As you should be aware – if you’ve read enough of this site – industries don’t just disappear in the vision I propose, but simply the motivations for them and agendas they pursue will change … hospitality is no different. So I was thinking that perhaps some of you might be wondering:
“will I still be able to go to a cafe / restaurant, or see a live band perform, if capitalism collapses and is replaced by a non-property/trade/currency-based economic paradigm?”
… the answer is most definitely yes, and I’ll explain how it would most likely work.
Ok, so let’s skip past the transition to the future, why would people continue to run entertainment and hospitality industry businesses, if there’s no property, no profit motive, and no absolute necessity to go to work? Simple …
- many people will desire access to scarce resources;
- given the destruction of our planet’s resource base, scarcity will take some time to solve;
- the hospitality industries provide significant social benefits, and facilitate other benefits;
- so you make a bed for someone, serve their meals, and entertain them;
- in doing so, you contribute to not only their wellbeing, but indirectly ( via such wellbeing improvements ) to the outcomes of their activities at the time, and diminishing over time subsequent to their departure;
- you also provide a venue for activities to occur, thus enabling such activities, therefore enabling and contributing to their outcomes …
… but the difference is, you’re no longer doing it for slave labour wages ( the hospitality industry is one of the worst paid industries in the world at present ), and instead – without any need to negotiate the deal – you’re recognised for your quantifiable contribution to EVERYTHING that directly or indirectly results from any kind of association to your entertainment or hospitality industry business.
Could meals be sustainably served to guests of such a business so they can further enjoy their stay, maintain their energy levels, and fulfil their nutritional needs for good health, if the “dish pig” wasn’t washing the dishes? No. So why does the role of “kitchen hand” afford such little respect and such low wages under the status quo? Isn’t it a thoroughly vital role? This is capitalism – ie: the abuse and exploitation of anyone and anything without “power”.
How long would such a venue last if no one cleaned the toilets?
Even the most seemingly menial tasks are vital to any operation, but capitalism fails to reward most contributions adequately.
Every single member of staff has both direct and indirect contribution to everything that is a consequence of the venue and its services, proportionally according to their contribution to the total venue, and their specific area of work.
the influence on patron behaviour:
It is often the case in hospitality that stuff put up with abhorrent behaviour from patrons, whose opinion is that “I’m paying, so it’s your job to shut up, do as I say, put up with everything I do without complaint, and cater to my every whim, then clean up the mess … then beg for your tips after I act like a complete shit”. This behaviour is often what makes the industry a bitch to work in – just ask any female waitress who has had to put up with idiotic horny men.Customers are also proportionally responsible for the amount of work they create for others to do, and for the various consequences of their actions during their patronage. So if you’re the kind of absolute pig who goes to a venue and shits on the bathroom floor, because you find it amusing to cause that kind of disgusting cleanup work for others to do – well we can’t invade people’s privacy by putting cameras in the cubicles, but what we can do is distribute the consequences of your actions across everyone else whom could possibly have been responsible, thus motivate others to bear witness against your actions, and where the evidence isn’t conclusive to place all responsibility on your shoulders alone, your own friends ( who know you well ) are unlikely to want to share such consequences with you if they think you’re the kind of idiot that would do such things, so they’ll be unlikely to go out with you, and likely to pressure you.
Also – since there’s no “law” per se – there’s nothing stopping a total stranger from invading your privacy by photographing you in the act, as any deleterious consequence of the invasion of your privacy is completely offset by the benefits of identifying the culprit, and if you’re not the culprit, then they wouldn’t do such a thing.
So there’s no motivation for you to do it, every motivation not to, and plenty of motivation for others to “police” your actions, and to ostracise you if you’re an idiot of this kind.
Thus the quality of venues goes up, because we get rid of the actions of these narcissistic sociopaths whom are created and nurtured by capitalism, in which the weak and vulnerable – those whom perform “lowly jobs” – are further abused for entertainment value of such simple minded idiots.
Believe me, I’ve worked in over 100 jobs in my life – including hospitality – and I can attest to the fact that there’s a lot more of these arseholes in the world than you realise ( this is no exaggeration ), and many of the worst of them all wear suits and have high paying jobs. The two worst bathrooms I ever saw ( with the exception of one highway service station bathroom ) were at a supposedly “high class” casino night club, and at a university campus.
important note:
There’s also no reason to assume the venue would have a “manager” – since there’s no property, and no authority or hierarchy, there’s no reason for the venue to manage itself as anything other than a cooperative of all staff, unless the staff themselves decide to elect a “leader” or management team, but generally speaking, without a specific reason to the contrary, many venues can just be managed by a process chosen by all staff, which may involve a combination of certain specialist roles and responsibilities, alongside using the system of the open empire framework to advise them of best courses of action, and perhaps direct democracy of all staff to make additional decisions not adequately covered by those other means.
benefits to recording industries – regarding digital piracy:
A side point to note here, is that on the entertainment side of the equation, we currently have a problem where digital piracy robs creatives of rewards for their work, but in a non-property/trade/currency-based economic paradigm, this issue disappears entirely.
If you produce movies, music, or any other digital entertainment “art”, your work will never be scarce, since it is easily reproducible, except in so far as that it might be scarce in areas where internet access is low or of poor quality – but other than that, it is easy to reproduce digitally, therefore everyone can have as much digital content as they want, without payment or question – therefore you are credited with the ongoing consequences of benefit of people whom enjoy and use your work, and from the greatest possible audience size.
Now you might ask:
“but how would we know who has a copy and what the benefits of their use actually are?”
Ok, fair question, and the systems required to produce the answers will take some time to develop – hence the reason I skipped a description of the transition – but the simple version is this:
- since it constitutes a deleterious consequence to deny someone else their right to be acknowledge for their work, you are motivated in the system to acknowledge your use of digital content, which is done automatically for you so long as you use the systems that do it automatically – and if you use some other system, you can always enter the information manually;
- if you fail to acknowledge, but are later found out to have failed to acknowledge, then such a failure will have a detrimental impact on your own statistics ( as it denies someone else their rightful benefits ) – which is not a huge deal necessarily from a single instance of such failure, but you wouldn’t make a habit of it – and thus this impacts your own access to scarce resources … which is ok if you don’t care about such access, but given how simple it is to acknowledge, why would you take the risk that you might change your mind later about such access, and regret having not acknowledged it?
- someone will eventually develop a way to find such instances of failure to acknowledge in large batches, and to alert people to their failures at the earliest stage ( before consequences accrue and accumulate ), thus providing people a reminder and opportunity to redress and rectify the situation at the earliest stage;
- you are simultaneously motivated to acknowledge such usage of digital content, because the very act of doing so indirectly contributes to the benefits accrued by the people who made it, when they utilise the scarce resources they were able to access as a consequence of your acknowledgement of usage of content they created;
… in other words:
- IF I watch a film you made, acknowledge watching it, and allow the automated systems to quantify the benefit of that content to my own life and activities;
- THEN you gain higher probability of access to scarce resources as a consequence, which allow you to make your next film, or perform some other ecologically or socially beneficial action;
- THEREFORE: I was indirectly proportionally responsible for some part of those subsequent actions made possible by your access to scarce resources, so I’m motivated to do acknowledge.
summary:
So no matter what you do: anyone who benefits from what you do, whom manually acknowledges that usage of your produced goods or services, or whom allows the systems of the framework to automatically record such usage – and the consequences of usage ( which is an ever evolving capacity of the system ) – is credited with their proportional ( but diminishing over time ) input to every subsequent thing you do which in any way benefited from their acknowledgement.
This is what it means to run an economic system in which there exists no property, no authority, no property based “profit motive” … but instead to give freely EVERYTHING that can be given freely, and to ONLY “compete” for access to that which is scarce, and only in a way that is actually quite cooperative, and reduces rather than increases that scarcity over time.
So for entertainment, events and hospitality, there are great motivations for people to pursue such endeavours, not only because they’re enjoyable, but because – when done well – they can have vast influence resulting in greater access to scarcity.
Imagine a world where the poets and nurturers of the world had vastly greater influence over the use of scarce resources … what would that be like? They’re not typically going to use it for warfare or slavery are they? No – well maybe some of the Christian conservative country and western singers, but this influence is demotivated by the system, and will guide them toward their better instincts, even if they make the odd mistake along the way – they’re going to use it for expanding consciousness, for promoting humanitarian values, and for creative expression.
People with more time on their hands, not doing pointless jobs, not struggling meaninglessly against manufactured scarcity, are going to enjoy life, go to their local cafe, restaurant, or other venue, and they’re going to use those venues as meeting places for community groups doing great things, for artistic groups, for creatively technical groups, for project meetings, conferences, and for pure entertainment … all of which will have beneficial consequences, and thus the venues ( along with everyone that works there ) will be proportionally responsible for some part of those outcomes.
Many such individual instances of proportional responsibility may seem insignificant as isolated events, but how many events are you going to host that week, month or year? How many people will attend? How many actions will be conducted at or inspired by events in your venue? What will be the total influence you have on the wellbeing of all those people?