Weekly Dwell #2

In honor of Labor Day, I've been thinking about labor and ownership, and how those two concepts are often seen at odds with each other. If you are a laborer, you're thought of as working for someone else, whereas owners are working for themselves. And therefore, there has been more socially constructed value in those that create their own businesses rather than those that work at ones that already exist. This concept mirrors that of the "hustle" culture and "girl boss" rhetoric that is now better understood as toxic and largely unhelpful.

Additionally, this construction falls victim to supply/demand valuation constructions -- if everyone was to become a business owner, there would be no more laborers, and therefore no one to work at these new businesses. The value of owning a business wouldn't mean anything once the tipping point occurs of there being more businesses than there are laborers. In this case, laborers would start to have more significant value, and the value of starting a new business would decrease, as we would no longer be realistically able to support new businesses within the economy. We've seen bits of this occur when there was a decrease in laborers for any given reason - quitting, pandemic, more jobs, etc - and valuation came back to favor those in demand. Why do we fall such victim to maintaining an economy that doesn't often work for the many?

Lastly, the concept of ownership - both in a business sense and in a private sense - is a phenomenon I'll keep returning to, as it is one that is both relatable and incredibly subjective. What should be private vs public? Who should own what and why? What does it mean to even own something? This is what I see as the core of the latest dubbed "Web3" of the internet, perhaps because of this debate of ownership that has occurred for everything since the beginning of time.