Work for Free

In 2023, I was asked to give a quote to a wonderful book called ‘Post Branding’ by Jason Grant and Oliver Vodeb. The context of the quote was the design work I’d freely done for Extinction Rebellion in 2018. I said: 

“Transparent and freely available design processes allow anyone to express themselves within a consistent framework. How do you express yourself differently within a society that values material wealth over everything else? You give your work away for free. It really is that simple – if more people work freely more often (with a network of likeminds to support it) we quickly shift into a different way of valuing ourselves and one another, production and consumption becomes care and freedom.”

This is all very good in theory, I hear you say, but can we REALLY work for free?

Many years ago Charlie and myself (This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll) were approached to redesign the Brixton Pound. 

At around the same time we had a revelatory moment. 

As owners of a design agency we spent a lot of time pitching for work. These pitches were done for free and amounted to 60% of our time – 60% of our time spent pitching for work we might (probably won’t) get. That’s a lot of time!

We decided to stop pitching and replaced that 60% of time with work we wanted to do for free. 

A simple collaborative act

And so the redesign of the Brixton Pound was done (for free). A design based on making the money collectible – raising money for the charity by using the difference in the production cost of the money and its face value. Every time a Brixton Pound was collected (the currency’s face value was the same as Sterling) this gave the difference in price (£9.98 on the £10.00) directly to the charity. This, in turn, allowed the Brixton Pound to set up a pay-what-you-feel café on Atlantic Road; helped it to give money to other charities in the local area; and it inspired people to think differently about money. We’d helped create a (small) alternative economy by one simple collaborative act. By working freely with the Brixton Pound charity, local businesses, local volunteer groups and David Bowie, we helped the ‘wheels go round’ in Brixton.

Simple acts of reciprocity can go a long way. By realising we were wasting our time chasing illusory money on a ridiculous hamster wheel, we stumbled on a different way of working. Just think about all the time you spend working for money and weigh this against what you’d rather be doing. How does it balance out? And if you add this to all the things you do for free in your everyday life (important things like raising children, cooking meals, looking after loved ones, building relationships) what does the balance look like now?

I imagine the balance is tipped in favour of work; or, rather, labour. We shouldn’t mix up work and labour – work is something we do for ourselves with our community; labour is something we do for someone else. Labour is probably your least favourite thing to do; you might even hate it, justifying it by saying things like ‘I work (labour) to live’. This might cause you stress and anxiety – you are constantly being forced away from ‘work’ towards ‘labour’, towards what someone else wants you to do. 

Production and consumption

There’s a quote falsely attributed to Winston Churchill that states:

“You get a living by what you do, you get a life by what you give.”

It’s actually a popular marketing quote. It highlights the difference between ‘basic needs’ and ‘real fulfilment’ suggesting that while labour provides sustenance, giving back to others provides a meaningful life. But the quote implies you can’t have one without the other – you must make a living first. The quote supports a paternal version of the Production and Consumption system we live in.

We are all cogs in this ‘Production and Consumption’ system. 

We are both consumer ‘cogs’ and producer ‘cogs’. We feverishly work to consume more. Often our production is just enough to keep our heads above water. It’s driving the most desperate into the hands of the producers of authoritarian snakeoil: 1 in 10 Reform voters say they are “financially desperate; I cannot afford essentials such as food, rent or mortgage. I am already taking extreme measures such as skipping meals.” And in some cases the water we struggle in is self made – encouraged by the finance industry. An industry which desperately wants us indebted so it can maintain control and increase its imaginary money.

Production and consumption has been accelerating over the past 30 years but the model has been the driving force of our ‘developed’, ‘democratic’, world since the 18th Century. 

We now live in a world brimming with brands (including political brands) built to feed high levels of consumption – it’s a race to see who can win the most attention and in turn collect the most capital from that attention. These levels of consumption fuel record levels of production. The machine never stops, whether it’s a car-making machine, an entertainment-making machine or a machine that searches for both of these. 

But there’s a failure at the root of Production and Consumption. A failure that is double-edged.

Predictability and Politics

The first and most obvious part of this failure is that our shared planet is not an infinite resource – it cannot support unfettered production and consumption. At some point resources run out, systems fail, wars happen and people die. And if the system we use to guide us isn’t tuned in to the system that gives us life, the failures become catastrophic: we co-create the conditions for a mass extinction event.

The second part of the failure is less obvious but we can see it playing out around us. To truly succeed in production you need predictability; and predictability doesn’t like competition. That’s why big companies buy their competition: they don’t want competitors because that means they can’t control the price. 

Think about how shit our water is in the UK (and how much shit is in it!). Everyone needs water and the UK’s water authorities have a monopoly – allowing them to hold us all to ransom while paying themselves huge salaries and giving lazy hedge fund owners huge dividends (app. £66 billion since 2008) while leaving the water system to rot. (At least someone’s doing something about it.)

This activity is repeated all over the ‘marketplace’ – from entertainment to logistics, from the internet to energy. It also finds its way into politics. We’re given no meaningful choice between political parties – just more of the same, each party moving further and further towards a right wing agenda (which means more of the same) fuelled by an on and offline media machine that ensures the money always trickles up. The Production and Consumption machine keeps running, making more wealth for the already wealthy.

This means more labour for us, more money for them. 

Shit everywhere.

Break out now

Why don’t you check through your labouring life and add up all the times you labour for free?

In the cultural sector there’s weeks of unpaid labour, filling out funding forms, chasing commissions, pitching (like we did) for contracts – all of this is done for free to satisfy someone else’s needs. If you’re paid a salary then every time you labour beyond your hours you’re working for free – you are actually giving your employer your time. 

What’s even worse is your employer expects this – that’s why the person you used to work with was made redundant and you were fed excuses. You were told that one of you ‘had to go’, that profits were smaller than expected, or AI can do their job, or people ‘prefer’ automated tills (but the shareholders still receive their dividends). And if you are unlucky enough to be in precarious work, holding down more than one job, home working or labouring as a carer, then all your time is spent worrying about how you make ends meet and how best you can please the irrational demands of your employer (with a percentage of your earnings being taken at source by a greedy online ‘landlord’ or stolen by a private equity firm).

Given the fact we are all labouring for free at least some of our time, isn’t it time to get off the hamster wheel and start working? 

What’s more, if we share our work freely we can inspire one another to build on each other’s work – breaking the shackles of boredom, ubiquity and copyright.

Maybe we can’t give everything away for free, to begin with. Maybe we can start doing this by forming free working cooperatives – reciprocal networks where we support one another. 

Who knows where these cooperatives will lead…

Elsewhere in Absurdity...

Where we’ve been, where we’re going, what we’ve been baking...

• On Thursday Alex was on a lunchtime session with More In Common organised by the brilliant Phoebe at Unchecked UK about the economic narratives that resonate with Reform voters;
• On Friday Charlie is attending the Arts and Climate Gathering organised by Good Chance in the wake of the huge success of the play KYOTO at Soho Place;
• Also on Friday Alex is attending Conceptual Engineering: New Ideas for a Disrupted Age organised by our friends at Future Narratives Lab;
• Also on Friday Roc will be at the Pelican House Spring Party and a special session before that on how people are coping with collapse;
• And in preparation for the launch party of the latest Hard Art publication, Daddio!, we’ve been in the kitchen experimenting with cream doughnuts (well, our friend Caro has)...