Potato Salad and the Future of Work

At the beginning of July a man posted a project on Kickstarter: Making Potato Salad. He asked for $10 for supplies, and since this was his first potato salad, he said it might not be any good, but he’d send samples to anyone who funded him for $3. This is what he’d do if you pledged $20:

Receive a potato-salad themed haiku written by me, your name carved into a potato that will be used in the potato salad, a signed jar of mayonnaise, the potato salad recipe, hang out in the kitchen with me while I make the potato salad, choose a potato-salad-appropriate ingredient to add to the potato salad, receive a bite of the potato salad, a photo of me making the potato salad, a 'thank you' posted to our website and I will say your name out loud while making the potato salad.

Within a week he had over $40,000 pledged.

I first heard about this from uber-liberal cartoonist Ted Rall, who found it outrageous that such a frivolous “project” could generate so much in donations. His cartoon, “Potato Salad Society,” includes these comments:

Meanwhile, worthier Kickstarter projects—and charities—go unfunded. It’s safe to assume that few of the potato salad supporters would give anything to save refugees in South Sudan…Finding donors online requires the deadpan, mildly amusing tone that has become the official vibe of the Web.” Rall’s conclusion: “We.Are.Doomed (Internet-friendly neo-Bob Newhart tone).

First off that is quite condescending and presumptuous to assume these people wouldn’t give to refugees, but this is in-your-face Ted Rall; he loves being confrontational.

But more importantly, I think Rall and other critics are missing something important here. I think this potato salad project could signal the future of how many of us earn a living.

I envision a future where some people make their living online, with sponsors contributing small amounts a month or year to support their creative output —a crowdsourced version of the wealthy patronage system that supported great Renaissance artists like Michelangelo. Instead of depending on one wealthy person, these people could live off thousands or millions of tiny contributions.

It’s becoming common today to see paypal “donate” buttons on websites. Ted Rall has one on his website, and I have contributed as a way of showing my support for his work (perhaps he’s bitter because he’s not generated the same level of support as the potato salad maker).

We could support people because we think his or her work is important, or because we want to be part of it. We could show our appreciation for something that makes us laugh, or think, or cry, by contributing a small sum. The Huffington Post interviewed 18 of the potato salad donors, and they said they had contributed because they thought it was “funny,” “charming,” and “genuine.”

Through the wonder of the worldwide reach of the Internet, those small sums could potentially add up to a decent living.

There are predictions that we are not far from a revolution in work, due to the roboticization of the workplace. This will throw a large percentage of people out of work, and we’re not talking about factory workers only, this includes doctors and lawyers (see my blog post). If this is true we’re going to need to find entirely new ways to earn a living. Supporting each other’s creative endeavors seems to me a very positive solution. 

Our Culture's Strange Attitudes Towards the Male Body

The Anthony Weiner episode revealed the widespread presence of (from my point of view) backwards attitudes towards sex. And this attitude is present in supposedly sophisticated elite media types.

For example, on John Stewart, a woman “analyst” gave the female point of view: “Women don’t want to see men’s bodies because they’re ugly. Women have beautiful bodies. Men just need to keep their shirts on.”

This past week Doonesbury portrayed the FOX reporter wrestling with the issue of his inappropriate tweets, and when he showed a female coworker one of his pictures, to test whether they were lewd, she recoiled in disgust.

How often did I hear in discussions of the issue that Weiner had sent “pics” of his “junk.” In other cultures, for example ancient Greece, the male body has been the model for artists—see Michelangelo's sculpture of David. I find it very odd that most people in our culture seem to agree that the male body is ugly. How many women have tweeted photos of their bare breasts? How many men have complained?

We are still an incredibly Puritanical people. This is in evidence in our reaction to “sex scandals,” but how much does sexual repression cause people to do incredibly stupid things like tweet a picture of their erection in their underwear to a stranger? Maybe if we got over our old-fashioned attitude toward sex and allowed more freedom to people to express themselves sexually (other than for a lifetime with one partner) we’d have fewer of these scandals. Why can’t men (and women!) visit prostitutes? Why can’t erotic performances be staged in major halls? Why can’t we follow the sexual connections we feel with certain people in our lives, even if it’s only a one-time experience?

Ted Rall calls sexual freedom the next frontier of civil rights in his syndicated column. He writes,

If slavery was America’s original sin, Puritanism was its original curse.

In recent years the United States has made significant strides towards greater equality and freedom. Racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry have been significantly curtailed by new laws and cultural education. But we still have work to do. Four centuries after people so uptight they couldn’t get along with the British invaded the New World, however, the United States remains one of the most sexually repressed Western countries.

It is not good for us.

“If expression of sexuality is thwarted, Christopher Ryan wrote in Psychology Today last year, “the human psyche tends to grow twisted into grotesque, enraged perversions of desire. Unfortunately, the distorted rage resulting from sexual repression rarely takes the form of rebellion against the people and institutions behind the repression.”

In other words, mean parents, churches and right-wing politicians.

“Instead,” Ryan observed, “the rage is generally directed at helpless victims who are sacrificed to the sick gods of guilt, shame, and ignorant pride.”

Like, for example, gays. Fourteen states still had sodomy laws on the books by the time the Supreme Court invalidated them in 2003...

One day, I hope, we will live in a nation where another person’s sexual expression is no one’s business but theirs and their sexual partners. We will be allowed to do whatever we want with whomever we want, as long as what we do is with a consenting adult.

Even if we take pictures and post them online.