 years of people declaring themselves to be accelerationists in various ways.

Speaker 1: 3:40

That's a really interesting story. I didn't know that. Yeah, I sometimes wonder, like 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 to, which makes it like less, like not able to be understood or consumed by someone outside of like the circle, I guess.

Speaker 1: 4:17

Yeah, I guess it has that double effect of that it goes viral and everybody thinks that they're an accelerationist.

Speaker 2: 4:22

now yeah, and it also becomes sort of wildly open to interpretation. You know these sort of highly condensed formulations that can just be unpacked in different ways. Yeah, I think that's part of its success, but it's as an academic. I'm also like I'd like to have more qualifications.

Speaker 1: 4:41

Yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 1: 4:43

So the I figured it would be interesting to just recite the first quote for people who maybe haven't come across the manifesto.

Speaker 1: 4:52

It says at the very top it's just like a web page with, I think it's on like 60 points or something like that Accelerationism pushes towards a future that is more modern and 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 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?

Speaker 2: 5:56

Yeah, so I think that that opening quote is a nice little summary. Accelerationism pushes towards a future that is more modern and alternative, modernity that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate. And I would say you know the basic premise builds off of Deleuze and Gatorre's work. So they talk about capitalism as this de-territorializing force, particularly relative to feudal relationships and the ways in which the hierarchies of feudalism get completely broken apart as capitalism emerges and the market forces spread. The point of Deleuze and Gatorre's work, though, is that it's not just a de-territorializing force, it also re-territorializes 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 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 Sorin Maui say. You know, it's his mode of domination for capitalism. So, yes, capitalism is liberating on one hand, but it's completely constraining and dominating on the other hand.

Speaker 2: 7:18

And Deleuze and Gatorre say well, the accelerationist moment is to push beyond that, you know, 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 accelerationism 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, well, we have to go beyond capitalism in order to actually bring about this sort of full system of freedom and opportunity and actual dynamism. So, yeah, that was, you know, that was the basic sort of premise we took from it.

Speaker 2: 8:06

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 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 focus on to try, and you know, extract ourselves out of capitalism into something better.

Speaker 1: 8:59

Yes, 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 they can be complicated terms and concepts for people. De-territorialization and, you know, territorialization, yeah so.

Speaker 2: 9:17

I mean the simplest way to sort of think about it, without going into like massive delusional metaphysics in any way. De-territorialization you can sort of think of as a rigidly hierarchical social system, or 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 de-territorialization is sort of the process of that becoming something else. And so the argument is that the feudal system was based upon, you know, sort of a lowered peasant relationship and you know, ultimately peaks at the monarch, that sort of system of feudal relations and you know relationships of bondage and debt and things like that.

Speaker 2: 10:23

That social system was massively transformed by the emergence of capitalism, particularly in England and then elsewhere around the world. Market relationships tend to get rid of that feudal relationship of bondage 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?

Speaker 1: 11:30

Right. So, like I understand it, you know, maybe quite crudely, that there is like a territory always exists. There are always like 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 de territorializing as a removal, and then re territorializing is the creation of a new social structure, and so this is important.

Speaker 1: 12:19

But I think, really, I think it's just like a and it's an interesting conceptual framework to think about things that, um, that other thinkers have kind of already identified, I think in different ways. Like I think you know, I think it's Schimpeter who had this idea of creative destruction, um, which is also kind of, I think, a very similar thing, although he was speaking about it specifically within capitalism there is creative destruction where they're through the competition of capitalist forces, etc. Um, but this is a really important concept, I think, for the left to understand, perhaps in order to think about like the uh, 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 re-territorialize into something else, similar to how capitalism did that to feudalism. I guess I don't know if that sounds correct in my offer.

Speaker 2: 13:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would agree with that, um, and I think it is sort of these. It's these big historical questions about the shifts between different modes of production. That's fundamentally what, well, particularly Marxist thinking is interested in. Um, you know, how do these changes, how have they historically happened? And, crucially, the strategic question of how might they happen in the future, right, um, and you know, is the model of feudalism to capitalism? Is that a model for capitalism to communism, or is it going to be something different? Um, but yeah, there is. You know, I think one of the the important points of the accelerationist claim from De Lausangetari is that, you know, capitalism is a massively constraining system. It's a system of domination and oppression and exploitation. Um, it's not this system of freedom that, uh, its proponents want to present it as.

Speaker 1: 14:10

Mm, yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, there there are some uh 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, for pointing out as being huge problems, and maybe we have fixed those problems in one way, but we have perhaps created new ones, uh, in that process.

Speaker 1: 14:32

Um, and I think, when it comes to maybe accelerationism in the like right now, sense, uh, of course technology is like an important part of that equation.

Speaker 1: 14:42

I think like it's hard to, at this moment, be like 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 de-territorialization 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 uh 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 still happening and technology is, just like right now, one of the main drivers of that. Perhaps you can say arguably.

Speaker 2: 15:43

Yeah, um, and I think that's one of the more controversial points about the accelerationist manifesto is that it did take sort of an optimistic perspective on technology.

Speaker 2: 15:55

Um, 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 capitalist and then deployed by capitalist and used by capitalist, and you know they do serve particular, you know, oppressive and exploitative functions oftentimes.

Speaker 2: 16:22

But our, you know 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 developed in it. And this is a point from, you know, science and technology studies which has long shown that the development of technologies doesn't like establish and firmly solidify the potentials of the technology. One of my favorite examples of this is the, the inventor of the machine gun, and famously thought that the machine gun was going to 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 developers' intentions and ideas for the designs don't constrain what's possible.

Speaker 1: 17:11

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 as 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 eyes word you want to say the ways in which things do or do not appear as they as they seem.

Speaker 1: 17:48

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?

Speaker 1: 18:07

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 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 something that they feel like they can make change in some way.

Speaker 2: 18:48

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 desire to do something, the desire to be, to have some agency in some way, ends up getting expressed in these weird ways, oftentimes sort of turned in words, you know, vitriol towards the left as well, which is problematic in its own way.

Speaker 1: 19:13

Sure, yeah, and then they call themselves accelerationists, but it's of course, I think it's like people with good intentions. So, you know, it's something that I try to make, especially in 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, is just that they're just trying to do their best within like the framework that they understand the world in.

Speaker 2: 19:40

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:42

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 like. The story that I know about is kind of like the, the CCRU 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.

Speaker 2: 20:19

Yeah, I think it's. Maybe it's actually slightly more complicated, I would say, because I think you know 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 not just ideas. You know that people went on to do all sorts of amazing artistic work as well and scholarly work and all sorts of things. But I think you know you have this moment in the 90s 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 which is like, well, yeah, liberal, democratic capitalism is the sort of apex of human society and the USSR is heading towards it and you know China is having market reforms and turning towards capitalism.

Speaker 2: 21:12

You know there was, there was a real sense that capitalism had won, I think in the 1990s, 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 edgelord sort of take on on that moment. You know, 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 Gatorie and his work on Patae and stuff and sort of said, well, yes, capitalism is the fundamental driving force of human history, because actually Deleuze and Gatorie'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.

Speaker 2: 22:05

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, ultimately 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 the 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 a sort of an edgelord take on on the end of history. And, yeah, people just sort of built upon these ideas and sort of pushed Deleuze and Gatorie's work into this end of history moment. And I think at that point there isn't really a right or a left accelerationism, 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-.

Speaker 1: 23:02

It's an observation.

Speaker 2: 23:04

It's an observation, yeah, in many ways, and it's not marshaled towards as we see Nic Landu 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 not right or left in any simple sense. At that moment, 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 Nic Land had disappeared for like 15 years when we wrote the manifesto. He just sort of disappeared off to China. Nobody heard anything from him.

Speaker 2: 23:49

I think you know he started writing this like column in some Chinese newspaper which was 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 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.

Speaker 2: 24:27

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 agent of history and that it's not the final stage of human history, it's not this liberating force that it presents itself as. And then you get Nic Land, sort of arguing against early Nic Land, I would say, because early Nic 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 Nic Land is sort of like well, all that stuff I said about identities and social structures, let's take it back. There is racial hierarchies and he starts arguing for this really like middle age conservative sort of argument about the reality of races and the hierarchies involved and all sort of stuff. You know, the sort of what was once radical about his thinking, I think, is completely disappeared and he's just become a boomer racist in many ways.

Speaker 1: 25:34

That's very interesting. But, yeah, to come from, I mean, yeah, nic 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 there's like one side where either 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 capitalism and like it's only going to intensify.

Speaker 2: 26:42

Yeah, yeah exactly, I think, chosen the side of capital is. This exactly describes him well.

Speaker 1: 26:49

Yeah, but what's interesting as well is that of all of the like I guess more most prominent people that I know that would fall under accelerationism the gland is the only one to have written something on cryptocurrency Like he wrote, like the piece on Bitcoin and how it kind of solved the problem of time for capital, something like that.

Speaker 2: 27:14

Yeah, I don't think that piece has aged very well though. I mean it was sort of an interesting provocative piece about the Kantian transcendental and the nature of the space here, temporal manifolds and things, and it's interesting, I think.

Speaker 1: 27:32

but it doesn't work. I mean, I think this is so. Part of the thing that I observe is that 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 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, like 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 get into Nick Land and so like.

Speaker 1: 28:29

Now I don't know if you've gone that deep into the rabbit hole, but you have one, especially like one NFT project called Milates, which are really into like accelerationist thoughts from a couple of 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 espoused, 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 it seems like they do a little bit. So I don't know, yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Speaker 2: 29:12

Yeah, I mean I don't know those projects in particular. I think there is, I mean, the social media does foster this edge lord sort of personality of just like being provocative for its own sake, and I think that sort of explains part of it. I mean, I think, on an optimistic level, I completely agree that I think a lot of people in crypto are anti-establishment and there is a positive sentiment there to work with. You know, the existing social order is failing so many people and you know it's right to be critical of it. How you attribute the source of that failure determines everything else really, but there is a certain positive aspect to that critical stance.

Speaker 2: 30:03

Yeah, I think as well you're right about the sort of. You know you get into the crypto sphere 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 also it's 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 anything of value in it. So I think you know that's it's you know, if you're interested in this technology, the only place to turn often is towards the right.

Speaker 1: 30:45

Right. Yeah, I think one of the things that's kind of 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 the way 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? And been trying to put forth, like certain things and trying to bring more people in from a to see a more, I guess, nuanced picture about it or to think about it in a slightly different way. That's what I'm hoping, hoping what I'm doing pushes in that direction, at least.

Speaker 2: 31:39

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.

Speaker 1: 31:45

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 leftist 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 to make important, you can pitch into my efforts, starting at $3 a month on patreoncom slash the blockchain socialists 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 time. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode and access to bonus content like Q&A episodes. You can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer and I'll give my thoughts in roughly 20 minutes.

Speaker 1: 32:21

The current bonus episodes have so far explored plenty of topics, including how co-ops and dows 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 D program. Of course, I'll still be making free contents like this episode to help spread the message that blockchain doesn't need to be used to further entrench 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 think that is like. What do you think it is about accelerationism that attract someone who's interested in crypto in that direction?

Speaker 2: 33:08

Yeah, I mean, I think one aspect of it is the sort of the under-determined 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 happens since the manifesto and the early discourse around what accelerationism is? There seems to be the sort of very memeable quality to the term. Everybody decides their L-AC on Twitter, or their R-AC or their U-AC or their E-AC or whatever the case might be.

Speaker 1: 33:55

I think, many letters before the AC. Exactly exactly.

Speaker 2: 33:58

I don't know what they were, and I think that's. I think it's largely good. I think the multiplication of variants 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's part of it is that it's under-determined 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.

Speaker 2: 34:31

The other sort of aspect is, well, accelerationism. What are you accelerating? The big question I always get and this is partly why I think the term isn't really useful anymore, because it is. I think it's a fundamentally wrong question. But if you describe yourself as an accelerationist and you want to say, well, we're going to accelerate something, you could accelerate anything. This is where you get these variants from. You can accelerate whatever you want. It could be artificial intelligence, you could accelerate anything Artificial intelligence. 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, this is what I want and I want to accelerate this, and therefore I'm an accelerationist 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. It sort of gives a name to something.

Speaker 1: 35:37

Right, right. So I'm curious how do you answer that question when you are asked that what are we accelerating and why? That's the wrong question to be asking, I guess.

Speaker 2: 35:48

Well, it's maybe not necessarily the wrong question. I think it's maybe just 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 this.

Speaker 1: 36:10

We need apocalypse first to bring about any good.

Speaker 2: 36:14

Yeah, I think it's a completely naive idea, but some people do hold onto it. Then, you know, I would say you know, if you're accelerating anything, 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 a completely 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 this is where I have a lot of problems with sort of classic philosophical ideas of freedom.

Speaker 2: 36:51

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. 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 building of proper institutions, proper social systems, but then also proper material infrastructure in order 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 this idea. So this is where I think a lot of our optimism or maybe not optimism our hope for technology comes from. Is that, well, technology does allow you to do new things, more things, and so you have to think about it as part of the project of freedom, of expanding freedom.

Speaker 1: 37:55

I love that. I can't wait to use that in a conversation. It makes me think of I don't know. It appeals to, maybe, the sensibilities of someone who is I don't know, who considers themselves to be more on the right, or something like that. One of the other ways that I've heard it kind of describe is that it's not about accelerating something. It's the acknowledgments that things are accelerating, that it isn't necessarily a program in itself, but that things are already accelerating and we need to respond to it in some way.

Speaker 2: 38:34

I think that's partly like the unconditional accelerationist approach. From what I can gather, 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. Political action is impotent. Any sort of human agency is basically an illusion. Therefore, we're here for the ride of capital Again.

Speaker 2: 39:01

I think it's a quite provocative argument and interesting for that, but I don't agree with 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 phenomenological sense that we have of things speeding up and changing rapidly. But actually, if you look 150 years ago, the ways in which things were changing during the Industrial Revolution was massively more significant than what we have nowadays. So if you look at a variety of measures whether it be crude measures of technological progress how many patents are being applied for and used, it's been decreasing since the 1970s.

Speaker 2: 39:50

Part 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 1970s. Economic growth for the leading countries has been declining since the 1970s. We're heading towards a period of more and more economic stagnation and, I think, technological stagnation in a weird way as well. Yeah, we have smartphones now, but that's the only major new innovation until recently. I would say. With artificial intelligence, even smartphones are based upon technology we discovered in World War II. It's not like some fundamental rethinking of things, it's just sort of taking components we've already had and putting them together in different ways. Interesting.

Speaker 1: 40:40

At. That observation, I imagine appeals to a lot of, I guess, like petit bourgeois sentiments that things are slowing down and if you're a sort of small scale entrepreneur, then that seems bad to you because you won't be able to break into the stratosphere of the bourgeois class, who will be forever stuck at the bottom of the top. I guess I think there is a certain yeah, those type of conditions can create certain sentiments in people like that. I think there are quite a few people like that in the technology space.

Speaker 2: 41:24

One other thing I find interesting just on that point startups. We think everybody has. We think there's a multitude of startups like new startups nowadays, but actually new business formation has been again in decline since the 1970s. It's weird. It's almost like something happened in the 1970s, this epochal crisis of capitalism which still hasn't fully been resolved. Elimeprism 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.

Speaker 1: 42:01

Interesting. What I find really interesting is on the left we'll say everything changed in the 70s because of the start of neoliberalism and neoliberal economic policy. Then I hear a lot on the right. They'll say everything changed in 1970 because we moved away from the gold standard. There's a website, what happened in 1972 or whatever, which all is just like gold standard ended and then everything plummeted. I think it looks very convincing for a lot of those types of people because it's also more difficult to explain neoliberal economic policy that happened in the 1970s at the same time.

Speaker 2: 42:42

I don't know if you had any thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, the 1970s were momentous. I think the 2020s might be as momentous, but we'll see. But I think there's so many things going on that it leads itself up into a variety of different interpretations. 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, there's a reason that countries left the gold standard during the Great Depression is because it was decimating their economies. It didn't allow for the freedom of things like exchange rate policy. That would mean that you didn't have to have half-year country unemployed in order to meet your foreign exchange requirements. The gold standard failed. It's a failure, and for very good historical reasons. I would just encourage anybody who thinks that the gold standard is a savior to look into that.

Speaker 1: 43:45

Yeah, I believe the bullshit that is generally implied by people like Bellagie and these other venture capitalists who are very popular in the crypto world that espouse this idea quite often.

Speaker 1: 44:08

Accelerationism has a more positive is the right view, but a more accepting view of technological innovation or progress.

Speaker 1: 44:18

But of course, right now there has been other trends within the left, as you have people who call themselves or who are interested in degrowth. I don't know too much about it, but when I understand they're interested in slowing down everything generally as a way to deal with the climate crisis, to stop that we don't necessarily need technological, new technological innovations to solve our problems, but that we can just slow down growth to decrease our output of greenhouse gases. Then you also have people who call themselves Neo-Luddites. They would point to the tradition of the Luddites in the UK in which a bunch of workers had destroyed I think they had just bought new machines for these people who were making clothing. The new machines would then cut half of their workforce, so they destroyed the machines and started this movement for a short while. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on these movements and whether or not they are, are they not as against their anti-accelerationism or something or whatever you want to call it, as maybe they seem, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 45:36

I think they're not necessarily as opposed as it might seem. The original Luddites were just simply workers fighting for their livelihoods against technology as the most obvious figure of capitalist relations. It wasn't necessarily a fight against technology, it was a fight against the capitalist who were installing these technologies. I think the Neo-Luddite approach, at least the ones that take that facet of worker struggle as central I have absolutely no problem with it. I do have a problem sometimes in Neo-Luddites can tip over into being just blanket criticism of any technology whatsoever. I don't think that's right, but I think there is a lot of value in the ideas. What's interesting is actually, I think, suitably interpreted. I find myself in agreement with almost all of it. That might sound strange, but here's the sort of thing you have.

Speaker 2: 46:41

On one hand, the debate seems to be between de-growthers arguing okay, yes, well, let's put it in this crudest form we need to stop economic growth. Then you have, on the other hand, eco-modernists who say well, technology will solve all the problems. We can solve all the climate issues, we can do carbon capture, we can do geo-engineering, we can do anything. We don't need to change our livelihoods whatsoever, we can just keep going. I think partly this debate between the two gets lost in the fact that neither is really talking about what timescale they're talking about, 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're based upon, at least in part, how efficiently we use technologies and where are we getting our energy from, and these sorts of things. I think, 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 this is where sort of degrowth comes in and says well, we do need to actually change a lot of our habits. We need to think about how much meat are we eating, how many cars are we driving, these sorts of things. I think they're absolutely right on all of those questions Fundamental to any question of the future as well. Is the future livable? I think climate change is like the foundational question upon which any other sort of political question has to be set upon.

Speaker 2: 48:29

I think degrowth is right in a lot of ways. I think, crucially, they're right in the sense of economic growth, particularly as measured by GDP, is a terrible metric for progress. 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. Degrowth is not necessarily the best way to phrase that.

Speaker 2: 49:04

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. That is not just a matter of a blanket rejection of technology, but in fact of using technologies in the most effective and collectively determined ways. The big problem is that we have technologies that are deployed by capitalist for capitalist purposes, without any sense of any sort of climate externalities or anything like that, and if we have collective determination over the development and use and deployment of technologies, suddenly I think the question becomes much more interesting. I think there's another divide here. You get between eco-modernists who will argue that we need big, high technology all the time, and then the other of others who will argue, well, we don't want any technology.

Speaker 2: 50:07

Technology is not the answer. I think actually, the answer is really we need sometimes small scale technology, but it can be really high tech, but it could be local. It could be small scale solar panels on roofs versus a massive single solar power generating plant. They're both high technologies, but eco-modernists would want the big solar plant rather than distributed solar panels on people's roofs. So I think 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 the climate costs. They're involved in these sorts of things as well. We can't just simply say, yes, electric cars for everybody, without thinking about lithium, for instance, and the ways in which lithium extraction is devastating to communities and climates around the world. So, yes, I have a lot I enjoy in degrowth, even if I think the term itself leads people astray.

Speaker 1: 51:10

Yeah, I think for a lot of people it's a negative reaction because of the term degrowth, because it seems like except for people describe it as almost implying an austerity that it could fit quite well within a neoliberal framework of austerity because we're degrossing, we're decreasing your living conditions, because, well, we have to fix the climate, which is not a positive political vision.

Speaker 2: 51:40

I guess, yeah, and particularly when significant parts of the world haven't seen wage growth and have seen austerity for the past 10, almost 15 years now To try and sell people a left version of austerity, I think is incredibly difficult and I think is also far too pessimistic about what's possible.

Speaker 1: 52:05

Maybe they just need to change it to just use the whole meta thing, meta growth just remove the.

Speaker 1: 52:11

D maybe, and then everyone will be like, okay, let's do that now. A rethinking of growth. Okay, yeah, I think that's really. I just 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 debates or discussion, to be able 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 this thing, there's that thing, there's that thing and they're all contradictory to one another and they're not going. 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 it's necessarily communization, but just coming together to a more coherent framework that no single movement or single framework can possibly encompass everything.

Speaker 2: 53:18

Yeah, yeah, 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 I do find is that, you know, I think the sort of slow decline of Twitter is going to 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, whereas 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 that sort of thing. Yeah, I think smaller scale internet communities are, you do get these sort of productive discussions, at least in my experience.

Speaker 1: 54:19

Yeah, definitely. 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 any time 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 I'm like I'm just trying to talk, have like a normal conversation about it. Why can't we have that? But it gets shut down like quite fast and we can't like there's no like. So 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.

Speaker 1: 55:05

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.

Speaker 2: 55:15

Yeah, I think the desire to be popular and get like massive engagement on social media is such a fool's game in the end.

Speaker 1: 55:24

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 want to tell us a bit about it and how it, how it relates to this, maybe this conversation that we're having?

Speaker 2: 55:42

Yeah, so 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.

Speaker 2: 55:58

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 judgeery and from work. But a lot of that thinking, if not 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 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 real void in the discussion around. Post-work is 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.

Speaker 2: 56:53

But almost always feminists will say, actually, post-work ideas can't really be applied to care work, to reproductive labor. So do we want robots actually looking after our children? Most people don't, the vast majority don't. So, basically, just the discussion ends there. You've got post-work on one hand and you've got 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 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?

Speaker 1: 57:45

That's interesting. So how do we combine? Are we?

Speaker 2: 57:48

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.

Speaker 2: 57:58

You, know we plop our children in front of TV so we can 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 Hedda has already been automated in many, many ways. I mean one of the challenges that we come up with in the book. Building on this scholar, ruth Schwartz Cohen, so she wrote a book back in I think it was 1982, if I remember correctly, called More Work for Mother, and it basically looked at the history of changes of technology within the home from like the 1870s to the 1970s, 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 running water, plumbing and electricity all these things. The home of the 1870s was massively different from the home of 1940s, 1950s, 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 1870s versus the 1970s, it hadn't really changed, if anything.

Speaker 2: 59:19

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 ratcheting up of standards around things like cleanliness and hygiene. So, yes, you could wash your clothes much quicker and much easier with a washing machine, but now you're expected to do it every few days rather than once a month, which might've happened beforehand. In the words of one scholar on this, laundrie went from being a weekly nightmare to an endless drudgery. It was just always there. So this ratcheting up of standards meant that, put it in economic terms, productivity was increased, but output also increased. So we're doing more and more Laundrie, and you find this everywhere.

Speaker 2: 1:00:30

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 duplication of effort that goes on every single night in people's homes, 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 the single family, single family home as its model. So yeah, and then we talk about 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. 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.

Speaker 1: 1:01:25

So then I imagine part of it is just like kind of like the privatization of care. 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 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 a more I don't know socialized form of taking care of children.

Speaker 2: 1:02:23

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think ownership is exactly the right framework for what's going on right now, like there's so much implied and often explicitly. Actually this the idea that the parental child relationship is like a relationship of ownership and, in fact, owning an asset of human capital is effectively what the parental relationship has become, and then we'll follow from 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 to get a good return on investment. It's just the way these things are seen. Yeah, it's a quite mutated form of childcare, I think, and parental child relationships nowadays.

Speaker 1: 1:03:24

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 this term, human capital. I feel like 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 surface level, kind of like I don't know, the more happy department. It's human capital. It drives me nuts.

Speaker 1: 1:04:09

But yeah, it's true. I mean 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 don't have the money yourself, then better hope that your child will, you know, help you survive through retirement.

Speaker 2: 1:04:39

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 1:04:43

I did this, I imagined like this must have come out of like your own experience of having a family. Like, yeah, I don't have one so.

Speaker 2: 1:04:52

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.

Speaker 1: 1:05:00

Did you have? Were your kids like to help you write the book?

Speaker 2: 1:05:02

Yeah, Definitely didn't help, but yeah, 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 finished it. Many, many, many sleepless nights later. But yeah, I mean, 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 completely bizarre ways that you might not expect. But yeah, I think it's given us a very nice perspective on a lot of these issues.

Speaker 1: 1:05:50

Yeah, I imagine it must have shifted some things by having that experience.

Speaker 2: 1:05:57

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:05:58

Another kind of aspect about like when I read the title of your book that I don't know if you had 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 you gotta have your job and you gotta have a hobby that makes you money in order to like really make it in life. I imagine 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.

Speaker 2: 1:06:42

I think a hustle culture is like ideology in its purest modern form, cause 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 they're saying to them that you just need to work harder in order to be able to make ends meet. It's explaining their situation to them. You know, you haven't worked hard enough. It's sort of raising them up but above others, is saying well, you work hard and you'll be able to be a success, and everybody else is lazy compared to you. So this is sort of like this hierarchy that emerges within it, and then it justifies the sort of endless slog that is necessary in order to work in capitalism today. So it's ideology in its purest form. It just justifies the existing state of affairs.

Speaker 1: 1:07:35

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 elite in in some way as being like the ideal way of living or of being, to understand correctly.

Speaker 2: 1:08:04

Yeah, it's, it's. It's the reality of so many people's lives. You know 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.

Speaker 1: 1:08:20

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 succumbed to, I guess.

Speaker 2: 1:09:03

Yeah, I think it is possible, but I think probably not possible under capitalism.

Speaker 2: 1:09:10

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 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 alleviate a lot of that burden. But we don't have, for the vast majority of us, we don't have the time or the resources to be able to actually do or think about these things. So, you know, part of the alternative is to give people those technologies, to give people the ability and the capacity, in the necessary environment and resources, to be able to develop their own ways of alleviating burdens. Yeah, there's those histories littered with these examples, but 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.

Speaker 1: 1:10:29

Yeah, fair Is there any last things you would like to mention before we close it off?

Speaker 2: 1:10:39

No, I think that's about it. I think I mean I will say I think sort of situating after work within 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.

Speaker 1: 1:11:21

Nice, yeah, freedom comes from free time. I think that's a nice succinct yeah phrase or argument to put forth towards your hustle culture, friends or something, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 1:11:33

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 1:11:35

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? Any plugs? Where can people find the book? Where they can find you?

Speaker 2: 1:11:47

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.

Speaker 1: 1:12:01

Of course, yeah, thanks so much.