Work in a Post Scarcity Utopia

Another snippet from Iain M. Banks’ wonderful “Use Of Weapons”, detailing the adventures of the mercenary called Zakalwe within and around the interstellar post-scarcity AI-led super-high-tech Culture. Here, we see a flashback to his cultural adjustment period after being recruited.

He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry, or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.

‘Of course I don’t have to do this,’ one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. ‘But look; this table’s clean.’

He agreed that the table was clean.

‘Usually,’ the man said, ‘I work on alien - no offence - alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my speciality…like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But…the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled…but,’ he slapped the table, ‘when you clean a table, you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.’

‘But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.’

‘And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?’ the man suggested.

He smiled in response to the man’s grin, ‘Well, yes.’

‘But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway,’ the man laughed, ‘people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,’ the man said with a smile, ‘it’s a good way of meeting people. So; where are you from, anyway?’

[Emphasis mine]

God I love this. It reminds me of a classic Tumblr exchange:

I am a sucker for frame challenges and for re-evaluating the actual sources of issues - “The problem is not X - X can be useful, helpful, and desirable. The problem is the context in which X currently exists negates its beneficial effects.”. Plus, y’know - Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, always and forever the goal ✊🏻

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