The real harm isn't the imaginary laziness you fear here.. It's scaled political power that allows groups to exploit others.
> What would it look like in your town? I don't know, but I don't need to
This sounds a lot like a non-answer. Perhaps I would understand what you're talking about better if you explained how you believe it would work in your town where you do have more context.
Forget all that tech. "Localism" couldn't even produce a single 2B pencil, which is such a trivial thing when we consider the scale of society as it is today.
I was honestly hoping there was going to be a better answer than this handwavy nonsense.
I'm not. I am suggesting that if you took the world as it exists today, and strongly turned down the volume on "everybody has to work," the world would improve, and that labor at the end of a pointy stick is not necessary to keep things going, and generally makes things worse.
Yes, the mix of goods and services could perhaps drastically change. E.g. if you love throwing away your 3 year old iPhone for a new one, I'm sorry, you will suffer; you'd probably have to deal with repaired phones with interchangeable parts. I think that's probably a better place.
The idea that you can just not work is not realistic.
The "pointy stick" you are talking about is nature, as in we will die without working to survive. You aren't entitled to the labour of others to ensure your survival.
You can either work at survival, eg: growing food to eat, building shelter, making clothes, etc, or you can have others do that while you provide something else.
No reasonable person FACTUALLY disputes what you're saying about work; it's so something-like-tautological and obvious that you should all think about why people seem to parrot it over and over.
It's not because human beings are likely to keel over and stop working in the face of nature. It's because it's a longstanding political wedge used by the powerful to get working classes to go against each other.
Even if you are willing to go back in time to a simple farm in a small town, you are still taking for granted that you will have people helping you survive. And you still aren't entitled to their labour. They will help you plant your field if you help them plant theirs. The scale of our society has changed, but the transactions haven't.
In any case, you seem dead set on misrepresenting or misunderstanding what I'm saying. If you're not going to address my actual arguments, then kindly get lost. You're wasting my time
That's how I see it anyway. I'm a techno-optimist, given the nature of technology in our species' development.
E.g. I'd argue that the biggest medical improvement of my lifetime was in a sense a step backwards, in that it was our collective discovery and consequent reduction in smoking.
You can of course go full relativism and say that our society cannot be judged as better or worse than any other, but I think that's disingenuous.
Its quite notable that modern medics has made its fair share of opium addicts. I don't know whether that's a feather in the modern cap or not
Also, how can you accuse everyone else of being a benevolent dictator when your suggestion is just as impossible to implement?
Do you have an equitable way to solve this issue?
Or maybe people who don't do strictly necessary work still need to do something. And maybe you consider that "sacrificial", I consider it "contributing"