Abolition
Last week’s (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds dispatch framed the initiative as a project in “radical everydayness”.
This week’s dispatch will frame the initiative as a project in abolition in addition to radical everydayness.
Next week’s dispatch, concluding an opening trilogy of sorts, will frame the initiative as a project in decolonization in addition to abolition and radical everydayness.
The frames of radical everydayness, abolition, and decolonization elaborated in these initial dispatches form the trellis along which I hope the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project will grow and develop.
As a project of abolition, the (De-/Re)Constructing Worlds project will consider different ways in which we may deconstruct the industrialized world and (re-)construct convivial worlds.
You ask me, “How does deconstructing the industrialized world and (re-)constructing convivial worlds contribute to the project of abolition?”
The industrialized world, as I have come to regard it, is a world constructed on the hypothesis that machines can replace slaves or, rather more precisely, that new machine slaves could be gradually made to replace the human slaves of old, and that a “temporary” and “voluntary” sort of human slavery, wage slavery, will suffice in the interim between the old human driven order and the new machine driven order — the imperative being that the wage slave uses their wage labor as a stepping-stone to small proprietorship.
The logic of slavery is built into the “deep structure” of the environments, implements, and statements that characterize the industrialized world. Indeed, the pervasiveness of this logic is such that many do not fully appreciate the horrors endured by the enslaved. Many believe that the work slaves are forced to perform is “essential work” that someone or something must be made to perform and they believe that what makes slavery wrong is the fact that slaves are not properly compensated for the “essential work” that they are made to perform. The fact is, however, that slaves are, by definition, forced to perform excessive, superfluous work for the sake of the slave master’s pleasure and profit.
Our so-called "higher senses” and “reasons” have misled us into thinking that slavery is an unfortunate solution to a real problem and that industrialization is the better solution this problem. Exposing the falsehoods of our "higher senses” and “reasons”, everyday sense reveals to us that slavery is, in fact, a bad solution to a false problem—the false problem of “who (or what) can be made to work for us”. Going further, everyday sense reveals to us that industrialization is but another bad solution to this same false problem. What’s more, and going even further still, everyday sense reveals to us that we will not be able to confront the global economic and ecological crises that we are living through today unless we learn to see beyond the false problem of “making others work for us” and learn to confront the real problem of “finding ways to work with others”.
Ivan Illich puts a fine point on the matter in the book Tools for Conviviality:
[Our crises] can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that [...] [eliminate] the need for either slaves or masters and [enhance] each person’s range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tools that work for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy [and information] slaves. [...] Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools.
Abolition, as I conceive of it, is about (re-)constructing a world in which the prevailing working relation amongst peoples, implements, and environments is that of working-with as opposed to working-for. From this perspective, eliminating chattel slavery, the most egregious form of working-for, could only ever be the beginning of abolition. Indeed, as a project in abolition thusly understood, the recurring question throughout the (De-/Re)Constructing Worlds project will be this, “How can we deconstruct statements, implements, and environments that facilitate relations of working-for, and how can we (re)construct statements, environments, and implements that facilitate relations of working-with?”
Industrialization in its latest and most extreme phase is about constructing a world in which artificially intelligent machines perform intellectual labor for their masters and in which robotic machines perform physical labor for their masters. This is to say, in other words, that industrialization today seeks to construct a world in which slavery has been perfected. In this brave new hyper-industrialized world, the biggest problem that the new masters of machines will have to confront is what to do with human beings who are expendable, who are neither masters nor overseers of the perfect slaves, who are neither masters nor overseers of fully automated and artificially intelligent robots.
We all know, of course, that those peoples most likely to be counted amongst the expendable are those who once were slaves and those who were displaced and dispossessed by the advance of slaveholding and industrial societies. It follows that, in the United States of America where I live, black and indigenous peoples are those most likely to be counted amongst the expendable.
robot (n.) from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave"
Working with the aid of a technical implement and a built environment is not the same thing as having a technical implement and a built environment that works for you. The difference between implements and environments that you work with and those that work for you is the difference between augmentation and automation, between the prosthetic and the robotic. With these terms in mind, we might say that the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project aims (i) to encourage augmentation and the proliferation of prosthetic implements and environments which would multiply our senses for the world around us, and, concomitantly, (ii) the project aims to discourage automation and the proliferation of robotic implements and environments which would increasingly rationalize the world around us.
But promoting the prosthetic above and beyond the robotic is not enough! Promoting working-with above and beyond working-for also means promoting collective prostheses above and beyond individual prostheses. Working-with means producing prostheses that bring bodies together as opposed to prostheses that set bodies apart from one another. This is to say, in other words, the working-with means producing prostheses that require that two or more different bodies aid one another and work together, this as opposed to producing prostheses that a body can operate alone without aid from any others.
Favoring working-with above and beyond working-for does not mean favoring the simple above and beyond the complex. Some of collective prostheses that I might cite as furthering working-with are quite complex. Take, for instance, the marvelous work of a friend and mentor, Sha Xin Wei, who creates “responsive environments” in which “computationally augmented tangible media respond to the improvised gesture and activity of their inhabitants” so as to enable “participatory sense-making” and the “steering of complex adaptive systems”. Yet other collective prostheses that I might cite as examples are so simple that they can easily be taken for granted. Take, for instance, the rowboat pictured here.
As I conceive of it, advancing abolition in defiance of hyper-industrialization is not about advancing simplicity above and beyond complexity. Rather, it is about advancing a prosthetics (i.e., a technics of augmentation) that enables an increasing diversity of bodies to form collectives and to work with one another—this as opposed to advancing a robotics (i.e., a technics of automation) that would work for privileged bodies and that would enable privileged bodies to insulate themselves from collective work.
