Tjark reads his deportation notice and can't believe it. He has been working unregistered for a temporary employment agency for a few months now and keeps himself afloat by providing support services in various care facilities. Mirko his boss was happy with him. He earned 370 euros this week. It looked so good! Now it says he has to go back to Afghanistan. His flight costs the state about twice as much.
Hanno the Uber driver is sleeping in his car. He's just doing this so he doesn't get fired. Because if he doesn't respond immediately to his algorithm-controlled service app, there will be trouble with the boss. So he has set an alarm that lets him start up reliably every time the city and the company think they can use his driving talent again.
Selma Ennaifer, the Tunisian Foreign Minister, speaks to representatives of the European Commission in an almost pleading tone. The reason? The EU's travel restrictions due to the pandemic mean that 70 percent (!) of the businesses in Tunisia, a tourist destination, have to close.
Three very different stories and yet similarly symbolic of the misery we are in. The examples have the theme of work and failure in common. In particular, it becomes clear which serious systemic errors are built into the current globally oriented work organization.

The gray perm of my hometown Linz, the family, and the school triggered a freedom gene in me early on. Initially relatively pampered and brought up in a middle-class environment, in addition to my studies, I was able to sip the fruits of our work system as an envelope inserter for a textile company, in the post office packing hall, in the Telekom call center and finally during community service in a retirement home. Even though it was relatively well paid, I thought to myself, “Well, brack!”. Work in the wage system appears to be one crippling oppressive attack. The lack of freedom didn't change fundamentally later in television as an editor and editor. Instead of getting a taste of truth, creativity and fame, the wrong people at the controls – namely politically acceptable news peddlers – spoil the actually great opportunities in a moving image medium. Since life isn't a jump-and-run game where you have 3 lives, I realized I had to get out of there. So, somewhat naively, I started my own personal liberation movement and set off towards film and art. I had to reorganize the lifelong issues of education, training and work for myself, which firstly wasn't that easy and secondly led to the realization: self-employment also has bars, just in plush ones. Not least because of this, I have been spending a lot of time since then, in addition to paid work, also initiating projects that deal with finding out how we as a society could escape from being held hostage by the job system. And that's exactly what this article is about.
Utopia for Realists
How do we change that with work? With digitalization, workplaces cease to be fixed places and begin to transform into states. I want to get you to think about these conditions together with New Work-New Culture. We could spend 15 minutes philosophizing, dreaming, pondering how we can ensure that we achieve something better in the rapidly accelerating transformation process of work.
A key to this is Bergmann's concept of “really, really wanting”. The New Work “WWW” has little or nothing to do with self-realization and self-optimization. According to Bergmann, New Work is not about a little improvement, not about job crafting. New Work – New culture doesn't just touch the surface and esotericism is a horror for us. NANK is an evolutionary, philosophical concept of freedom with a focus on work.

Work goes deep into the understanding of personality and the values ​​and core beliefs associated with it. It also comprehensively defines and dominates relationship values ​​in the world. New Work, as Frithjof Bergmann sees it, has nothing to do with love bombing, shining in the sun or the value of being used in itself. It is much more about the intrinsic motivation of what is present within oneself and how strongly it is perceived. In comparison to the power of external influences, people's own desires do not pull with strong ropes, but hang on a thin and easily torn, delicate thread. New Work calls this phenomenon the “poverty of desire”. The human being itself is far too often, first and foremost, weak and fragile. People quickly become discouraged, depressed and tame. Therefore, it is easy to intimidate or even train people, and many people are shy and withdrawn. Frithjof Bergmann also calls the phenomenon self-ignorance; beyond the individual, he speaks of the “concept of unlived life,” which often shapes working society. Handle
In the first part of this article I would like to outline Bergmann's New Work in more detail and embed it in the current socio-political context. It will be an attempt to position the essential elements, calling and community production, within the changing economic framework. The second part is about what role digitalization plays in the transformation process of work, what is going wrong and how we could transfer this into a new, more humane era. I refer to the current developments surrounding COVID and the long-term major forces of democratization, automation, globalization and monetary control. In the last part, I present our current approach to how a technological tool could be used to specifically improve the situation on the labor market. "Ø – The value of an hour of work" attempts to develop a value system for work secured using DLT (Blockchain) technology. Ø  is an index that uses artificial intelligence to learn how to correct incorrect dispositions and unequal evaluations of work and systemic errors in salary issues. From data already collected, supplemented with new evaluation approaches, a factor is calculated by which an existing remuneration should be multiplied in order to better reflect the social value of a job. So that as little ideology as possible sets the tone, we try to record the activities themselves with a matrix of skill sets.

Both soft factors such as creativity and empathy as well as hard criteria such as the level of education required for this activity or the average work speed required are taken into account.

In the part-time review that we call work, we slowly come to the realization that we as a society are somehow stuck when it comes to work. Economic growth madness, automation. Digitalization. It doesn't go forward or back. According to Bergmann, New Work has been thinking about why this is and how we could change it for 40 years and is proposing something new.
New Work-New Culture firmly believes that with smart changes to the work system we can have a positive impact on the whole world. Calling – the intrinsic calling – linked to collaborative production methods will revolutionize working life and the way we live. Technologically, the unbelievable is already possible. As a private person, you can dock your phone to the AI ​​"GPT-3" and have a universe of possibilities that goes beyond your imagination and initially flattens you in its abundance.
For example, you can have fictitious conversations with Thunberg, Chomsky, Musk, Obama, the Pope or the Chinese civil rights activist Wei Jingsheng. For example, if you ask what is going wrong with digitalization and what the next right step would be, artificial intelligence provides the answer from the data of the published statements of these thinkers that it is up to us whether it turns out badly or well. But there are also amazingly more useful, logical and authentic-sounding answers to the really pressing questions of our time. Even scientists who work on it are left with a feeling somewhere between euphoria and bewilderment when they propose solutions to the climate problem. In some cases, these experts can no longer even understand exactly how AI comes up with its solutions when it invents new things in goods logistics, resource conservation and smart health robotics.
Theoretically, everyone with the Internet has swarm intelligence in their pocket as a tool for making decisions. Theoretically, firstly, access is limited and secondly, this oracle is the machine learning substrate of “everyone’s opinion”. The question is not just philosophical, but quite practical, whether this really has anything to do with intelligence. This supposedly collectively secured data is available from the perspective of a programmer and an institution that decides on the data composition of the model. To what extent this data is ethically compromised, to what extent it is just mainstream, to what extent it is the devil is currently being researched. What we already know is that they are similar to Wikipedia, white, male and dominated by rich countries.

New Work, with its approach of listening individually to what you need and what you want, helps you navigate uncertainty. When it comes to entering this vast, white and uncharted field of new possibilities, we need a strong inner compass. Because, despite the revolutionary framework, there may still be a marathon ahead of us before we synchronize sufficiently and develop common cultural techniques that raise the potential of what is possible and ultimately enable a better life for many. But what we are already dealing with is an acceleration of transformation processes, which people are sometimes facing with fear.
There has always been change, especially at work. But now we see the beginning of a new era. On the one hand, it is the obvious acceleration of upheavals that provides good reasons to speak of a new era. But it is also the nature of the fragility. As Václav Havel once said, it is as if something were exhausting and destroying itself. But what now rises from the rubble? How can we deal with these breaks?
New Work – New Culture is interested in the symptoms of decay and departure and the contradictions as an expression of a deeper transformation of work as we know it. When it comes to work and meaning, we still long for something different. It is not yet possible to define this other. But the fog is clearing. A first idea of ​​what the new thing could look like grows as the offspring of a kind of collective longing. What we are seeing now is that a new form of being present and being present is emerging. This presence not only has something to do with digital 5G acceleration, but also something to do with authenticity, with being close to what you do every day.

From the very beginning – and that was back in the 70s – the New Work did not want to regret the end of the job system, but rather to celebrate it frenetically. As Hegelians, we believe that we are not born free from the beginning, but that the path to freedom is difficult to achieve. And the job system has made people terribly unfree. In the classic wage-earning society, optimizing a company means optimizing “human resources”. People with individual wishes, skills and living conditions are referred to as resources and we want to use them as willing employees as multi-flexibly and effectively as possible. More and more people, and not just since Corona, are no longer playing along. People fall out of their roles, things are no longer in their place. Politicians have looked at continuities for too long and overlooked the radical epochal break around 1980. The topics have changed. An entire intellectual coordinate system has shifted: people torn between the individual and society, oscillating between the individual psyche and that of the masses. The individual's body is hidden into the social body. There is also a pull from desire to need, from a vertical to a horizontal order. In this situation, New Work calls for a sustainable strengthening of the individual's free will and a collaborative spirit. Finding out what you want, finding your calling, can help defuse problems when navigating uncertainty if we allow a little more flamboyance for what is “naturally possible”. During the industrial era, the vast majority of work was done using muscle power; it was dull, grueling, exhausting backbreaking work. In the post-industrial age, this work is almost entirely done by machines. The first “Dark Factories” are in Taipei. The production halls there remain dark because in normal operation only robots with sensors and not a single person work. Regardless of the current flight restrictions, Lufthansa has plans in place to manage business in the future with 40,000 fewer employees. It is estimated that artificial intelligence and augmented reality will make 30-50 percent of current jobs obsolete in the next 10 years. What will we work on? What will we work on? We don't know for sure. But what we can say is that the work will not stop. In order to overcome the "Great Challenges" – poverty, environment, health – in society, billions of people can and must get involved.

If we let machines do the dull work, two thirds of all work could be employment that makes you stronger, that is tailored to you, that advances you, that serves your self-realization. This represents enormous progress, because in the past only small privileged elites – artists, intellectuals and inventors – could enjoy the hearty lifeblood of such work. A cleverly linked network of collaboration, combined with entrepreneurship and fair remuneration mechanisms, can offer protection against job loss, downward mobility and poverty. The core message: 'Work on what you really, really want!' This important nucleus of freedom joins research and discovery in 'Community Production' and combines work on hi-tech machines with a good touch of entrepreneurial spirit.

Historically, evolution was in the hands of nature. Now it is suddenly largely in human hands, but we must be careful and use our scientific know-how as responsibly as possible. The task of today's young people, the "Transition Generation", will be to lead humanity through the coming time of chaos, danger and opportunity. In order for them to have a chance of being successful, the older ones have to leave space and resources.
One of the forces that is working on a future that continues to be unedifying for most people is the so-called stakeholder capitalism, whose prophets are more likely to be assigned to the corporatocracy and where the signs currently predominate that they want to continue their plunder of the planet essentially undisturbed. By the way, we don't believe that there are particularly evil individuals at work here, not even the so-called ruling class, but rather that the system is currently designed in such a way that greed ruins everything in the end.
But there is a much more inconspicuous broad emancipation movement with a gigantic sea of ​​projects that work on the complete opposite. What these projects have in common is that they specifically address civil society solutions to the Great Challenges. When it comes to the topic of work, we include movements such as Transition Towns, P2P Foundation, D64, the Common Good Economy, Post-Growth Society, Solidarity Economy and Attac.
There is also a growing public backlash against inhumane technology, which has already been identified by the World Economic Forum as a threat and hurdle to overcome.  In paternalistic governance efforts for what is supposedly good for people, social engineering and social control are expanded. The “Great Reset” agenda, which has now officially been launched, seeks to guarantee protection from harm that is non-negotiable – in order to reduce concerns and suppress dissent. Basically, it's about building and maintaining the tolerance of the world's population.
But if you look at the ongoing conflicts that are currently taking place on the streets – there are the yellow vests, Friday for Future, Blacklife Matters and the fairly opaque composition of various lateral thinkers in the German-speaking world, including the climax of the strangely symbolic civil war scenes in the US Capitol – then these are very dark images of an escalation of dissent and distrust of governance with all its characteristics. Disorientation and escalating protest as a toxic cocktail that of course carries great risks, but which can also shake people awake and make them aware of change.

Given the dramatic change brought about by a simple virus, we are also living through the greatest experiment in human history when it comes to work. The health and economic crisis, which we are desperately trying to overcome, is a very good time for change. At this moment, in which the "normal state", the usual processes of a society, are fundamentally disrupted, it becomes clear to what standards everyday life is usually based. In his play “The Temporary Ones” shortly after the Second World War, Elias Canetti recreated how the relationship between the individual and society can be generally thought of. Of particular importance is the moment of a collective borderline experience, the experience of the dissolution of all social norms. It is this “lawless” experience that we also associate with work and how it will evolve. NewPay. The momentum is there! How this “state of emergency” should be assessed politically and culturally is something that even very clever minds differ on. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in the first lockdown, lamented the irrevocable loss of our last autonomous spaces for thought and action and the totalitarian triumph of state power. Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito contradicted him and explained the lack of alternatives to the concrete measures and at the same time called for a critical examination of the mechanisms of globalization, neoliberalism and bio-political forms of government. Slavoj Žizek went one better in the debate and saw the real philosophical revolution of events in the fact that the virus could strip away the entire scope of capitalist madness and, on a global level, realign the relationship between people and communities from an existential perspective. "There's a new world out there and in that new world you can redefine every moment. You can be whoever you damn well want to be!"
Ultimately, all interpretation is pointless; what comes has to be shaped. Generations Y and Z have the Herculean task to do this and “increased self-attention” is a term that gives hope here. On the one hand, there is risk aversion, narrow-mindedness, rules, perfectionism and the search for security in teams and peer groups as an expression of the need for stability in a constant crisis; A kind of “plush commoning” is emerging. On the other hand, this generation has an almost religious desire for self-realization, self-economy, multi-optionalism and rejection of traditional Puritan work virtues. Seen positively, it is a new 'being with yourself', a presence that characterizes this generation.

You're looking for a sense of belonging, a purpose, perhaps a little meaning. These characteristics are not unimportant when it comes to emancipating New Work. The most beautiful side thing of all “Dystopia” is that we can now re-create, re-code life itself.

Article by Ilja Weisz – igor@servus.at
We trust in work
New Work New Culture
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The social think tank New Work-New Culture has been dealing with work matters for 40 years.
In the spirit of Victor J. Papanek – “The green imperative: ecology and ethics in design and architecture” – NANK sees huge potential in the redesign of work and production and seeks and finds answers to the “Great Challenges” with Transition Design.
In recent years, NANK has tried to create positive images for "navigating uncertainty" with various exhibition formats at Ars Electronica and the Vienna Biennale, among other things, and thus raise awareness of solutions to the work dilemma.
NANK Co:llaboratory is a social think tank that researches the 'change of work'
NANK Co:llaboratory conveys the work philosophy concept of 'New Work'
NANK Co:llaboratory develops social design tools around work
Project collaborators: Elodie Bioux, Lisa Kärcher, Frithjof Bergmann, Felix Zabel