“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
As Ursula K. Le Guin argues, rapacious billionaire capitalism is neither natural nor inescapable. Yet, as Srnicek and Williams (2015) contend (and we agree), few viable alternatives have emerged to challenge this new gilded age’s concentration of wealth. It is a failure of political imagination. There are viable post-billionaire futures. Emergent technologies of the 21st century—in particular Generative AI—seem a nightmare of billionaire neo-robber-barons imposed on us all to evaporate living wages, healthcare, and any semblance of autonomy or work satisfaction. Students increasingly encounter AI-mediated workplaces shaped by tensions among automation, creativity, precarity, and labor value. As educators, we are obliged to prepare students for these emerging conditions while creating space to imagine alternative futures for work, technological agency, and human flourishing.
It is the progressive tradition that ushered in humane forms of capitalism through sharing rewards of industrialization. As Danaher (2019) asserts: everything from weekends to 40 hour workweeks to more recent innovations like paid family leave are the result of labor demanding a greater, if not quite fair, share of wealth produced by increased productivity. Children are no longer “small hands” working alongside their blood-related adults. For Danaher, Srnicek & Williams, and Frayne (2015), the commonality is controlling a greater share of the wealth produced by automated, roboticized, agentic production. What if the rewards of automation and labor saving were more equitably distributed? Today, this question extends beyond the mechanization of physical labor and digitization of professional workflows (e.g., CAD and desktop publishing) to the emergence of agentic systems that assist in cognitive, communicative, creative, rhetorical work historically associated with professional expertise and economic mobility. What if, instead of enriching a few dozen individuals on the planet as billion- and trillion- aires, fruits of robotic and agentic labor-saving instead enriched us all, paying for access to decent healthcare, housing, and basic levels of nutrition and admittance to basic levels of leisure and pleasure activities? What would we do with all that dignity and autonomy? Although each of the scholars we reference here differ in their emphasis, they share a concern with decoupling human flourishing and fulfillment from compulsory wage labor.
Kathi Weeks’ argument (2011) diverges from Danaher, Srnicek & Williams, and Frayne by re-politicizing work. Weeks does not articulate an idleness enabled by, in Danaher’s delicious construction, “human obsolescence,” but asserts the valuable role of choice and power of consent in accepting creative and rewarding activity, whether it is defined as work or, more fulfillingly, as human occupation. So we propose [ utopia ]-in-the-loop as a place to begin the necessary work of reimagining the relationship we have to labor-as-toil, tying our identities to our occupations, and accepting a naturalized (yet wholly unnatural) accumulation of wealth.
The top 12 richest individuals own 50% of humanity’s wealth, while according to Oxfam, a modest redistribution would yield substantial rewards:
just 65% of last year’s $2.5 trillion rise in billionaire wealth … would … end global poverty for a year. And in the U.S. alone, a modest wealth tax on multimillionaires and billionaires—at a rate of 1% for fortunes over $10 million, 3% for fortunes over $100 million, and 5% for fortunes over $100 billion—could raise an estimated $414 billion to invest in social programs and fighting poverty.
Danaher’s obsolescence is not a dystopian realization that humans are not necessary, but a reframing asserting that, in an age of abundance, reaping the fruits of full automation, human toil is unnecessary—or obsolete—and people need not hustle for subsistence. What imaginaries can we conjure in a world in which the wealth workers create is available for social and communal good? If automated production of wealth was more justly distributed and governments had means to invest in the health, welfare, and infrastructure of nations, what future imaginaries could we create to support meaningful employment of citizens in the body politic, the agora, the conversation of a broadly defined community of participatory, autonomous, engaged, healthy, sovereign people? Let’s engage our imaginations to ponder possibilities of [ utopia ]-in-the-loop in an emergent age of full automation, for while the status quo seems inescapable, any human power can be changed by human beings.
The failure of political imagination is not merely an intellectual shortcoming; it is borne out in the present tumultuous realities of the job market, where precarious work and inequality persist despite widespread recognition that the system itself could be otherwise. While it is our responsibility as educators to simultaneously envision and prepare students for the future, we are also obligated to prepare undergraduate students for the current realities and foreseeable futures of the workplace.
We want to imagine, with our students, alternative futures. This imaginative work is evidence-based, treating political and workplace imagination like science fiction, closer to what Latour named Scientifiction, of the “almost here” speculative near future, and as something most compelling when grounded in factishness. Democratic workplaces with collaborative governance structures, power-sharing and profit-sharing, automation for alleviation of drudgery and seizing more free time: we aim to exercise our students’ and our imaginations while exorcising the status quo of voracious acquisition and unfettered profit-seeking. But what does this look like in the classroom?
As WYSIWYG systems for developing agentic workflows emerge and become more accessible than ever, we have adapted a common assignment for TPC courses—interview someone in your field about the work that they do—in response to the increasing use of generative AI. Students partner to interview professionals about the impact of automation on particular genres of workplace communication, with attention to production workflows and ethical considerations.
Framed as an “Automation Impact Report” (which, completely unintentionally, is abbreviated as “A.I. Report”), the assignment prompts students to investigate current states of automation in students’ respective fields, to situate research within particular workplace contexts, and imagine research-informed alternatives. To complement their interview data, students conduct secondary research about the history of their selected workplace communication genre, and consider ethical questions regarding automation of decisions, devalued skills, and automated tools impacting workplace practices. For this assignment, automation is defined broadly to include analog practices such as templates, forms, and boilerplate, positioning automation as a concept that extends beyond generative AI and remains relevant across contexts.
[ Utopia ]-in-the-loop is not a distant horizon but an immediate pedagogical and social practice: an ongoing effort to align what is technically possible with what is socially desirable. As Le Guin reminds us, human systems can be reshaped. The question, then, is who gets to imagine those transformations, and how can we give students tools to begin imagining and then building alternatives today. Articulating possibilities, we demand utopia now!
References
Danaher, J. (2019). Automation and utopia: Human flourishing in a world without work. Harvard University Press.
Frayne, D. (2015). The refusal of work: The theory and practice of resistance to work. Zed Books. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350251151
Latour, B. (2008). “The powers of fac similes: A Turing test on science and literature” in S. Burn & P. Dempsey, Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers (pp. 263-292). Dalkey archive press. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/163.html
Le Guin, U. K. (2014). National Book Foundation medal: Ursula’s Acceptance Speech. Ursula K. Le Guin. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal
Oxfam America. (2026). What percent of the world’s wealth is controlled by billionaires? https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice/what-percent-of-the-worlds-wealth-is-controlled-by-billionaires/
Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work. Verso Books.
Weeks, K. (2011). The problem with work: Feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. Duke University Press.
Generative AI Disclosure
We used generative AI in composing this piece. Specifically, we used ChatGPT, Copilot, and Claude in drafting our proposal (after hand drafting a partial blog post), rewording the opening paragraph, and to condense our habitually verbose prose. We anticipate that this disclosure will serve as a chronological marker similar to #ShotoniPhone or noting that we used electronic copy-and-paste. Not because of inevitability, but usability and normalization.
We collaborated through Google Docs and Gmail (our employers are “Google Campuses”), Facebook messenger, and video calls across multiple platforms. Microsoft Word counted words and facilitated basic formatting. Our composing process was cross-platform: macOS, Windows, Android. We considered alternative configurations, such as:
- Networking Raspberry Pis to write collaboratively and minimize reliance on [underscored]insufficiently regulated and taxed [end underscore]billionaire-controlled platforms and services.
- Running local LLMs to reduce our individual usage footprints.
- Calligraphy on parchment (our preference), but time and distance constrained our access to materials.
All em dashes are deliberate.
