Death to work or work to death. Statement not question. This is the binary choice for so many after years of exploitation in the working class of most modern economies. The same economies which produced broad gains in income, social class, life expectancy, access to healthcare, and a myriad of other quality of life improvements also produced additional distance between the outliers and the middle ground in the same categories. In the United States, the median income for individuals and households has increased since 1970, but the middle income segment is shrinking and the low income segment is stagnant. This same economy enabled the private commercialization of space exploration by multiple parties while nearly 12% of the population receives food assistance from the government. Complex endeavors such as space travel and nuclear weapons (delivered at the greatest distances by space travel) historically require the efforts of leading nation states with vast natural resources, advanced engineering and manufacturing capabilities, human capital, a money printing press, and an existential crisis to defend. In the example of privatized commercial space exploration, the money printing press was and is the compression of wages paid to low income workers paired with regulatory favoritism to select businesses. The examples of exploitation are numerous and compelling.

An anti-work movement became prominent in American workplaces and online communities in 2021, with the movement focusing on enabling individuals to end working. This movement often is labeled in media reports as the Great Resignation. My experiences indicate labeling anything as “great” while in progress creates a condition to prevent seeing the even “greater” event potentially underway. One hypothesis is we are in period of rapid change from a rebellion of anti-work focusing on individual empowerment to open revolt against work by the collective.

As with other social movements, when leadership is ineffective the participants begin to rebel against authority. When scattered rebellion does not achieve the desired change, revolution can occur rapidly and for unexpected reasons. In the 20th century, the Iranian revolution occurred during a period of relative prosperity and was driven by the working class and middle class revolting against policies perceived as benefiting elites rather than traditional causes of revolution such as wartime defeat, a financial crisis, or a military coup. But to label the discontent of labor as unexpected is to ignore the cause and effect relationships that seemingly are obvious to even the casual observer. Why should we not expect a warehouse worker to experience deep anger while watching a company owner thank the warehouse worker for paying for a rocketship to space? Why should we not expect the warehouse worker to take action to level the playing field a bit, especially if the leveling action results in more personal security in the form of food, healthcare, and overall quality of life?

The premier thinkers (and doers) of the 20th century knew this all too well:

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.

Richard Buckminster Fuller – architect, designer, futurist

But instead of using technological advances to support our society on Earth, the advances were used to enable the richest of our society to escape the bounds of normal human existence.

While rebellion rarely grows into true revolution, history has a way of repeating itself.