New Work India

(I am leaving for India today, and will be there for ten days. We have prepared a Power Point that consists of pictures of the assembled Technologies of New Work. This is the brief Introduction that precedes these pictures.)


The Task is to make a presentation that will be succinct and brief, and that will give a persuasive and attractive introduction of NEW WORK (of what could develop into “Lift India Technologies”) to our Indian hosts.

One crucial difference between NW and virtually all other relief or development efforts of which I know is that NW aims at a complete, comprehensive, fully thought-out alternative SYSTEM profoundly different from the system that we now have.

N.W. encompasses: New Economy, New Work, New Culture (also New Philosophy) but New Work is a new System because all these components are integrated and coherent and of one piece: in fact they mutually strengthen and support and enhance each other. For the purposes of a cursory first introduction we shall leave nearly the whole of this aside. For this first glimpse we shall focus on what generally would be called the reduction of poverty. (In the context of New Work we do not speak of “poverty” we instead talk “the Monster Bifurcation” in 20% “Oasis People” and 80% “Desert People” (or also of the bifurcation into the handful of semi-god like “financiers” and the ever more homogenous amalgam of the totality of the rest of us – c.f. the descent of the middle class into “desert people.) The question is: How does New Work propose to diminish and eventually to abolish this bifurcation?

Our approach is in some ways different from that of others who also work on this problem. What we have attempted is very closely tied to extraordinarily young technologies, some ultra simple, some on the very edge of the ultra high-tech. Unlike others we do not use the terminology of “Basic Needs,” instead we have demarcated 10 Foundational Areas – the areas that represent the 10 most threatening “monthly bills.” In these areas we have over the years identified arrays of technologies that to the greatest feasible extent satisfy two distinct but also connected requirements:

For one, they should enable groups of “Desert People” or also “Disposable People” to “make something for themselves.” That for us is a pivotal, much quoted sentence. In other words we search for technologies that allow people to become more self-reliant, less economically dependent, in a very serious sense of that word, more “free.” New Work probably would have died in its infancy if an astounding diversity of innovations that make “Economic Indpendence” possible – that no longer require large factories but allow manufacturing in “small spaces” – had not evolved in the last twenty years.

The other, second, (hoped for, but not always attained) attribute is that these often amazingly new, decentralizing technologies enable groups of “Desert or Disposable People” to also evolve co-operatively structured serious profit returning flourishing enterprises – whose “market” are the 80 or 90% of the earth’s population that gradually descend.

The 10 domains to which we have given priority are:

1. Housing

2. Energy

3. (Phone)

4. Food

5. Appliances/Furniture

6. Cloths/Materials/Shoes

7. Education

8. Health

9. Computer Tech.

10. Mobility


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From: http://www.newworknewculture.com/content/new-work-india