WHAT IS “WORK”?

Labor Displacement Study: episode #0:

WHAT IS "WORK"?

We ask a lot of some words. The word, “Work” is one of them. If we think about it for a moment we’ll see that it’s carrying a lot. Maybe too much. Hear me out.

Work.

It's where we go. It’s what we do. It’s how we explain ourselves at dinner parties and first dates. When plans fall apart, a relationship strains, or an engine sputters out - the executive summary is that it’s not “working”. Work is the reason the alarm goes off in the morning; and ‘Work’ is the thing that ends the most important part of our day.

No other word carries so much freight across so many contexts.

Location. Activity. Identity. Verdict. Purpose. Lifeline.

Is that all there is? Let’s take a closer look.

My childhood dream was to become an animator.

And at an early age that dream came true as I found my way into interactive games. The studio where we worked was a beautiful, custom-built facility. Everything from the architecture to the interior design told you that what happened here mattered.

Hundreds of artists, developers, designers, and staffers organized their lives around that job. Apartments were rented nearby. Lunches were bought and eaten at the same spots every week. Friendships formed in conference rooms and parking lots and late nights before a ship date. A small, but whole world, humming with purpose.

And we grew! We moved from our smaller, custom building to a larger campus. And for six years, that job was my world.

“Work” was my identity. My place of safety. My peace. It gave me freedom, and a means to pay my way through the life I chose for myself and wanted. Work was place to grow and to become someone useful and valued.

Then the mergers came. The acquisitions. The efficiency reviews. The redundancies.

Layoffs arrived in waves. I survived the first. The second. And then my time came too.

Some time later, I drove past the old campus.

I saw the shops we'd pack at lunch; mostly quiet. The haunts we'd closed down on a Friday night; fenced or gone. The building that had hummed with hundreds of people making things; hollowed out. And our original building, the beautiful custom built one? turned into a mattress store.

But I wasn’t ready for what happened next. Going back to those places did something unexpected in me. There some kind of stored up grief that came rushing up to the surface. It was more complex than just ‘sadness’. There were layers of sorrow from losing touch with old friends, being reminded of family members that I’d never see again; and the strange encounter of feeling younger versions of myself who was animated by ‘dreams’ I now find painfully naive, and simple.

Sure, nothing lasts forever, but somewhere along the way I made a quiet bet that things would never, ever end. But there I was, “out of Work”.

Work vs. Labor

“Work” means something very different depending on where you stand.

While at my dream job, I remember seeing an org chart for the first time. I happened to be sitting in the back of the room and pinned to the wall was a triangular diagram with a bunch of boxes. Well, in seconds I understood the baic idea: CEO at the top, layers of management in the middle, and at the very bottom were us, animators! I think my initial thought was ‘There wouldn’t be able to ship games without us here’. Only much later would I understand this was partially true. Sure, young artists, there wouldn’t be a studio without “animators”. But the company can go on forever without “you”.

For those of us who yield up our, minds, talent, efforts, and time, “work” work is intimate. We stake our families, our routines, our identities, our whole existence on it and become thoroughly intertwined in it. The question, ‘what do you “DO”’ is invariably answered with, “I am a (fill in the blank)”. It’s all very inappropriate.

For those who allocate capital as the owners, managers and financial planners, “work” is over in a different dimension. First off, what we call work, they call ‘labor’. The word Labor intentionally abstracts the workers function and service as a business unit that is bought cheaply and sold at a higher price. For the executive, work (labor) is a resource to be acquired, deployed, and when necessary, optimized. The difference in the relationship is fascinating in its asymmetry; an executive’s work is largely invisible and incomprehensible to the laborer. To the executive, a laborer’s work is understood in it’s absolutes, and minute details. The laborer’s work is studied, planned out before it arrives, carefully watched to make sure it’s profitable and quickly adjusted when it is not.

It’s for that reason that when employees and executives talk to one another about ‘work’ they talk past each other. The same word might be being used, but the meanings couldn’t be more different.

This isn't a moral critique. Society is made up of entrepreneurs, hourly workers, lenders, borrowers and those in public service. There’s nothing unfair or inappropriate in the arrangement between executives and laborers. There are no saviors to praise when opportunities come, and there are no villains to blame once those opportunities go. Owners make decisions that make sense from where they sit. And sometimes the smart decision means changing with the times; adjusting to bigger picture conditions, and following the logic of capital-in-motion.

So, they move on.

We all do.

Why am I talking about this?

We've all seen those headlines. We've all seen those headlines. For those who've been close enough to know, know what's behind them. Among those thousands of people are parents of teens or young children; senior directors whose names were on a plaque in the lobby, who gave a speech at the holiday party. That person who trained us; who made employee of the month three times running. People who learned and grew, and gave real years, sometimes their best years, to that place. Now packing a box. Walking past the security desk one last time, maybe with an escort if, you know, things got emotional. Shuffling out of a building they spent more time in than their own home.

Nothing personal.

Wasn't it, though? We very personally gave ourselves; sometimes intensely; sometimes passionately, to something we dared to build our lives around. And then it simply stopped needing us. Even if we bounced back with a better offer, or even a lateral one, it takes a minute to recover your sense of time, of worth, of direction. This is part of why I wanted to look at labor displacement more carefully. Because this has happened before. Many times. And the people it happened to weren't naive, or careless, or unprepared.

I chose to call this a labor study because "work" is still kind of sacred. I think most of us will still be working long after we retire — but on our own terms. What changes is this: none of us will be subject to becoming anyone's labor.

- - -

Historically, the demand for human labor has always risen and fallen in a pattern that is pretty old; almost ancient.

One of my favorite cases to study are boom towns turned ghost towns. How much time passed between boom and bust? Where did the people go? What became of those who stayed? What would I have done if I knew I’d be able to earn a fabulous income for 5 or ten years? What would I have done if I didn’t know how long the boom time would last?

The families who bought houses near the plant weren't naive. The workers who gave decades to the studio weren't wrong to believe in it. They were doing what humans do — finding meaning, building identity, planting roots in whatever ground felt stable enough to hold them.

And then the ground moved.

A study of labor displacement.

There are a lot of reasons for labor being shuffled and moved around; probably just as many reasons as there are for people being hired.

As a former animator I feel excited and challenged by the disruption happening by artificial intelligence. We are living through a moment that is as historical as the invention of electricity and this innovation is happening across industries and geographies at once. And our social-digital media environment lets us experience the collective shock together in ways no previous generation could.

Seriously, think about how contemporaries felt when the horse and buggymen saw the first automobiles. Think about how artisans thought and felt when power lines that delivered electricity started going up. Isn’t that dangerous?

What’s happening with Ai has reminded me that there is full stack of forces that have reshaped human labor across modern history: Innovation. Transportation. Mechanization. Industrialization. Immigration. Automation. And now it’s Artificial Generation. Is it really that different? The generations of laborers and business owners before us thought so too.

But the reason why I want to look more closely into labor displacement is because each wave of technological innovation delivered on the progress it promised. But with it, left people behind; some sooner, some later. Winners and losers, some who did nothing wrong except staked their lives on the wrong ‘bet’.

Again. Harder.

What is work? Why do we give up so much of our lives and peace for it? For a boss? A paycheck? For revenue? Marketshare?

What does it mean that we've wrapped so much of our identity — our purpose, our social value, our sense of worth — around our occupation? Has work always meant this much? Or were we, somewhere along the way, quietly lead into believing this is the way it’s supposed to be and has always been?

What happens to a person when it disappears? What happens to a community? What does it mean to have value in a world that may no longer need what you were trained to offer?

Is there life beyond work? Is there meaning beyond output? And if work has meant such different things to different people all along — to the laborer, to the executive, to the town built around a single employer — what does that tell us about how much of ourselves we've surrendered to it?

Have we been taught that our worth is equivalent to our output. That we are, in some fundamental sense, what we do.

Next: Blog #1 — The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

Labor disruption caused by new technology is not new. What is new is the speed, scope, and reach.