The Guardian recently posted a piece about a movement that sees in the robotization of the factory, the self-checkout machines at retail stores (these are not even robots), and Amazon's coming delivery drones, a post-work society where luxury is finally democratized. They call this techno-utopia: luxury communism. It's a world where machines do all of the work and, as a consequence, everyone has lots of free time. But I have a few problems with this new remix of an old brand of leftist futurism, the main of which begins by recalling the famous words of the former CEO of the Enron Corporation, Jeff Skilling: "You must cut costs ruthlessly by 50 or 60 percent. Depopulate. Get rid of people. They gum up the works."

Capitalism may speak in many languages, but it always says the same damn thing: "Get rid of people." And on top of that, capitalism has never desired to grant workers something as truly extravagant as free time, which is why it does not exist in any normal way in our society. There is only time at work and time not at work. And what you earn in the former pays for the latter. Free time exactly means free time: time that costs nothing, time you do not have to pay for. And the street is the place that has plenty of that kind of time, unearned time. Free time is the time of the homeless, the excluded. Against this kind of bad and pressing time, what you will find everywhere is an increase in the number of machines that make it harder and harder for you to earn the money needed to pay for the time when you aren't working. And so, a major structural change has to occur before we live in a society that has normalized and included time that actually costs nothing. Such a structural shift would require not reforms but a revolution and possibly lots of dead bodies.

But even if luxury communism were to be realized, it would mostly be empty because the robots and machines we're developing and deploying these days do mostly bullshit work (which is not be confused with David Graeber's bullshit jobs). Do we really need drones delivering packages in the sky? As David Owen points out in Green Metropolis, trucks are very efficient and do the job well. (Owen has a high opinion of trucks and a low opinion of automobiles.) These drones would be doing bullshit work—work that adds nothing to society but economic growth. In short, we do not need new and more machines; we need fewer of them. Our problem is overdevelopment, not underdevelopment. We should aim instead for a post-growth society and not a post-work one. Why? Because a post-growth society actually needs people to work. If you must cut your grass, and must own a lawn, then do it with your own energy (and best of all would be if that energy came from ugly produce). This kind of work is good for you and also the environment.

We find the situation in the future we're now in is that the only real way forward would be to do more work in our free time.