The scholarship system was a piece of social engineering from some sort of long term generosity of mind of the people who set up that school. The dole, you know, why does the dole exist? It exists because somebody thought it was repulsive that people should be poor in a society where there was a lot of money going around, that some people should be very, very poor. It seemed objectionable. Doesn’t seem objectionable to a lot of people these days, which is interesting. So these forms of social engineering appeared and, as I say, I think they represent a sort of altruism, a generosity towards the future, which I think is just starting to find its time now.
We are now in a new era. We come from an era of scarcity, basically, economic scarcity – and when all of economics is based on the idea of scarcity and the idea of competition for resources. What we’re moving into, I think – this is explored in Paul Mason’s book Post Capitalism and in David Graber’s books and various other people are writing about it. What we’re moving into is an era of abundance. And co-operation. We’re super-productive, we’re going to become even more productive as we automate, and we’re going to become even less connected to the production, because automation means robotisation and it means that humans are less necessary to that process.
So, what are we all going to be doing? We’re going to be in a world of ultrafast change. It’s really accelerating at the moment and will continue to. And we’re going to have to somehow stay coherent. What are we going to be doing? I think we’re going to be even more full-time artists than we are now.
And I don’t just mean the professionals like me, I mean everybody, is going to have to be constantly involved in this activity that I was describing earlier of being able to resynchronise with each other, to connect things together, to be able to make adventurous mind games about different futures, to be able to understand things.
