Triton 47

Triton 47 › Money, work & society › After the PhD

Compelled to labor

· 410 words · 2 min read AI-assisted

Index note unemployed = free; books (Graeber, Standing, Bregman, Bookchin)

Mixed authorship: this post combines the author's own writing with text generated by an AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok or Google AI), usually pasted in and labelled by the author.

To AI:(via speech to text): recommend me books to get society from unemployment to employment. Unemployed people are just people who are free. They do not have work. Although in society they might need to beg because they need to eat, but they don’t always have to beg, they can just exist. That’s a buffer workforce. And of course they exist, their body’s mental skills decay. If they don’t practice it then they go to the norm. But what if one wants to recruit that workforce to make things happen? Although that’s just giving them the illusion that they will get work and money, but the reality is they will just be put to work. And they will lose their freedom of existing, but of course they will get a new experience. And of course the work will be done. Well, it only happens because there are so many people of working mindset that exist. And the people, they are looking for work, not realizing that the humans were not made to work, but they are wired to do, because they cannot farm their own land, fish their own food, or kill a cow they see in someone’s backyard because they don’t have any. The government has made, or the rule of ownership has been come, so how can these people eat? They can’t even pluck a fruit from the tree because the tree would belong to someone else. So they must just be looking for work, even if they did not want to work. Or even if they weren’t wired to work, they will work. So the action is a constrained function. And if this doesn’t work out in the world, what does? The person, if cannot eat, would just die, right?

AI:

Read the following to reconstruct grounded societal frameworks addressing structural unemployment, constrained agency, and enforced participation in labor markets:

  1. “Bullshit Jobs” – David Graeber
    Dissects the phenomenon of meaningless employment and challenges the assumption that work is inherently virtuous. Reveals how large portions of labor are performative and wasteful.
  2. “The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class” – Guy Standing
    Defines a growing class of insecure, gig-based, underemployed individuals. Offers policy paths like basic income and labor rights reform.
  3. “Utopia for Realists” – Rutger Bregman
    Advocates for universal basic income, shorter workweeks, and open borders. Includes historical analysis of full employment and its illusion.
  4. “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” – Murray Bookchin
    Argues for a society beyond compulsory labor, where automation

Original: https://triton7777.wordpress.com/2025/07/16/compelled-to-labor/