A few years ago I decided I was sick and tired of working shit jobs for shit pay. even the cool local anarcho-friendly worker-owned cooperative wanted to pay me $16/hour to do graphic design with them and billed their clients at $72 / hour. There was no boss to skim off the top, but rent in the bay area is insane and their office building and state of the art computers cost a lot of money, money that had to come out of the proceeds of their labor before they could afford to pay themselves. And that’s just no fun. So I started advertizing on craigslsit and set myself up as a graphic designer working from home. The job is still kinda boring and I’m not thrilled about all my clients, but I get to set my own hours, work as little or as much as I feel like, and I don’t have to pay a boss to tell me what to do. (Incidentally, it may suprise some of you that I have a job at all, but the thing about giving my music away for free / donation is that I don’t get paid for it…)
I’ve been self-employed for a bit over 2 years now and it’s good times, for the most part. The hardest thing about making the switch - aside from taking that first leap into the unknown - has been learning to motivate myself to work and manage my own time in a way that lets me do everything I need to get done efficiently, keep my clients happy, and still leave me plenty of time for music, activism, and just plain being a human. It’s was one thing to free myself from wage slavery (though, come to think of it, I still get paid an hourly wage. but at least I set it myself and don’t have to give a portion of it to my boss…) and it was another thing entirely to figure out how to keep from going totally broke. Learning to self-manage has been a long tough proccess, but is a critical one for anyone interested in smashing the tyranny of bosses and creating a self-managed society.
In that spirit I present to you the following flash movie, courtesy of No Media Kings.
They also have a text version (here) and a comic version, also available from their website. Check ‘em out!
Just a quick post today to let ya’ll know that my partner, the lovely and supremely talented Laura Noel, has just made her first album available on Jamendo.com as a free download. check it out:
An interesting article on the evolution of inteligence and it’s impacts on Hierarchy vs. Egalitarianism in early human societies.
… great apes’ societies are very hierarchical with each animal occupying a particular place in the existing dominance hierarchy. A major function of coalitions in apes is to maintain or change the dominance ranking. When an alpha male is well established, he usually can intimidate any hostile coalition or the entire community.
In sharp contrast, most known hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian. Their weak leaders merely assist a consensus-seeking process when the group needs to make decisions, but otherwise all main political actors behave as equal. Some anthropologists argue that in egalitarian societies the pyramid of power is turned upside down with potential subordinates being able to express dominance over potential alpha-individuals by creating large, group-wide political alliance.
What were the reasons for such a drastic change in the group’s social organization during the origin of our own “uniquely unique” species? Some evolutionary biologists theorize that at some point in the Pleistocene, humans reached a level of ecological dominance that dramatically transformed the natural selection landscape. Instead of traditional “hostile forces of nature”, the competitive interactions among members of the same group became the most dominant evolutionary factor. According to this still controversial view, known as the “social brain” or “Machiavellian intelligence” hypothesis, more intelligent individuals were able to take advantage of other members of their group, achieve higher social status, and leave more offspring who inherited their parent’s genes for larger brain size and intelligence. As a result of this runaway process, the average brain size and intelligence were increasing [sic] across the whole human lineage.
Also increasing were the abilities to keep track of within-group social interactions, to remember friends and their allies and enemies, and to attract and use allies. At some point, physically weaker members of the group started forming successful and stable large coalitions against strong individuals who otherwise would achieve alpha-status and usurp the majority of the crucial resources. Eventually, an egalitarian society was established.