Hi,  Studs Terkels’ Working, is subtitled what people do all day and how they feel about it.  There’s only a few interviews with people who don’t work or have a job.  Though we don’t know for sure that all of the people Studs interviewed made their income from the work they were interviewed about, it made sense in 1973 to title a book where you ask people what they do all day and how they feel about it Working.  In 2020, when you ask people what they do all day and how they feel about it, especially post-pandemic, I’m not so sure everyone is talking about work.   Un- and underemployment, not to mention the precarious freelance life of the gig economy, were at an all time high even before the pandemic.   Though most experiences of the precarious economy are fraught, and can be extremely time consuming as people spend hours and hours searching for work, feeling incredible anxiety, the pandemic has revealed that even under capitalism, where we work to survive, there are other ways of spending your day to day.  Like Blaseball.  -- Blaseball is a trip -- I'm not equipped to describe it fully here, but it's an online community, game, and potentially a model for anarchist society .  My friend Allis has been playing + supporting the community of blaseball a LOT in the lasrt few months, and it reminds me of a theory of change I think about a lot called New Power.   In the book New Power, Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans describe an online phenomenon that they refer to as “new power.’   In contrast to ‘old power,’ the power of institutions and authority, they argue that new power is a ‘current’ -- participatory, open source, peer driven.   It moves faster than institutional authority, driven by the action and passion of individuals at scale.   New Power is what’s behind Lady Gaga, Invisible Children, and Black Lives Matter, and draws on chaos theory, network analysis, and a sociological understanding of clout.   It’s somewhat similar to explanations of bitcoin: trust at scale.   This all sounds a little abstract, but in practice, New Power isn’t abstract or formula based.   It’s people freaking out about the things they love, together.   Like Blaseball.   --  Of course, we also work... to survive. That's why New Power is sometimes talked about as The Network Effect, or, as Adam Davidson of Planet Money describes it, the Passion Economy.  In their book, Jeremy and Henry see crowdfunding as the future of new power and the world, part of a DIY attitude towards governance that will drive investment in ‘the right things’. This utopian perspective sounds like it comes from two people who have never had to run a crowdfunding campaign.   But as Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans say in their book, new power defies economic explanation. New Power doesn’t really explain the economy of the future. In fact, in some ways, it’s contradictory to a functional future economy, at least one that looks like our current capitalist one -- to paraphrase a member of City Bureau, a journalism startup that provide local news on the South and West Sides of Chicago and uses a lot of new power, “we do know this is the future of journalism -- but also, we do not know how people will make money in the future.’  -- Blaseball, and all of the weird internet niches people spend their time on, are weird and joyful spaces.  People freaking out about things they love, together.   When I think about what the future of work looks like, or at least, the future of how we spend our time, I keep coming back to that.   Do you play Blaseball? What do you think about New Power?   Stay safe, h