Ebook: The Manifesto of the Happily Unemployed

A booklet by Guillaume Paoli (and a group of unnamed others), who also wrote Demotivational Training, and who has been thinking and writing about work for decades, in France, London, and Germany.

This manifesto has been around in German for years, and made a big splash among people, which got even bigger when it was falsely reported as being "a movement of 150,000 members." Paoli is charming, and charmingly modest, and this is, like Demotivational Training, a worthy addition to the books that challenge the primacy of work-to-survive/work-to-thrive, a challenge that only get sharper in these days of much conversation and experimentation with UBI.

We all know that unemployment cannot be abolished. If a company is doing badly, there are job cuts, if it is doing well, money is invested in automation-and this also means job cuts. In the past a workforce was called for because there was work. Now work is desperately called for because there is a workforce and no one knows what to do with these workers because machines are faster, better, and cheaper. Mankind has always dreamed of automation. Two thousand three hundred years ago Aristotle, clearly one of the Happy Unemployed, said: "If every tool could perform its own work when ordered [ ... ] if thus shuttles wove and quills played harps of themselves, master craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves."

Now this dream has been fulfilled, yet everyone experiences it as a nightmare because social change hasn't kept pace with technological change. This process is irreversible. Workers aren't going to take over again from robots and machines.