What the Freedom Is For
All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, should be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, unpleasant work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)
Wilde wrote this in 1891, imagining a world where machines would shoulder the weight of unpleasant labor and leave humans free for what he considered real living: making beautiful things, reading them, contemplating the world with admiration and delight. It’s a generous, radiant vision. And in a strange way, the machines have arrived. They just haven’t stayed where Wilde assigned them.
What he could not have foreseen is that machines would cross the line he drew between unintellectual labor and creative life. They compose, they generate, they design. They don’t only clean the streets; they write the sonnets. The category of “ugly, horrible, unpleasant work” that Wilde wanted automated has proven far less stable than he imagined. Some of what he considered drudgery, we’ve come to recognize as meaningful. And some of what he considered the province of free, creative humanity, the machines have quietly entered.
But look at how Wilde describes the life he wanted for people once the machines took over. He writes of “making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight.” Making is only one item in a longer catalog, and it sits alongside activities that are fundamentally receptive: reading, contemplating, admiring. Wilde’s freed human is not a relentless producer of beauty. That person has the inner quiet to be moved by the world. Over a century later, with machines now crossing into the territory Wilde reserved for human flourishing, the original question remains, largely unanswered: what, exactly, is the freedom for?