For Frithjof Bergmann, the point is that every person can find work in harmony with their own wishes, hopes, dreams, and talents, and that reorganizing work is the key to an alternative and a new culture.

Work can be understood as a polarity: work can exhaust and drain, but it can also be the opposite – something that gives strength, draws us into life, and gives us meaning. When it comes to work, and when we talk about sustainability in society, we should be interested in the question of power. The power that gives freedom, but also the power of better concepts of work, is the subject of this text. On the meta level it is an invitation to think about whether we want to remain servants of other masters, or whether we should take our fate more firmly into our own hands. To answer this, we first try to reach an understanding of the discussion around the “Grand Challenges” against which the world is struggling. Among these challenges, the gap between the obscenely rich and the devastatingly poor has a special position for “New Work”. We consider how the deepening trenches between the “desert people”, who have hardly any resources, and the “oasis people”, who revel in luxury, might be bridged. There seems to be no remedy for this. Unless a loud and comprehensible voice for something “new” begins to form. This new thing is often linked with hopes about digitalization. Over time, however, we have had to revise some of these romantic ideas of freedom through the digital network. Alienated, alone, and angry is what the digital revolution has really done to us. We were promised community, civics, and convenience. Instead we found ourselves confused, mistrustful, and without orientation.

D. Rushkoff warns: “The digital economy is going wrong. Everyone knows it, but nobody knows exactly why, let alone how to fix it. Workers are losing to automation, drivers are losing to Uber, investors are losing to algorithms, hotels are losing to Airbnb, and even tech developers are losing their visions to the demands of the start-up economy.”
It is not the digital itself, but rather the way we apply it. More a legacy of early corporatism and central currencies than a feature of digital technology. We are running the 21st-century digital economy on a 13th-century operating system.

The operating system for the next epoch could be New Work after Bergmann, with AI and blockchain as important tools for it.

So that this application of technology does not go wrong again, New Work New Culture considers which ethics, which concepts, and which terms this innovation requires, and negotiates the question of how the transition to a more sustainable society could succeed. Which alternatives to the world of work and to the growth economy are being attempted, and which strategies are crystallizing? We also highlight commonalities between different initiatives and schools (common-good economy, post-growth economy, basic income, Theory U, solidarity economy, Transition Towns, peer economy, New Work). In the analysis of today’s work society, we emphasize positive changes and diagnose an intensive shared movement of reflection in order to shape the important process of upheaval that is emerging in a deep transformation of the relations between economy, politics, government, and civil society.

Where are we going? How do we want to live?

In the part-time revue we call life, we are slowly coming to recognize that as a society we are somehow stuck. We can go neither forward nor back. The most beautiful side effect of this “dystopia” is that we can now recreate life itself, recode it. Out there is a new world, and in this new world you can redefine at every moment who you damn well want to be.

Navigating uncertainty

We could once again stand before the blank canvas and wait, wait, wait … endure ourselves … mirror the world within us, turn it around, and then, when we are certain, paint the next picture: the next picture of our society. Let us try to await the moment in which the new arises within us and then have the courage to bring the new into the picture in broad gestures.

New Work New Culture – tools for the next economy

What we need for this is the will and a few tools. We want to develop these further with `share your factory`. Our tools revolve around co-design, human-machine interfaces, and circular-economy solutions. They are intelligent applications insofar as they make networking, excitement, and also evaluation possible. Beyond that, we are for the first time connecting blockchain with micro-production.

Calling

The period around the coronavirus, with its unspeakable, hysterically excessive measures, did have one good side. Many people understood that change in work is possible and very present, and that control must not only come from outside, but also happens bottom up – and that this transformation begins, not least, with each individual. This pause was an impulse for NWNC to push once more in the attempt to bring about a model of work that makes it easier for all people on this planet to do what they really, really want. When asking what one is especially good at, where one senses meaning, happiness, and talent, it helps to negotiate wishes, longings, and abilities face to face. Nevertheless, for most people it is very difficult even to find out what they really, really want.
Sometimes it is a film, sometimes a conversation. Everyone probably has their own experiences. In any case, it already helps to have guidance and assistance.

How does it work, how does one find out what one really, really wants? As Frithjof Bergmann says, one does not find it like a tennis ball under a green tree. It takes time, guidance, tools, and a lot of communication to find this out, and there are also traditional structures and weighty interests that stand in the way of democratizing work and production. But with the Covid virus holding us in its breath, we are also experiencing the greatest experiment in the history of humanity concerning work. New Work New Culture wants to reshape this transformation on three levels:
1. Personal perspective: Do what you really, really want! Realize opportunities on the path to fulfilling activity.
2. Organizational perspective: testing new solutions based on the principles of decentralization and co-creation.
3. Technological perspective: Fair Pay re-evaluates work by means of AI and DLT and thereby also supports relocalization and climate protection.

Community Production

Community Production, or “Distributed Microproduction”, is a universe of personal and social making. We connect concrete places, actors, and tools. Innovation approaches around code and production receive a stage and a showcase. In the learning world of the New Factory, design is developed that advances forms of collaborative production into future practice. With this set of cultural techniques, a universally modelable, decentralized system of work and production exists, stretching its tentacles deep into the city and out into the world.

Socio-techniques such as “Share your Factory”

Share Your Factory wants to update the operating system of production and uses the real experimental environment for this. In this context, the project opens up diverse spaces of possibility for novel value-creation concepts. Forms of collaboration and decentralization will continue to gain relevance, and with 1hWork innovation efforts and technological trends can be constantly implemented in production and fairly accounted for through work input.

The economic and social designs derived from this (visions and scenarios) in turn provide the necessary knowledge base for further steps around products and technology sets of decentralized microproduction.
With the New Factory we develop reference architecture and technology. Know-how transfer takes place through pop-up factories, home delivery, and communication and learning offers for schools, universities, and vocational support institutions. A DIY stream and the Your Own Fabric Box, which comes to the population, describe current engineering competencies in a playful way in connection with a competition format. The longer-term goal is the designer as factory. The construction of entire micro-machine parks and mini production lines.