Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [191]
The core ideas of hybrid work are simple.
Hybrid work is fun. A variety of work is more fun and more rewarding than repeating one task.
Work projects and collaborative tasks you choose are more satisfying than those you are coerced into doing.
Hybrid work is inherently flexible. If you don't like a task or collaboration, seek another.
Hybrid work responds to your interests and talents and to the needs of your community.
Hybrid work celebrates creating value. If you're creating music, art, theater, food, joy or a hundred other creative enterprises then the line between "fun" and "work" fades.
Creating value—be it maintaining an overgrown trail, collecting compost, working out a "good governance" set of transparent rules for a committee, mentoring someone else, organizing a multi-event street fair, tinkering with a new practical software application or a thousand other tasks both mundane and creative—gives your life purpose.
Service to others or a community gives your life meaning.
Hybrid work is a choice in today's economy for those with low-debt, low-cost lifestyles. As formal jobs become scarce, then many will have few opportunities for fulltime employment and thus embracing the endless possibilities of hybrid work will be the healthy, fulfilling choice.
Hybrid work honors and values the mundane necessary tasks of culture: collecting the garbage, sorting out the compost, weeding the garden, keeping an eye on the kids, helping the elderly get some exercise, caring for pets, providing security, and so on. The mundane and the creative and the paid and unpaid share the same places of honor in hybrid work.
15. Join or construct networks (transparent non-privileged parallel structures) that diffuse concentrations of power. In today's global economy, capital is rarely concentrated and locally controlled. Thus union organizing is difficult because global capital simply moves elsewhere when employees demand a larger share of the corporate income.
Nonetheless, the concept of diffusing or counteracting concentrations of power (resisting financial and political dominance by an Elite or cartel) is still valid because local government remains accessible to citizen influence and pressure, and even multinational corporate/financial institutions must obey local laws.
At the community level, an Elite might dominate the school board or other institution which controls concentrations of authority or assets: planning department, transportation council, police oversight committee, and so on. Once the Elite becomes self-serving and no longer serves the public good, then it is our duty to unseat that Elite or attempt to diffuse its power (add a feedback loop which did not exist before).
Naturally, every Elite, no matter how small or localized, will resist any dilution of its power. Thus the strategy is to form self-organizing groups and networks which are large enough and robust enough to match the concentrated power of Elites.
Alternatively, citizens can bypass the entire established Power Elite and form alternative/parallel structures: charter schools, farmers market co-ops, and other types of parallel informal power structures which operate independently of status quo structures dominated by Elites.
One example of this is to simply pay off and then close credit cards and other loans owed to the banking cartel and establish local merchant credit as needed. Small contractors have accounts at the local lumberyard which they pay off monthly. This is a form of local credit that requires no global banking cartel's involvement.
A web-based self-organized local group could share local credit availability (local credit union, informally organized