Things You Want to Do
Now that you don't have to do the thing — what do you actually want to do? The closing post of the What's Left series.
By Geordie Everitt
Thirty-five years ago, my evenings had a shape that I suspect was secretly common and almost never discussed. I would put in a full day at GTE Data Services documenting mainframe billing systems, drive home, eat something, and then sit down at my Amiga 2000 and write code until two in the morning. For free. With an enthusiasm I never once felt between nine and five.
The day version and the night version of me were doing recognizably the same kind of work. The difference wasn't the activity. It was the direction — one was pushed, the other pulled. And I want to end this series with that difference, because everything else in these six posts has been converging on it.
The Suspended Department
The people I worked with in Tech Pubs all had a version of the Amiga. For the frustrated novelists it was the manuscript in the drawer. For others it was music, or a workshop, or a business idea perpetually deferred to next year. A hundred people, each holding their actual intentions in suspension eight hours a day, funding the want-to column with the had-to column, never expecting the two to merge.
This arrangement was so universal that we didn't perceive it as an arrangement. It was just what work was: the thing you did so that, in the margins, you could do the thing you meant.
The series so far has been an inventory of what's been evaporating out of that arrangement. The infrastructure scarcity went — the mainframes are in our pockets. The gatekeepers went — distribution is free, for better and very much for worse. The friction work — the documentation, the formatting, the scaffolding that employed that entire department — is going right now, absorbed by machines that were grown rather than programmed. What remains, as the last post argued, is the unoutsourceable core: the slow internal work of learning and making, the things that happen in you.
Strip it all the way down and the residue is the night shift at the Amiga. That's what's left.
No, This Is Not a Utopia Post
I can hear the objection forming, and it's the right objection: the had-to column paid the mortgage. The Tech Pubs arrangement may have been a compromise, but it was a funded compromise — the friction work was exactly where a person of ordinary luck could exchange ordinary effort for a stable life. Dissolving it dissolves the deal, and "now you're free to pursue your manuscript" is cold comfort delivered to someone whose income just left the building.
I'm not going to pretend the policy question answers itself, because it doesn't, and the honest version of this series ends with that question open. Whether the dissolution of friction work becomes a liberation or merely a dispossession is a choice societies will make — through policy, through politics, through how the surplus gets distributed — not something the technology decides on its own. The technology only decides that the question gets asked.
But here is what I can say, because I've watched one version of it happen. Every previous evaporation in this series looked, from inside, like pure loss. The end of scarce distribution looked like the death of quality. The end of the mainframe priesthood looked like the death of serious computing. Each time, the thing that actually died was a constraint we had mistaken for a foundation — and the people who adapted fastest were the ones who had kept something alive in the want-to column, some pulled-rather-than-pushed work that didn't depend on the constraint surviving.
The Question
So the series ends where the department never got to begin.
In thirty-five years, nobody at GTEDS ever asked me what I'd build if the documentation didn't need writing. The question would have been absurd — the documentation did need writing; that was the whole arrangement. It needs writing no longer. The machines read the code directly now, and every year they absorb more of the had-to column, and the arrangement that structured a century of working life is quietly losing its first term.
Which leaves the second term, and the question each of us was always going to face eventually, arriving now on an accelerated schedule, addressed to you personally:
Now that you don't have to do the thing — what do you want to do?
I'd start answering soon. Not because time is short, but because the answer turns out to be the kind of thing that has to be grown — and nobody can grow it for you.