At Point7 blog, Emlyn O’Regan attempts to answer the question:  in a society with far less paid labor, “who would take out the garbage?”

In what he calls an “adhocracy,” the cluster of stuff like Wikileaks, The Pirate Bay, Anonymous, the Arab Spring, etc., that seems to be supplanting the old corporate hierarchies as the defining feature of the new world, there’ll be a need for a lot less labor to produce stuff — and a growing share of what we used to pay for will be available for free.  How many people are still willing to shell out money for a dead tree encyclopedia, when Wikipedia’s available?  Not me.   And are there any real travel agents still out there?

Stuff that used to require an enormous white collar infrastructure, replicated in endless local iterations (O’Regan uses the appealing imagery of a “world spanning fractal turd”), can now be done on a modular basis with common platforms whose server networks require only a tiny fraction of the labor to maintain.  Many functions that previously required enormous bureaucratic, hierarchical institutions, can now be performed by what John Robb calls “superempowered individuals” taking advantage of free platforms as a force multiplier.  It’s also an example of what Bucky called “ephemeralization.”

So there’ll be a lot less paid work available, and a lot of stuff we’re still paying for will  be either free or very cheap.  But if you put it all together in the form of a Venn diagram, to what extent will the receipt of income from the remaining paid work overlap with the need to expend money for the remaining goods and services with a money price?

And will there be enough people who still need money income to secure sufficient labor for the unglamorous grunt work that remains?

The answer, O’Regan suggests, is that 1) there will be a lot of people who are no longer employed who donate labor (like babysitting) in the informal and gift economies, and a much larger share of goods produced through self-provisioning in the informal sector; 2) the most unpleasant drudgework will be automated to a considerable extent; and 3) dwindling opportunities for work will add a ludic character to the opportunities for even manufal labor that arise (like the surplus of volunteers in hay-mowing season looking for a “nice spot of work” in Morris’s News from Nowhere).

That still leaves the question of purchasing power for goods with a real production cost.  There will still be some goods which must be produced on a scale sufficient to require a market area larger than the informal sector (i.e. people living in primary social units like extended family compounds, urban communes, neighborhood cohousing projects, etc.).  These goods include not only the most capital-intensive stuff, like microprocessors, but will likely include even garage factories producing comparatively heavy consumer goods for markets of hundreds or thousands of people.  So if the economy is insufficiently granular to enable the decentralization of all production to primary social units, or to distribute the remaining paid labor evenly (giving everyone a five or ten-hour week), how will those without work pay for stuff that costs money?

The answer, I think, lies in those same primary social units.  Only a minority of people in a primary social unit (the above-mentioned urban communes or cohousing projects) might undertake paid labor outside the home, in the dwindling number of enterprises that require paid labor.  Even in conventional, standalone nuclear family dwellings, there might be only one part-time wage earner rather than two full-time ones.  And the non-waged participants of the primary social unit, as an income- and cost-pooling unit, would work to help provision fellow residents of the household through unpaid labor in the voluntary communism of the primary social unit — in return for a share of the economic goods paid for by the wage-earners’ income.