I’m ready to sign the divorce papers.
Labor and capital need an amicable separation agreement.
That’s what I’m laying out today.
What started as just Post-Labor Economics has evolved into the Labor Zero (L0) movement, a growing coalition of thinkers, builders, and ordinary people who understand that automation represents a categorical threat to our present way of life, as well as an opportunity to abolish the drudgery of labor as we know it.
I’ve been hard at work on my book—Labor Zero—for the last two years and it is nearing completion. The manuscript is done, and the launch is coming.
But what this movement needs is a soul, not just a book.
That’s when I realized that we need a charter. A set of Strategic Objectives and Core Values that fully articulate what Labor Zero is, what we want, and how we get it.
Since first starting Labor Zero, I’ve been studying what works in movements, what doesn’t, and the historical patterns of technological disruption, political change, and civilizational transformation.
What do we really need to create create a vital post-labor society?
It starts with identity. Do you identify as a laborist? These are the people who identify with the drudgery of labor, believing it is both necessary and righteous for dignity and survival.
Or are you a labor abolitionist who recognizes that wage slavery only enriches the elites, and no longer delivers what it once promised? Do you recognize that the middle class is hollowing out, and is never coming back?
We must not wax nostalgic about the past, but instead actively build the future we want to inhabit.
Bear with me, we’ll get to the charter in a second…
Artificial intelligence and humanoid robots are coming, ready or not, and this serves as a catalyst for change. The world we know, from economics to politics to our daily lives, will be indelibly altered by this wave of technology. The arrival of multiple disruptive technologies at once is a forcing function that will create a total civilizational reset.
The problem is that the default incentive structures will drive us towards surveillance capitalism, corporate capture, and a high tech, low life dystopian future. Nobody wants that future, but it is unavoidable if we fail to coordinate.
That’s why the Labor Zero movement is essential. Coordination is a necessary ingredient to change incentive gradients, but it is not sufficient on its own. You also need Schelling points, which are people, ideas, books, and movements that serve as focal points for coordination.
A shared charter is one of the oldest forms of a Schelling point.
My work on Post-Labor Economics has ballooned into multiple forthcoming books, the first of which is Labor Zero. However, time is of the essence. We cannot wait to build a movement for the publication cycle, which will take years. Automation in the form of advanced AI and robotics will not wait.
My books will come, but this charter is ready today.
What I lay out here are twelve major objectives and twelve essential values that this movement inhabits. This is the distillation of the last three years of my work and research, across all the domains I’ve covered, from household income and macroeconomics, to civil rights and social contracts, to the rise and fall of civilizations, and the thriving or decay of human lives.
As you read through the 24 points of this charter, keep in mind that there is a monumental amount of research behind each one, and my upcoming books, articles, and videos will continue to unpack each one.
But also remember that a movement lives or dies on its momentum, and the coalitions it builds. The greatest idea means precisely nothing if it is not legible, distributed, and foments action.
This is only one tiny step in a much larger movement, but as they say, every epic journey begins with a single step.
The marriage between capital elites and ordinary laborers has been strained for decades, and is becoming acrimonious. It’s time for us to all read the writing on the wall.
This marriage is over.
This charter represents the terms of separation.
The Labor Zero Charter
Labor Zero exists to navigate a single transition with two faces: the decline of wages as the way most people access the economy’s output, and the decline of labor as the leverage by which ordinary people have always forced concessions from the powerful. This Charter sets out the strategic objectives the movement works toward and the core values that guide and constrain how it pursues them.
Strategic Objectives
1. Decouple survival and dignity from labor. End wage labor’s monopoly as the gateway to income, social standing, and citizenship, so that no person’s survival or worth depends on selling their time.
For two centuries a paycheck has been the main channel through which people access the fruits of the economy, and society bundled income, status, structure, and belonging into the single package of a job. As automation severs income from labor, that bundle has to be taken apart deliberately. The aim is not to make work disappear but to end the coercion at its core: a person should be able to refuse degrading work without facing destitution, and should be recognized as a full member of the economy and the polity whether or not a firm currently needs their labor. Wage work becomes one option among several rather than the toll everyone must pay to live.
2. Enable and accelerate the beneficial automation that ends mandatory labor. Actively advance the technologies and economic arrangements that retire compulsory human toil, treating the machine as the engine of abundance and the enclosure of the machine, not the machine itself, as the problem to be solved.
The movement is not Luddite. Automation that produces more with less human effort is, in itself, good news: it is the precondition for a world in which no one labors merely to survive. Every past panic that machines would create a permanent “lump” of unemployable people was wrong about the technology and right only about the politics, about who captures the gains. Labor Zero therefore works to speed the arrival of cognitive and physical abundance while fighting on the only battleground that decides the outcome, which is whether the resulting wealth is broadly held or narrowly enclosed. The target is the lord, not the loom.
3. Universalize capital ownership. Shift the foundation of household income from wages to broadly held ownership of productive assets, distributing durable stakes rather than only revocable transfers.
If labor income shrinks, people need other income, which means they must become owners of capital rather than sellers of time. The practical model is the diversified portfolio the wealthiest households have always enjoyed (income arriving from several sources at once, so the loss of any one is survivable), extended to everyone by design. This runs from universal floors at the base, through sovereign and municipal wealth funds, cooperatives and employee ownership, baby bonds and matched savings, up to the residual wages of work that remains genuinely human. The measure of progress is how much of ordinary household income comes from owned assets rather than from selling time, and how widely that ownership reaches across the population.
4. Secure a sovereign and public stake in the automated means of production. Establish substantive public ownership (equity, governance rights, and citizen dividends) in the compute, fabrication, frontier models, and data commons on which the automated economy runs.
When production no longer needs workers, the wage can no longer be the channel through which output reaches people, and ownership becomes the only channel durable enough to survive decades of elite drift. Sovereign wealth funds, golden-share arrangements that confer control independent of equity percentage, public stakes in advanced chip fabrication, time-limited protection on model weights before they enter the public domain, and dividends drawn from compute and inference revenue are all available and already demonstrated at scale in places like Norway, Alaska, and Singapore. The machinery exists; the open question is political will. Any model trained on the public’s collective output carries a public claim by its very nature, and the movement works to make that claim real.
5. Reconstitute property and intellectual-property doctrine. Reform the rules of ownership, especially for intellectual property and for any capital derived from the public commons, so that public claims register as recognition rather than as theft.
Today’s reflexive treatment of private ownership as natural, perpetual, and absolute is the frame inside which every fight over halting, owning, and constraining automation is lost before it begins, because any public claim looks like expropriation. But property has been rewritten in every generation of legal history: the enclosure of the commons, the original short copyright term, compulsory licensing for radio, the breakup of Standard Oil, the public-trust doctrine over navigable waters. Foundation models above a capability threshold, compute above a scale threshold, and the training-data commons itself all qualify for the same kind of treatment. Until the property frame is contested, every other objective is fought uphill; reconstituting it is the terrain on which the others are won.
6. Reconstruct halt power: the post-labor strike. Build a durable, distributed, and credible capacity to interrupt high-risk automated systems, recreating on the new substrate the disciplining leverage the strike once gave labor.
The strike worked because it was embodied in workers who owned their bodies, spread across millions of nodes that could not be captured at once, credible because elites needed those bodies, repeatable, scalable, and escalating in cost. It disciplined power across the whole twentieth century mostly through the threat of its use, without ever being pulled at full force. That leverage must be rebuilt on the new substrate of compute, energy, fabs, and model deployment, which happens to have natural chokepoints labor never had: training runs are detectable, excludable, and measurable, sitting on public grids and under public permits. Hardware controls, multi-key authorization, international compliance regimes, and statutory standing to halt dangerous deployments are the tools. Without halt power, every other objective collapses into supplication.
7. Anchor civic standing in tamper-evident infrastructure. Build the civic foundations (secure identity, property and benefit records, and open payment rails) that cannot be quietly erased or revoked, so that a citizen’s standing rests on documentary persistence rather than on anyone’s permission.
Labor’s leverage came from bodily presence; the new leverage comes from records that many parties can verify and few can secretly alter. A person whose identity can be deleted, whose title can be quietly changed, or who can be cut off from the payment system has only fragile rights no matter what the law promises. The remedy is infrastructure: identity and ownership claims anchored so insiders cannot erase them, and payment rails (like the systems already running at national scale) that no bank, network, or intermediary can use to debank a person. This leverage works differently from the strike: it does not have to be activated in a confrontation, because it runs continuously, making denial costly rather than making operation costly, and it passes intact to the next generation.
8. Make transparency structural. Engineer disclosure-by-default into the automated substrate (for decision systems, training data, and public spending) so that visibility is built into how institutions operate rather than depending on the conscience of the people inside them.
Almost every major exposure in modern history (the leaks, the disclosures, the refusals to carry out an order) happened because institutions were run by humans who could see what was happening and decline to go along. A fully automated state, firm, or military removes those human auditors and, with them, the accidental transparency conscience provided. The fix is to make transparency deliberate and architectural: cryptographic provenance for training data, public registries of consequential automated decisions, contestable explanations and real appeal paths, tamper-evident audit logs, inspection rights for accredited auditors and journalists, and strong protection for the remaining human operators who blow the whistle. The default must flip from secret-unless-disclosed to disclosed-unless-justified.
9. Prohibit automated coercion. Establish a hard constitutional and statutory floor against algorithmic, autonomous, and kinetic coercion of citizens, requiring an accountable human in every adverse decision and protecting the right to refuse, contest, and resist.
Every regime in history that found a way to enforce its will without needing willing human enforcers has eventually used that capacity, because the machine that cannot refuse is more reliable to a ruler than the soldier or informant who might. Automated enforcement (of account terminations, credit denials, deportations, benefit cutoffs, parole revocations) must always route through an identifiable, legally accountable human with a real path of appeal to another human. Lethal autonomous weapons that select and engage targets without meaningful human control belong under binding prohibition, and robotic policing platforms erase the choke point an officer’s unwillingness to fire has historically provided. The right to refuse, to whistleblow, and to physically disable coercive systems aimed at citizens must expand, not shrink. The window to write these limits into law is open now and closing.
10. Establish binding, distributed civic agency. Create channels of mass political power that do not depend on the workplace (sortition, citizen assemblies, subsidiarity, and participatory budgeting), and give them real veto and direction rather than an advisory role.
Unions and labor parties were not just bargaining tools; they were schools of self-government where ordinary people learned to aggregate into collective will. As the workplace dissolves as a site of organization, elections become the only formal channel for mass agency, and elections in the AI age are exposed to persuasion at scale, deepfakes, microtargeting, and amplified donor influence. Sortition (selecting ordinary citizens by lot, as classical Athens did) is the strongest single instrument available, because randomly chosen people cannot be deepfaked against, microtargeted, or lobbied. The trap to avoid is the advisory panel whose recommendations the powerful discard at will; any such body must hold binding power. Subsidiarity, paired elected-and-sortition chambers, recallable local control over automated deployments, and cooperative governance of the compute and data commons complete the toolkit.
11. Force the disaggregation of accumulated power. Pursue the three-part architecture that keeps power from permanently concentrating (preventing private tollbooths over essential systems, ensuring elites can be replaced, and giving every citizen a durable stake), and install it where it resists reversal.
History’s longest-lived free societies ran three mechanisms at once, and the ones that decayed let all three fail together: no permanent tollbooths over the things a society cannot do without, no permanent dynasties immune to replacement, and no propertyless citizens with nothing to defend. Open the substrate, churn the elites, capitalize the citizens. Each fails alone: anti-monopoly without circulation just lets one elite periodically break up its rivals; circulation without ownership lets concentration intensify behind new faces; handing out shares without structural protection lets them re-concentrate within years. The architecture has to be installed entire, at the constitutional layer where the next coalition cannot quietly repeal it, because reversible safeguards are not safeguards. This is how the long pattern, in which every attempt to do without masters produced new masters, is finally broken.
12. Rebundle the human goods of a life after labor. Deliberately provision the non-monetary goods work once supplied (rhythm, role, belonging, mastery, recognition, and chosen difficulty) through households, communities, civic service, and serious leisure.
Ending the coercion of work does not end the human need for the things work happened to provide: a clock and a calendar, a place where one’s absence is noticed, people who expect you, a craft to get better at, a contribution that matters, and difficulty worth meeting. The warnings from history’s leisure classes and from communities that lost their factory are real. Money alone raised people’s evaluation of their lives far more than it improved their ordinary days. A society that prepares only to replace income, and not to rebuild structure and belonging, will discover isolated people in private rooms with screens and stipends and few reasons to appear in public. The work is to grow the clubs, gardens, sheds, services, festivals, and walkable places that let people choose effort and membership from a position of security rather than fear.
Core Values
1. Human dignity is intrinsic. A person’s worth and standing do not depend on their economic contribution or their usefulness to others, and remain whole whether or not their labor is needed.
This is the moral foundation everything else rests on. Wage labor has delivered real goods (income, structure, company, identity), but the fact that a coercive arrangement delivers real goods does not justify the coercion, any more than a prison’s provision of shelter and routine makes incarceration a model for life. The movement refuses the reflex that treats the unemployed, the displaced, or the “economically unnecessary” as lesser. Dignity is not earned by productivity and cannot be revoked by automation; it is the baseline from which a humane post-labor society is built.
2. Property exists to serve the many. Property rights are a tool for broadening wellbeing and stakeholding across society, not a sacred shield for incumbents, and the answer to concentrated ownership is broadened ownership rather than abolished ownership.
The movement is not against property; it wants property widely held, and treats durable ownership as the ordinary citizen’s best defense against domination. What it opposes is property as a one-way ratchet that lets a few hold permanent tolls over things everyone depends on. Reading property this way changes what counts as legitimate: a public claim on capital built from the public’s own data and commons is recognition of a stake that already exists, not a taking. Ownership rules have always been rewritten to serve the society of their time, and they can be rewritten again to give everyone a share rather than to fence everyone out.
3. Ownership over allowance. A durable, hard-to-revoke stake makes a person a principal; a transfer the next legislature can cancel makes a person a dependent, so the goal is to distribute command over capital, not merely consumption.
This is why a cash transfer alone, including basic income on its own, is not enough and can even be pacifying. It distributes consumption without distributing ownership, and a population that consumes but does not own can still be managed and ignored. The models that actually shifted power distributed stock, not just flow: land to the people who farmed it, savings turned into universal home ownership, resource rents converted into a citizen’s permanent claim. A floor under income is necessary, but it is a floor, not the structure. Real security and real leverage come from owning a piece of the productive base, because what you own is yours, is hard to take, and gives you standing to resist the next attempt to take it.
4. Power must remain answerable to feedback. No concentration of wealth or capability may insulate itself from the consequences of its own decisions; the correction loop that lets reality reach decision-makers and replace them when they fail must be kept intact.
Civilizations do not rot from luxury; they rot when the people in charge go deaf: when bad decisions stop producing costly signals that reach them, when failure no longer removes anyone, and when those who govern have made themselves unanswerable to the conditions they govern. The danger of full automation is that it threatens to remove the last mechanism that has ever forced a deaf elite to listen, which was its dependence on other human beings. So the movement treats answerability as non-negotiable: power must stay wired to the consequences of its choices, through ownership, transparency, replaceability, and the standing of ordinary people to push back. A system that still works for the people with the power to change it will not change itself.
5. Seek the positive-sum settlement. Favor arrangements in which automation raises everyone (citizens, firms, and the public alike) over zero-sum capture in which it raises a few, recognizing that broadly shared abundance is also the only politically durable outcome.
The case for broad distribution is not only moral; it is the rational path for everyone in the room, including the owners and engineers of the systems being reformed. An automated economy that strips ordinary people of income, ownership, and agency destroys the demand base that supports its own valuations and the legitimacy that supports its own operation. The cooperative settlement is a genuine triple win: citizens gain a stake and a say, firms gain a stable regime and customers who can still buy, and the public gains finances and legitimacy that survive the transition. The movement looks for the configuration where the gains are real and shared, because the alternative, a few hundred thousand owners ruling a planet of dependents, is unstable as well as unjust.
6. Abundance, with automation as its engine. The movement is pro-technology and pro-prosperity; the problem to solve is never the machine itself but the enclosure of the machine, and the destination is broadly shared material abundance.
It would be a mistake to read a movement concerned with dignity and distribution as hostile to growth or technology. The opposite is true: the productive power of automation is what makes a world without compulsory labor possible at all, and the realistic upside, an economy orders of magnitude larger than today’s, is worth reaching for. Pessimism that treats the machine as the enemy fights the wrong battle and forecloses the prize. The movement embraces the engine and concentrates entirely on the question that actually determines the outcome: whether the abundance it produces is enclosed by a few or inherited by everyone born into the post-labor century.
7. Structure over virtue. Durable justice must operate automatically, survive bad actors, and be installed where it cannot be casually reversed; it cannot rest on the good character of whoever happens to hold power.
Admirable individuals who lay down power (the general who declines a crown, the magnate who funds libraries) are admirable precisely because nothing bound their successors to do the same. Virtue does not generalize and does not last. What lasts for centuries is what runs on its own, requires no one to be good, and holds up under the certainty that bad people will eventually occupy the offices. That means designing mechanisms rather than trusting intentions, and installing them at the constitutional layer with a high cost of amendment, because anything passed by ordinary legislation is repealed by the next coalition that finds it inconvenient. The movement builds machinery, not hopes.
8. Power, like income, must be widely held. Freedom requires that political agency and standing be broadly distributed (no permanent rulers and no permanent ruled), just as security requires that ownership be broadly distributed.
The movement holds that the rule of the few was never written into human nature; it was the product of a constraint (coordinating any large undertaking required a small number of people at the center), and that constraint is now dissolving. Concentrated power yields only to distributed counter-pressure, so power has to be spread the way income has to be spread: through many hands holding real veto, real direction, and real standing. A world in which a narrow class owns the productive substrate and everyone else lives on revocable permission is a world of dependents, however comfortable. Broadly distributed agency is the precondition for everything else the movement wants to protect.
9. Freedom from domination and coercion. Every person is entitled to security from arbitrary, automated, and kinetic control, and to the right to refuse, to contest, and to resist coercion aimed at them.
The aim of removing labor’s coercion is not to replace it with a softer cage. A central risk of the automated age is that those who hold power gain the ability to enforce it without needing anyone’s willing cooperation, through automated decisions that cannot be appealed and autonomous systems that cannot refuse an order. The movement insists that the human capacity to say no, to challenge a decision, and to push back against an enforcement system stays protected and even grows. Freedom from domination is not only freedom from the boss who controls your survival; it is freedom from the algorithm and the autonomous machine that would control your life with no one accountable for the result.
10. Everyone sees everything, including the rulers. Institutions and the powerful must be legible and auditable to the people they govern, and the scrutiny a healthy society directs outward it must direct at itself with equal intensity.
Healthy systems (a body, a colony, a polity) keep their parts visible to one another, maintain channels that carry honest signals, detect trouble early, and respond in proportion. The regimes that collapsed had cut themselves off from the signals their own people were generating; the ones that survived their crises did so by turning the lights on, including on themselves. “Everyone sees everything” is not a slogan about surveilling citizens; it is the reverse, a commitment that public spending, public decisions, and the conduct of powerful institutions are open to inspection by anyone. Corruption and unaccountable power depend on darkness, and legibility is how a free society keeps its own machinery honest across generations whose founders are long gone.
11. A good life needs challenge and belonging, not idle plenty. Human flourishing depends on chosen difficulty, mastery, contribution, and membership; security is the means, not the end, and the movement guards against the pacified comfort that hollowed out history’s rentier and leisure classes.
People value effort and also avoid it, proud of the workout or the repair they resisted beforehand. A society that hands out time and removes every binding commitment collides with that asymmetry every morning. The cautionary cases are the leisure classes that converted surplus into conspicuous waste and the rentier societies softened by unearned income. The point of ending compulsory labor is not idleness but the freedom to take on difficulty that is chosen rather than imposed, to belong to things that notice your absence, and to contribute where contribution is real. Friction should be cultivated, not abolished. A post-labor society should not measure success by how many people it keeps busy, but by how many are secure enough to choose what is worth doing.
12. Change through legitimate, non-violent, evidence-grounded means. The movement pursues its aims through lawful, non-violent democratic instruments and proven institutions, builds from existing arrangements rather than clean-slate fantasy, and rejects both the romance of revolution and the comfort of utopia.
The historical record of radical rupture is grim. Revolutions that overthrow the old order tend to produce something worse, and the ledger runs from the Terror to Stalin to Mao. The instruments the movement trusts are the ones that have actually won durable settlements: ballots and ballot initiatives, ownership and shareholder pressure, boycotts and divestment, strikes and civil disobedience, citizen assemblies and patient coalition-building. Its method is composition, not invention: most of what is needed already works somewhere and needs to be spread, refined, and integrated rather than dreamed up from scratch. Reforms must grow from the institutional soil that exists, because designs imposed in a vacuum get rejected or distorted. The goal is not a perfect society but a durable one, in which the ruling apparatus stays a servant rather than a parasite. That is the most any society has ever actually achieved, and enough.
