Busy Robots, Routines, and Rethinking
07 Oct
Posted by ericmsteen as Sci-Fi and Activsim, Social Art
For a while now I’ve been thinking that people in our society are not too far removed from robots. We are machines that follow certain paths and tracks, and we are programmed to think that productivity has something to do with being at a job that pays the bills. I’ve been addressing this on this blog, and also through my art practice by exploring drinking beer with friends as a productive labor, one that builds friendship, community, locality, and takes you away from your normal nodes of “production.”
Mads Lynnerup is an artist that is addressing the same issues of labor, leisure, and productivity. In his newest art project he asked a number of people in the town of Troy, NY to “take a day for yourself.” People who have jobs and live out their daily life with a normal routine will now get to break that routine for the sake of art. They are each documenting their day in some form and I imagine we will see that maybe people are most productive when given time for themselves – to catch up on rest, to continue building relationships with their family and friends, to do something that is actually interesting to them, to give them the mental space to think for themselves. In these situations, all acts are creative. I value the utilitarian aspects of art projects such as this and the challenge they present to us to rethink how our lives will be played out. Thank you Mads Lynnerup
Here are a few links to websites that I enjoy that also address issues of productivity, busyness and seeing daily acts as a form of creativity. They take two very different approaches: Unconventional Ideas and Why Work?
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2 Responses
Down To Earth Science Fiction | Beer and Sci-Fi
November 14th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
1[...] (about 1am PST). That’s not going to work! It’s Monday night, I work the next day! Quit thinking like a robot, participate in humanity and do this because this is what will improve your quality of life – [...]
Kenji
November 23rd, 2009 at 10:08 pm
2we are programmed to think that productivity has something to do with being at a job that pays the bills.
I think it actually does, but only the part of productivity that can be bought and sold. Which is not all of it, but it is a really big part.
A lot of critiques by laypersons (I haven’t read any by serious economists yet, but Marx’s “Capital” is on my list, if I can manage to understand it!) of capitalism and markets that I’ve seen seem to me to ignore or misleadingly downplay the plain fact that prices (including the wages of labor) are not just some oppressive conspiracy by The Man: they represent human desire, and not just that of the rich and privileged. Why should that desire not be fulfilled? Yes, there are lots of things we value that can’t be bought and sold: love and friendship are some easy examples. But on the other hand there’s a huge quantity of things we value (not just that we are told to value, but that we actually value) that CAN be bought and sold, and the system of free-floating prices that we live in makes those things more and more readily available to us, because it motivates other people to produce them. And those things, the buyable and sellable, might not just be the obvious like bread, beer, houses, and iPods. Creativity, or the exercise thereof, can also be motivated or enabled by market forces. This is why we buy recorded music even when we could just download it for free, isn’t it? You want to support the musicians whose music you like. In other words, you send them a market signal that their creativity is desired by other people, and thereby enable them to pursue it without sacrificing their most pressing needs like food and shelter.
It’s true that this system often fails to offer us what we want, and that it often traps us in situations we find unpleasant, like having a job you hate. But hang on, maybe that job isn’t as meaningless as it seems. Consider the indirect implications of the fact that somebody is willing to pay you to do it.
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