Andrew M. Ward
July 2026
We live in a strange cultural moment. AI has replaced robotic automation as the main source of fear about our jobs being made obsolete. But whilst we continue to both fear and welcome a world without work, we remain in thrall to the culture of grind, of the protestant work ethic. Silicon Valley bosses look enviously across at Chinese ‘996’ culture - 12 hour days, 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Pop culture also reifies work, from Rihanna’s 2016 ‘Work, Work, Work’ to David Guetta’s 2011 ‘Party Hard’, which declares ‘us hustlers’ work is never through’, that we must ‘keep partyin’ like it’s your job.’
So too is work a central concern of utopias. Rutger Bregman’s popular 2014 book Utopia for Realists centers on policy proposals to reform work, recommending a 15-hour working week supplemented by a Universal Basic Income (and open borders). The concept of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ popularized by British journalist Aaron Bastani, went a little further, laying out the vision of a post-scarcity world where automation, renewable energy (and asteroid mining) would mean work would be obsolete. A utopian vision of work being done largely by robots is one shared across science fiction, from the *Culture* series by Iain Banks to Isaac Asimov’s Robot. The hope, or fear, that machines will relieve, or deprive, humanity of labor is as old as technology itself, from the machine-trashing efforts of the Luddite and Swing Protests in 19th century England to Paul Lafargue’s 1883 book *The Right to Be Lazy* which argued that socialists were, just like capitalists, enthralled to the dictates of work and production. This made even less sense, Lafargue felt, as automation reduced the need for human labor. Instead automation should free up leisure time, rather than more work tasks be invented for our occupation. His arguments are prescient given both the current fear over AI automation, and the rapid expansion of the service economy in the wake of deindustrialisation in the 1970s.
Utopias respond to the social conditions from which they emerge. Post-industrial utopian movements, from the pietist spiritual communities that sprang up in the US to the attempts by utopian socialists to establish industrial collective communities, sought not to end the misery of work but share in its bounty. Theirs was a world in which work was prized as not only an economic pursuit but a moral one. In fact, the very origin of the concept Utopia, in Thomas More’s 1518 writing expressed a belief in the moral purity of labor. More advocated for a six-hour work day, but was fearful of the moral degradation resulting from too much leisure time. In it’s place he prescribed a structured culture of learning and prayer. Another utopian idea in circulation around More’s time was Cockaigne, the mythical land of plenty in the European medieval imaginary. A 16th century Italian engraving, ‘The Great Land of Cockaigne Where He Who Sleeps the Most Earns the Most’ gives us further details.
Given the brutal reality of peasant labor in Medieval Europe, and famine and disease a constant danger, it is perhaps unsurprising that Cockaigne, or Cucaggna in the Italian, is imagined as a) a world without work, and b) a land of endless sustenance. Without the technological capacity to replace work, interestingly work is just magically ‘done’, with the natural world reimagined as doing the work for us. Roasted fowl rain from the sky into the mouths of celebrating peasants, cooked fish jump out of the sea, and suckling pigs wander around with carving knives already in their backs. Owls (a confusing choice) shed cloaks when hit with a pole, and horses arrive haltered and fully trained. There is little to be done, and much to enjoy. There is even a prison in this mythical land, but it is where those who discuss work will be sent.
Work is where we spend a great deal of our time. Whilst we might reify work culture, and put down those who don’t work (even if partially out of envy) the vast majority of us sympathize with the utopian imaginaries that have removed the burden of work from our shoulders. Many of us even feel that our work is pointless (see Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber) and that we might as well be doing just about anything else. But both work culture and the moralistic overtures of More’s utopia remind us of the moral character of work. The progress of technology raises the stakes as to how much work might be taken off our hands, but the same questions remain: is work a moral pursuit or is leisure our ultimate aim?
The Medieval Utopia ‘Cockaigne’, a world without toil or trouble. Source: Getty