making soap with the Big Boss

 

Soap - an accident of fat and lye, chemically bonded, that when mixed with water, create a lather.

It is thought that the first soap was 'formulated' after early people began noticing that their clothes were cleaner downstream from where they cooked meat. Wood ash below cooking fires is essentially lye and animal fat.

In the last two thousand years (among other events) cosmetics have grown to a 90 billion dollar industry. Companies small and large produce all kinds of cleansing and moisturizing potions and lotions.

These products go beyond our needs of fighting germs and varying conceptions of cleanliness - they appeal to our consumer-based desires for bathing rituals and self-care. (If you don't read it already, consider reading The Unpublishable, Jess DeFino’s brilliant criticisms of the beauty and wellness industries).

Here at Worlds End, our resident Expert Soap maker Susan Ryhanen will teach a course that will be packed with lessons on soap making and beyond.

It will cover the making of cosmetics in general; soaps, salves, lip balms, oils, lotions, as well as business development skills (LLC or S-corp, bookkeeping, employees, taxes, etc).

This small group will leave with all the tools to start their own business following SAIPUA’s model. The course will be held in person on Worlds End farm from May 2nd - 7th. Further details to come.

Can’t attend Susan’s soap-making course, but want to attempt our recipe on your own? It’s fairly easy to learn. You can support us by buying and downloading Susan's 5-page detailed instructional on cold-process soap making, which comes with her supplier list, and further support from Susan should you need it.

Part of our larger mission here at Worlds End School of Thought, Agriculture and Craft is to share the knowledge we have honed in our respective practices. We hope you can bring your skills to our big communal barn table to share sometime, helping us all transform the ways we live and work together.

Reminder: our barn doors open for these kinds of conversations on Sunday May 14th, the first Coyote Cafe day.

some gratitudes and the (working) buckwheat cookie recipe

 

The sheep are 10 weeks away from lambing, this is the time of gestation when they start drinking a lot more water. I say a prayer of gratitude every day for the miraculous technology of the electric tank warmer.

Years ago we used to chip thick ice out of the tank every morning and haul fresh water up to thirsty sheep. With a 5-gallon bucket in each hand, we would cross the stream teetering on rocks and strategically placed planks (grateful every day for the bridge across the stream too.)

I watched a clip of Oprah talking about gratitude; she emphasized how important it is to be highly specific with your gratitude practice.

I've never had a good journaling practice or gratitude practice but maybe I should. Now I think about the importance of specificity every morning when I look at the tank warmer, and then at other parts of the day. I pass by Pentti cutting firewood on the splitter and think; I'm grateful not only that both my parents have their health, but that they can participate in meaningful work that helps all of us on the farm.

I am very grateful for young healthy livestock dogs and for the fact that I probably won’t have to deal with sick or dying dogs for a while, which feels like such a relief after a tough few years.

I am also incredibly grateful for the 86 episodes of the television series The Sopranos which I am just discovering and also for our new highspeed internet on the farm which allows me to stream it while browsing used Dries Van Noten on the Real Real… which I decided is an integral part of my permaculture practice (only buying used things).

Suffice it to say, I’m leaning into television, online shopping and sugar this January.

(Working) Recipe for Buckwheat Chocolate Chip Cookies:

Cream for 5 min a least:
8 oz butter (softened)
8 oz brown sugar

Mix and then slowly add:
1 egg
2 oz yogurt
1 tsp vanilla

Sift and then slowly add:
6 oz buckwheat flour
4 oz all purpose flour
5 grams salt
5 grams of baking soda

Mix in:
10 oz chocolate chips (I like a semi-sweet disc) and nuts if you like

375 degrees for 7 min, then turn the baking sheet and give another 5-7 min depending on your oven.

notes on Posthumanism

January and February always prove difficult for me, and while I like to think that I'm special or an exception to the rule, I fear that I'm like many people in the North who are affected by seasonal depression.

I joked about the Huberman podcast on Instagram recently (here is that hilarious remix). Huberman is a scientist at Stanford; his lab studies the brain, and he talks a lot about the science of 'well-being'.

Caught between interest and disdain ('optimizing' language puts me off, as does the praise of supplements like Athletic Greens, nootropics, reishi coffee and the worship of Navy Seals) every day I find myself considering his advice; scanning the horizon back and forth to get a dose of morning sunlight in my eyes while feeding and watering farm animals. I walk past the frozen pond and imagine cutting a hole in the ice for cold plunging - apparently an excellent tool for modulating dopamine and balancing your circadian rhythms for better sleep (Finnish relatives of mine used to do this regularly.)

But optimizing rhetoric becomes problematic for me from a post-humanist, feminist perspective because it begs the question, who's not optimized?

Who is not fulfilling their potential and why and by whose standards? Post-humanism is not just about granting rights to robots like Sophia (a sexy chatBot modeled after Nefertiti and Audrey Hepburn and granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia in 2017) and it's about much more than trans-humanism which feels like a hyper-masculine shitstorm currently hovering over the potential of ChatGBT.

To me, Post-humanism at its fundamentals is a departure from the sexist and racist origins of Humanism which centered on white men in Europe under the guise of morals, reason, and the pursuit of truth through science.

An easy visual that really helped me understand these concepts is Leonardo da Vinci's iconic drawing of the Vitruvian Man - "a perfectly proportioned, healthy, male and white model, which became the golden mean for classical aesthetics and architecture. The human thus defined is not so much a species as a marker of European culture and society and for the scientific and technological activities it privileges." (Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, 2022)

Humanism put a sharp point on difference and laid the groundwork for the modern rationalization of the exploitation of difference (sexism, racism, classism, anthropomorphism.)

The infamous hot priests calendar - a gift to the farm hangs on the big fridge. During the Renaissance, Humanism was born as a reaction to the mystical divinity of the Catholic church that governed reason at the time.

Through Rosie Braidottis writing (and Haraway's cyborg, posthuman, interspecies work) I've come to see that post-humanism allows us to move forward into more equitable and exciting ideas of living together and better (at least to me) futures.

The optimizing stuff of the Huberman brand - especially the Jordan Petersen, Jocko adjacent bits - feel like a masculine version of Goop, i.e. the pursuit of perfectionism (through the comodification of wellness based on a very specific standard of health.)

Ages ago I talked about how perfectionism has racist underpinnings. I think this brief conversation about humanism illuminates that connection. When we worship and practice perfectionism, or even when we are attempting to ‘optimize,’ to whose standards and what systems of culture and power do those standards benefit?

new year, new ewe

 

In sincerity, I love the energy of getting through the holidays (I'm a complete grinch) and the opportunity of a clean slate on January 1st. This year I’m embracing the art of writing things down in lists and attempting more structure for myself, Saipua and the farm.

The iterative aspect of farming (every year a new crop along with a new crop of participants) is one I have grown to appreciate as an unusually long game, a race that starts in March and finishes in December.

January and February are achingly quiet and frozen months here, with very little to do but feed and water animals.

Inside I'm on the phone a lot, hovering around the woodstove, interviewing farmhand applicants and chatting to their interesting and varied references.

I'm also planning residencies (thanks to those of you who put your deposits down on 2023's Floral residencies!) short form classes, volunteer schedules, budgets and working on the perfect Worlds End buckwheat chocolate chip cookie which I plan to have on offer at the Coyote Cafe (opens May 14th!).

Buckwheat is a great crop for our wet clay soil and one day, mark my words, we'll grow it, mill it and make that cookie and give it away on Sundays. If you believe in my deep-time, anti-profit ventures; bless you.

Tess, or ‘Tuna’ as I sometimes call her, has been settling in with us at the farm, working sheep and providing great companionship to me. She is 8yo and came to me from the working border collie network - a woman who trains her dogs for trials found herself limited with Tess because she lacks some of the focus and precision needed to win at sheepdog trials. Her other dogs were getting more time on sheep and Tess dropped on the totem pole. She decided to adopt her to me knowing Tess would get more work here. What a great world of dog people there are out there, I feel very grateful.

The communal living experiment continues to evolve beyond the confines of the human campus - in the specific ecosystem of Icelandic sheep and Maremma dogs up in the permanent pasture.

The trouble we were having with Donnie chewing on sheep this fall (unfortunately a common 'playful' behavior with adolescent LGD's) seems to have subsided for now though I still don't trust him with his 'favorite' ewe - No. 32 a rare black and brown mouflon born last spring.

Inspecting Donnie’s chompers. We also had Donnie neutered a few months ago which should level his hormones out and help him get more serious and settle into his responsibilies.

She gets the princess treatment along with her young sisters; they come in the barn for safe keeping every night (Donnie is triggered by boredom early in the morning before I get up there to feed him) and get fed not just hay but also alfalfa pellets. This treat has them trained to come in without much coaxing and also helps get these lambs’ weight up as we've bred them a tad earlier than some shepherds would.

Here she is - her front right leg nicely healed, little No.32 our first Mouflon ewe - It’s relatively rare, we’ve never had these genetics present in our flock.

The greenhouse and gardens are now all officially resting. Mark and I are anticipating a most excellent set of gardens next season after so much work in 2022 setting up the greenhouse and renovating the flower fields - solarizing large portions to smother and eradicate the perennial weeds that prove difficult to fight without landscape fabric (I just hate the stuff) and building up beds with manual shaping and the addition of compost and topsoil.

As always with this time of year I'm bored with the 'necessity' of winter rest and aching for the sprint that lies ahead - the fury and its foments.

There will be more ways than ever for you to get involved with the farm this season - no matter where you are. In a few weeks, I'll release volunteer dates - opportunities to come live and work with us for 2-week stints this season.

I'll also be describing a new subscription-based educational service that will be comprised of video content and text-based documents aimed at sharing our work here with a larger audience. It's going to be Worlds End TV and will include everything from the much anticipated 'Lamb Cam' to floral arranging tutorials to soil science to Susan's 'perfect scrambled eggs instructional.'

Till then I'll be here at my computer more than I care to be; making spreadsheets on sheep breeding and finagling budgets, longing for the heat and chaos that lies around the corner. 

Teaching through exposure

In last weeks newsletter (are you still not getting it?! Signup HERE) I promised I would share three distinct sparks that altered the course of my life - moments that exposed me to a world or possibility that I had not previously considered. 

The first was an article in the NYT art section about a gallery show that made me think the art world could be different. Having recently arrived in NY from a crummy art school with no direction and no connections I worked tooth and nail in multiple unpaid internships in several rather terrible gallery situations to eventually land my dream job at Exit Art a few years later.  

The second was flowers - I had never considered flowers or floristry until I was gifted a most unusual and beautifully wrapped bouquet of flowers for my 25th birthday. I became obsessed with the shop they came from (a now closed little shop called Rosebud on Union and Hicks Street in Brooklyn, buying just a stem or two on my walk back to RedHook from the F Train.  A few months later I was allowed to make the arrangements for Exit Art's gallery openings and I was off and running through the flower district in NYC thirsty to learn the name of every flower and branch. In 2006 SAIPUA, the combination of my mothers soap hobby and my new found flower obsession was born in a dilapidated storefront on the main drag of VanBrunt Street. The rent was $1000/month! (If you go to red hook now, it's currently the home of Thank You Have a Good Day.)

The third bifurcation point: my accidental run in with a charging herd of sheep being driven by a sheepdog in 2008 when buying cheese from Wood Cock Farm in Vermont. The daughter of the cheesemaker was loitering as we were buying sheeps milk ricotta and asked if I wanted to see their flock. Their sheepdog slipped out the door behind us and without warning - embarked on a furiously fast 'come by' driving the hundred or so sheep towards us in a white fluffy sea of terror - I thought I was going to be obliterated. 'Just stand still' the daughter said to me, bored with this tsunami and annoyed at her dog. I left there with a note pinned in the back of my mind: I wanted that scenario for myself one day.

Now here I am holed up in my little apartment white-boarding up a storm; attempting to divine the 2023 calendar season at Worlds End from a litter of post-it notes. It's a complex choreography to place visitors, students, staff and family into a structure and calendar of events that has a corresponding budget of resource allotment (income vs. salaries // energetic input vs. output). 

I have come to love this winter activity of imaginative planning - when it's all abstracted and anything is possible...when I might still say - lets scrap it all and plant a giant corn maze! (I mean, not no.)

Irregardless of the direction the season takes us, I'm committed to keeping this project porous, open to changing, and ensuring that the farm always has many points of access for all kinds of different people. The simplest access point; come visit and tour and eat on our OPEN SUNDAYS (Coyote Cafe re-opens on May 14th 2023). A more complex access point; joining us for an entire season as a farmhand/apprenticeship. 

The teaching and exposure that happens here is paramount to my personal desire to build a place so full of aching beauty and uncanny utility. A place where all sorts of interesting people and things are happening in a hive-like environment. Where I can continually be inspired and learn just as I inspire and teach others. 

__

In the fall of 2021 I posted something on instagram about what you all could imagine teaching if you came to worlds end. I was so moved by your responses I put them in a spreadsheet to digest later. I pulled it out yesterday and posted the first 100 responses below here (you can also see and add your own teaching desires to the post which is now pinned to the top of the @saipua instagram page.)

granola 
natural dyeing, garment building
documentary filmmaking/storytelling
deadheading/pruning

develop recipes, write cookbook, research and save family recipes for posterity

art of napping, balance of eating energy food & exercise, good manners, how to play cards, how to happily be with yourself, benefits of cold showers, how to take exceptional self portraits (not selfies)

chicken slaughtering, soil science, delivering babies/inserting IUDs, trailer backup, scheming about business ideas and politics
how to make a butter biscuit

how to sustainably forage edible/medicinal plants, how to combat plant blindness, make bitters/botanical mixology
yoga

Mah Jongg, how to make the best tuna, chicken, egg salad

how to ice dye, tie dye, weave, yarn dye

how to bake with intutition, clean without harmful chemicals, infuse herbs and flowers into ice cream/sorbets
positive psychology

looking, walking, asking questions, being together - comes from academia

nature poetry in various languages, ecocritical theory
Cyanotypes, nature art

GF desserts using floral/herbal flavor profiles

basic DIY home repair - carpentry and woodworking

how to create flower essence and commune w/plants
soap making

process or intuitive painting for perfectionists

business values and conscious leadership

basic bushcrafting, making fire, tarp shelter, axe skills, basic campfire cooking
women and utopian vision

film photograph in nature, breaking up with plastics, intro to herbalism w/focus on chronic illness, disability, inflammation

meditation, breath work, setting personal boundaries, living with intention, eating and living w/the seasons, group work connecting w/self

ecologically focused landscape and garden design large and small scale

how to build your perfect unique lifestyle business

how to make friends w a plant, how to make a book w a single sheet of paper, how to introuce youself without mentioning capitalism

poetry writing from natural world, oral history storytelling

poetry workshop based on experiment/techniques from Bernadette Mayer
pie baking

mindful marketing for artists/creators looking to attract ideal clients

the art of reinvention, pleasure stacks, nature bathing

white affinity group exploring/disrupting whitness, white supremacy, white folks tuition will subsidize bipoc/black and poc affinity group to come do their work

qigong, chinese medicine lifestyle principles

The Art of Travelogue, paints, writes, draws impressions of where they are
Cooking classes, Japanese ink art

how to replicate native flowers/plants in paper

filing system and organization tips for homes,w/ an understanding of the creative spirit

Learn to Love Marketing your small business starter journey
Cooking classes focused on spices

balancing your energy, cocahing workshops to increase self-knowlege and self-love for more natural way of living
broom making

agricultural education, basic medical education

good manners before they die out completely

@heysisterseasons, teaching about menstrual cycle through nature and climate change
how to build a fire

healthy vocal production, garden design, how to look at photography and take more interesting pictures
hide tanning

distillation, enfleurage, incense making

cultural cooking lessoms from women around the world
mindful foraging and wreath making

how to make bread, yogurt, jam, how to knit, wearable flowers

how to make paper flowers, moths, butterflies etc. if it grows or flies we can make it in paper

how to make a silver cuff, hand built or wheel thrown vases and planters

history of art, premodern European art but would deep dive into whatever period
knitting and spinning

botanical drawing or plein aire painting workshop
ice dyeing
@smudge_studiobk waterlcolor
needlepoint

how to develop and use intuition, use breathwork for healing, personal growth, community care

weaving with foraged and naturally dyed materials
weaving
bread making

how to make a perfect chocolate cake

photography and digital marketing for small floral businesses

"magical realism" - creative practice involving movement, writing, drawing, roomscaping, adornment
rest as regenerative cerative practice
help teach a writing workshop

photography, how to use a DSLR for video, editing, flower arranging, film photography, film elmulsions w/polariods,smaller scale studio lighting, how to make delicious ice cream with unusual flavors

photography - intro, film or digital, how to make my Grammy's risotto, how to give cranky cat pills and ointment

natural dye course, how to press flowers

visible mending, any kind of knitting, hot water bath and pressure canning, sourdough bread and crackers, gingerbread, pizza in home over, foolproof foccaccia

floral bartending, dance party mix tapes
large scale pinch pots (or any scale)

natural dye with food waste, flower, bioregional seasonal plants, local wool and basic spinning, herbal body care, community space holding, cooperative existence
bundle dying

mending, charcoal drawing in nature/figure drawing to lift creative block and to accept phsyical form

@kylecook.custom can teach furniture making techniques like hand tools and dovetails
beekeeping

recognizing signs of burnout, self care

how to print and dye with flowers, make your own apothecary prepartions, make the best ghee, congee, bone broth, reiki, yoga, meditation
the possibilities of cooperatives
moccasin or simple sneaker making

Personal nature color wheels or finding color inspiration in nature and creating a palette around the choices

how to make large scale arrangements with foraged things, how to make really yummy salad
how to make sugar flowers

still life styling and photography with seasonal fruits veggies and flowers
photography in rural context
meditation, yoga

Feldenkrais, relaxi taxi, how to slip in inappropriate jokes into conversation

memoir and personal narrative writing

holistic vaginal health, navigating western healthcare through woman positive and sex positive lens

print workshops - would love to learn more about your space, timing, plans maybe they align with mine

Soap and Surveillance: Is there any way to stay clean under capitalism?

Soap and Surveillance: Is there any way to stay clean under capitalism?

I rented an apartment in Hudson, NY so I can get off the farm every week. As much as I am committed to the work of Worlds End - it’s thick and varied landscape of relationships and agricultural problem solving (Donnie and his penchant for playing and chewing on lambs is a recent example) - I also believe that the key to stamina in a sprawling project like this is the ability to get away from it.

As we forge new ways of living and working together, we get to invent new rules and patterns; assessing and pivoting in real time. Prior to this apartment, I had been living in a cabin without electricity and water, a fun experiment that ran its course.

Suffice it to say the respite this place provides allows for physical and electronic device recharge. It also gives me a chance to experience true ‘days off’ and alone time to think and write and see friends outside the context of the farm.

Privacy is a huge concern inside the project of Worlds End. The ability for residents to live and work together is proportional to their access to true privacy. Privacy means a room or cabin off limits to others, but it also means you have a place where you can’t hear someone else’s phone call or hear that they are opening the fridge. It means having time when you don’t casually run into someone in the hall and end up answering a question or having a quick chat when really you just want to brush your teeth.

We can define privacy easily in these physical, real world experiences.

Privacy in the digital realm is more complicated to understand and poses a larger threat…

In this apartment, there is an antiquated, non-programable thermostat from the ’80s. James sees Black Friday sales and suggests we buy a Nest thermostat that can be controlled from our phones from a great distance. We can likely save money on days when not here, and be more comfortable by warming up the apartment just before we arrive.

I immediately seize up at this idea as I’m recently reading Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (this is a great interview to watch, also her hair) and starting to understand with greater detail the extent to which our access to private sanctuary is being eclipsed by enticing and helpful technologies that promise to make our lives easier.

One of my favorite movies is Ex Machina. It’s a chilling story about artificial intelligence and passing the Turing Test. Embedded in the film is a great explanation - you can watch it here - of how collected personal data can inform the creation of new technologies through machine learning. It also contains, in my opinion, one of the most memorable dance scenes in all of cinematic history.

In this example, we’re talking robots - very human-looking ones that can cook and have sex with Oscar Issac - but in a more normalized reality, this type of data can be used to moderate and adapt our behavior - quietly and without us realizing it. And it is being used to gently shape our desires, fantasies, emotions, and access to freedom.

All phases of capitalism have taken some aspect of human experience and pulled it into the marketplace; examples would include the loss of the commons, the commodification of labor power, and the creation of the ‘personal care industry.’

Surveillance capitalism commodifies the masses of surplus behavioral data left over from user interfaces. It’s data collected from how you interact with your phone and your computer browser - but it’s also your television, your security camera, your thermostat, your smart refrigerator, and your car.

In the 1988 masterwork, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that mass media and corporate power are inextricably linked in their collaborative creation of propaganda aimed to funnel profits to those in power.

Today, with an understanding of data collection and surveillance, we can see how the expanding horizon of helpful personal ‘smart’ technological devices not only ‘improves’ our lives but opens an entirely new territory for intrusive manipulation of the masses.

To return to the title query of this email; I do believe the process of commodification contaminates any action, art, or object we make. I see this all the time in creative people who struggle to balance their making life with their need to earn a living.

I do think that grace and god exit the room when we attempt to make money just for money’s sake. I think we need new ways of living together in communities that collectively understand value as being something completely separate from the dollars needed to pay for gasoline or taxes, and I think it’s easier to practice this kind of experimental work in far-flung agriculture-based projects like Worlds End.

I joked last week about collecting your data as you shopped around on the Saipua website; which - full disclosure - includes me using dial-up internet to log into to the back end of our Squarespace website to see what you purchased when, after which email and with which discount code. The Saipua algorithm can be said to consist of some loose mental math after a brief scroll through your orders and the subsequent conversations with Susan at cocktail hour.

In all sincerity; thank you for your orders. I say this all the time, but I can’t say it enough: they SUSTAIN us and our work here.

Can we stay clean under capitalism? Perhaps it’s the wrong question... A more interesting one: what could the world look like without such massive accumulations of wealth and power?

On work.

I hear all the time from local business owners and my neighbors the same statement: ‘No one wants to work anymore.’ 

There is a lot that we could unpack from this very specific location of rural upstate red-county truths; but I might argue that people are simply not willing to do the jobs that society offers anymore. The old ways of working are simply - not working. 

I think about work all the time and how to re-evaluate it here on the farm. 

At present, the larch trees are turning and dropping their needles after all the maple and oak leaves seem long fallen, it’s as if we get a second autumn. We deserve it I tell myself. 

When I first landed here 11 autumns ago I thought the trees were sick and dying. I was sick myself at the time over climate change, preoccupied by news; guzzling and drunk on liberal doomsday fantasies. (To think that was a time before Trump, before the loss of Roe…)

When the needles fall it sounds like rain on the deck of my cabin - I often can’t tell the difference. They get in everything - the dog gags them up in coughing fits after they stick to her frisbee. The needles end up occupying a notable percentage of our kale and carrot salads - so much so that I feel compelled to google their toxicity (moderately tolerable.)

In my daily chore routine at the farm, I spend a significant amount of time sweeping the larch needles from the deck of the cabin before I bring in firewood and water. This is work I think - small work I do as a part of the larger work in this place. (But what constitutes large and small work anyway? and to whom? What is meaningful work?)

Almost none of my friends have corporate jobs anymore; few of them have 'careers' that I could easily describe in the way my parents might have; Susan: teacher, Pentti auto-body repair man. 

Many of the brilliant people who have built this project over the years and gone off for their own endeavors, have work and projects that are beautifully difficult to describe in career or corporate business speak. Most of them I would categorize as artists - a useful catch-all for the intersection of work and the manifestation of creative desire. They work for money - Taryne and Zoe are installing a plant wall at the Uniqlo on Broadway in NYC as I type this - and make strange worlds in their own time see: Takata, Fuzz Industries, Secret Meeting.

Many people I know are in transition. Close friends have taken time off or removed themselves from their careers in order to revaluate their lives. One might see these transitions as the stuff of mid-life crisis, couched in a current milieu of existential narcissism, but a lot of the people I'm talking to are figuring out how to position themselves between the need to earn a living and take care of themselves and their families and how to make (or be a part of) meaningful changes in the world. 

Being with oneself outside of the cultural apparatus of career can be an excruciating process. Career is identity, stability, and it leads to predictable outcomes. One knows how to answer questions about oneself at cocktail parties. 

I think we’re walking into a future where people won’t have jobs anymore.  People will always perform ‘work’ (as all living things in nature do). They will string different types of work together for survival and for celebration. Some will focus on highly specified work others work will vary widely. But the idea of having a ‘job’ will be fade into history. People will follow leaders and work together with others but there will be no more bosses. Some people will still be miserable when they have to do work, some will always resent working, some people will die working. Some people will do certain kind of work in order to avoid other kinds. (Sweeping is this for me.) But working will just feel like living. 

James is here and says that my attitude is optimistic; he introduces me to a more cynical future:  we will all be debt slaves in Martian colonies serving Lord-Emporer Elon Musk. One might also consider the ‘company-town’ model of live-work employment illustrated in chilling detail in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You.

Certainly the essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber addresses the trouble with managerial capitalism (i.e. once upon a time there were only workers and capitalists) and it's scripture of organized hierarchies (teams, departments, administrations, etc). As the work of the world becomes more automated, we've invented meaningless jobs to keep people busy. Because people who are working all the time (and consuming with their earnings in their free time) make for reliable members of society - Graeber argues that happy people with free time are dangerous to the ruling class.

I like to imagine specific paradigm shifts and it occurs to me that maybe there is a future where we don't have 'white collar' jobs anymore. Where there are no more corporations. Where there are no more doctors or lawyers or accountants. No more Firms. No more industrial agriculture, no more prisons. Where the work of these types of people and places is done in more localized, relationship-based ways. Some people will still be healers, others organizers or numbers people, we’ll all be engineers in some ways. We’ll all be artists and we’ll all be more connected to the physical needs of our survival.

Emergence is new unrecognizable forms lifting out of old ones. I see it like a magic eye poster. I think am I seeing the dolphin!?