The idea of automation is one that has almost always interested me, and my views have changed violently over the years.
My views used to be similar to yours, in that I saw the possibility of zero-work as a chance for widespread liberation. But there were many problems I had and still have with this notion.
I will name drop a lot, and I justify this by encouraging you to read up on any ideas you find particularly difficult or interesting, and as such I will try to provide pointers.
Capitalism, technology, civilization, production; these are not things I think can be explained in purely economic/material things. Woven into these issues are values, ideologies, philosophies, theologies etc. Whilst economic exploitation, and economic privilege, do go some way towards explaining the world today, there comes a point where an honest appraisal of the world cannot be explained by a class exploiting the rest of humanity for their own personal power and pleasure. The fact is that a lot of rich people are totally miserable. They work long hours, incur great amounts of stress, worrying about numbers in their bank accounts, numbers in general. They engage in self destructive as well as aggressive behaviour. Why? Because they sincerely believe in notions of material value and production.
Society functions to produce more to make more society to produce more to make more... on and on forever. This is the ideology of the modern world. Instead of engaging and experiencing with the world as actual, existent, sensory beings, we are producers and consumers of material commodities. The experiences are secondary to what we materially derive from them. To steal a phrase from the Situationist Guy Debord, ‘being is replaced by having, which is replaced by appearance’.
This draws upon many ideas. For starters, Max Stirner’s idea of the Spook; an idea that can ‘possess’ an individual and make them act as if that idea has a meaningful corporeal existence. Typical examples are great causes or social projects, such as a Nation or Civilization, to which citizens must sacrifice their lives to build, maintain, and grow, but St Max extends this even to notions such as Humanity, or Truth, or Justice. The same can be said of Production; it is concieved of as some actual existent fact about the world to which indiviudals must devote some portion of their lives to increasing. It is this notion of Production, and its counterpart Consumption, that the development of technology is pushed towards. The logical endpoint of current techno-productionist system is not a kind of ‘fully automated luxury space anarchism’, but in fact the removal of the human element altogether, with automated production for its own sake.
This of course doesn’t even consider the cost of reaching the level of technological advancement you describe. It is fair to say that technology now is not used for the creation of more anarchy, but for the expansion of Society, and the projection of homogeneity and conformity. What will the mental state of these future humans be with the advent of full automatism? How far down the rabbit hole of ecological destruction will we have to go to develop, produce, and maintain this technology?
Now consider the roles of Master and Slave. There is a large body of theory that states that the only way that any individual copes with being a slave is to be a master, and that to be a master you must first be a slave. That is to say everyone is both a slave and a master, though of course to different things. This might mean that a working man is slave to his boss, but might be master of his wife, or children. The woman might be slave to her husband, but could be master to a poorer woman, coloured woman, or perhaps her children again. What about the King, or the Capitalist? Their mastery is obvious, but what about their slavery? The King is slave to notions of Honour perhaps, to Prestige, to Law, to Kingdom. The Capitalist to Profit, to Production. What are the implications of everyone having their own personal robot-slave? Surely anarchy is the attempt to break away from this simultaneous domination and submission, and I wonder whether automation is necessarily the way towards this.
I have my grave doubts that technology can lead us towards anarchy. Look at what it is used for right now; what technology there is that is directed towards human experience is almost exclusively used to escape the world that we have built pursuing that very technology. Think of TV, of the Internet, of the emergence of Virtual Reality. These exist to remove us from our reality, to place us somewhere else, to mediate our relations through things. It seems to me part of a systematic attempt to objectify every aspect of reality, from person to relation. Are we really the masters of Technology, or do we serve Science in the pursuit of Technology?
