FAQ




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Then you are like most people. It is hard to find out what you really, really want to do. You do not find what you really want to do like a green apple under a tree. It requires unsparing honesty, self-reflection, and precise attention to yourself. It also requires trying things out and guidance to discover what strengthens you. One of the goals of New Work is to help people do exactly that.

We have found that the large majority of people, when they are given time and space to find out what they truly and seriously want, want to do something meaningful: something that helps other people, something that makes the world better in some way.

Most directly and centrally through the development of Community Production, which can provide both meaningful activity and material goods for people who are currently unemployed.

This is the idea that some of the most recently invented technologies can now be used to make products we need ourselves. Perhaps the most revolutionary achievement of our time is the development of technologies such as generative manufacturing processes, blockchain, IoT, and AI, which enable people to make advanced products in „small spaces“. These include electricity, buildings, household appliances, phones, and electric cars. It is, however, very unlikely that you can manage much of this alone. You need other people who can show you what to do, with whom you can share infrastructure costs, and with whom you can cooperate in other ways to make this kind of production possible.

The internet is a good example of how you can do many things yourself that previously required a specialist, such as publishing an essay. What the internet has done for information, new technologies are now doing for production. What once required a warehouse full of different machines and an assembly line can now be done with a much smaller number of very versatile machines in a small space. One goal of New Work is to explore, enable, and spread such technologies.

Not quite. You can already do some of it, depending on where you live and how flexible you are. In many places there are now community gardens, such as networks in Detroit, where you can contribute a few hours per week of time, know-how, and work and receive produce in return. Associations such as the Dane County Time Bank allow you to contribute work hours in exchange for work hours from other members. These are established strategies that allow you to meet some of your most important needs. One goal of New Work is to help build an infrastructure that allows you to take care of more of your needs in this way. There are professional facilities such as the Grand Garage in the Tabakfabrik Linz in Austria, a 4,000 m2 publicly accessible digital fabrication laboratory with robots, welding equipment, 3D printers, laser cutters, and more. It offers training in the use of equipment for producing goods, from furniture and bicycles to solar panels and electronics. Some projects developed there include the construction of energy-efficient houses, cars, and, most impressively, copies of the very machines used in the same laboratory.

First, many of the technologies promoted by New Work are already very low-cost. We recommend existing technologies and processes around new kinds of building materials, water filters, and energy generators that can be used even by impoverished communities with minimal effort. We also try to keep up with research and constantly look for improved, even less expensive technologies. Digital fabrication equipment like that used by Incite Focus naturally required some capital, for example through grants, to get started. At Incite Focus in Detroit and at the Grand Garage in the Tabakfabrik Linz, all funds used to start the facility could be repaid through user fees, partnerships with universities and industry, and even through the sale of products made there; the facilities are now fully self-sustaining. Less elaborate fab labs and maker spaces exist in a growing number of communities, with a well-established ethic of sharing designs and techniques. There are already freely available designs for using a 3D printer to make a 3D printer, and we have every reason to assume that the costs of such tools will become increasingly affordable.

Cheaper to make? Probably not. Cheaper for you? Well, even if something costs only a few cents in the factory, it still has to be delivered to you and advertised to you, and everyone from the parent corporation to the distributor to the retailer takes a share. So yes, we expect that, with appropriate Community Production infrastructure, many goods, though definitely not all, can be acquired in this way more cheaply than by buying them in a retail store.

The aim is to use as much recycled and waste material as possible. In Detroit, for example, there is a lot of wood from abandoned and often destroyed houses. Buildings can be made from old buildings. Recycled plastic can be used for some 3D prints. Also remember that when you make a product yourself, you can ensure that the materials you use are environmentally friendly. You know exactly what happens before and after, that it was made locally, and so on. You can also customize it in a way Wal-Mart cannot: you can adapt clothing individually, add your logo or other design elements, and truly use your imagination to create things that are exciting and highly personal to you.

No. People who are ready and able to enter into these skills can benefit immediately from these technologies by making things themselves that they then do not have to buy. For others, who cannot or do not want to do that, or who prefer a mixture of guidance and doing it themselves, supporting them is a central goal of many New Work-friendly groups. Incite Focus in Detroit, Betahouse in Berlin, Hei in Munich, and Happylab in Vienna train people in the use of these technologies. So we are not proposing that division of labor disappears. As with time banking, there are many ways to exchange different forms of help and effort outside the traditional work system.

No. New Work does not require a community to adopt a family-like organizational model in which goods are simply shared. We do, however, recommend and facilitate arrangements for shared ownership and emphasize that this is the only way to make a community garden, a maker space, or other shared facilities available to most people. A facility may be operated by a nonprofit organization, a public institution, or a for-profit company. Think of how people in an apartment building share washing machines and perhaps a pool. Think of the YMCA, credit unions, public libraries, copy centers, and the different ways in which we finance and organize educational institutions. New Work advocates whatever kinds of organizations actually work effectively, without ideological prejudice for or against any particular type of organization. We are interested in a scalable blueprint for new economic arrangements, not an idyllic arrangement in which we all have to hold hands and sing.

See above. Specific New Work projects can be financed by the participating people, through grants, by entrepreneurs or companies, especially B Corps, and/or by government. As the technologies for New Work become cheaper and fascinating new tools such as blockchain, IoT, and AI applications become available as open source, the question of cost will become less and less central.

Yes, the employment system is already changing by itself; we would almost describe this as a collapse. We predict that new technologies will reduce the need for labor, leading to ever higher unemployment and a wider gap between rich and poor. The current official strategy of trying ever harder to accelerate economic growth will probably not succeed, so we need a new approach. We must take ownership of the freedom that better technology now makes possible and find out how we as a society will live in this new world. New technologies can be suppressed or monopolized by existing companies, and much is going wrong in digitalization. We should take joint action to ensure that the emerging decentralized technologies are widely distributed and somehow remain connected with our essential core. We must actively educate ourselves as world citizens so that we can use these advantages together.

Developing and explaining strategies for handling these fixed costs is another important part of New Work, and we will publish more precise details on each of these areas on this website. In broad terms, this is not only about using new technologies, but about new, community-based ways of structuring our efforts: a new culture of stronger cooperation, not a commune, in which people have time, for example, to care for older people, teach one another, and look after one another. Such efforts will not replace the need for work income with which such goods can be paid for in traditional ways, but we think that surprisingly large progress on these costs is possible.

No. Part of the awakening associated with New Work is to find out what you really need in order to live a satisfying life, rather than what consumer culture says you need. This is not about demonizing luxury, leaving no room for enjoyment, or refusing an abundant life. But if you are an affluent Westerner, there is a high probability that your lifestyle includes many unnecessary excesses that you do not actually need and that exist only because our work system popularizes unnecessary behavior in order to secure its own existence. If you choose more New Work, you are more likely to be able to choose between a life-threatening full-time job with unnecessary excesses and a truly meaningful activity without those excesses. But this decision ultimately remains yours. At the same time, New Work is definitely not about ascetic self-denial. On the contrary, we believe that our current job-centered attitude does not efficiently provide people with what they really need, and that restructuring the cultural and economic environment in which we make our consumption choices would, in the vast majority of cases, make us richer and above all improve our quality of life without losing anything that matters.



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