As the material-capitalist behavioral forces of society wane--due to the abolition of labor (robotization, automatization, globalization, AI, slimmer organizational structures and so forth) and an increasingly guaranteed economic minimum welfare (as the sheer wealth of society grows)--this also undermines the mental rationalizations that people have of the necessity of the work we do.

In other words, this undermines the meaning-making of professional work. More and more of our work appears meaningless to us. And this in turn undermines the social construction of work-life and the economy itself: to the younger generation it seems silly and banal, rather than responsible and serious, to dress up in a suit and work at a bank every day.

Thus meaning-making itself, rather than money, becomes the scarce resource for which people compete. Who gets their story validated by the attention and belief of one's fellows? Who -really- gets to be the activist, the inspirer, the coach, the visionary, thought-leader, writer, truth-sayer, critic, hero?

Not only do we have difficulty believing in our own role in the labor market--it becomes all-too-transparent to us when material need for work no longer force excuses and rationalizations of it into our minds--but we find ourselves increasingly unable to believe in the commonly constructed social context and reality itself. Society itself begins to feel unreal, absurd, meaningless.

And so we seek in our own inner depths, and at the limits of what our intellects can muster, for new truths that we can believe in, authentically believe. But our own heart's conviction is not enough. Only the insane can uphold realities without the confirmation of others. To remain sane and happy we must thus seek the approval of one another, in order to validate our own inner voices and compasses.

Hence, at the heart of capitalism, a new logic of human behavior is being born: a kind of post-capitalism where profound attention, meaning and belief are what we compete over and seek to create and control. So it's no longer money that is the prime mover in this postcapitalist world. Those who control meaning- and narrative creation, who can get high-quality attention, steer the behaviors of others. We begin to struggle over stories and descriptions of reality.

It is not only professional labor that is being displaced; friendly company we get with beautiful strangers through screens, sex we get from the internet and soon from robots, and so forth. Most research is superfluous and most academics know it in their hearts that they will never make a difference.

All the while, we are empowered as consumers; we can get more things more easily than ever before. This is walk-over victory of capital over labor; but when capitalism wins over labor, it also cancels its own logic and we enter a postcapitalist realm of what Alexander Bard calls "attentionalism".

So that's what we're doing here: we're trying to create new meaning in a world where we can no longer believe in the roles assigned to us under industrial capitalism. Thanks for your participation.