Gentleman Farmers

Is labor an important part of being human? Ora et labora.

I have this recurring idea of a gentleman farmer in my head. This farmer owns many acres, stretching across the hills. He nuzzles the horses down in the horse farm and feeds them from his hand. He pays attention to the crop rotation and is thrilled to watch the verdant growth as harvest approaches. He’s proud of his equipment and ensures its highly maintained despite frequent use.

This farmer loves the land, and he looks upon it from a beautiful, broad bay window framed by bookshelves and brick. His eyes pass first over the well-manicured lawn he did not cut, out past the ornamental garden he curated but did not plant, and on to the distant fields he does not till and the crops he does not harvest. There are machines and workers for all of that.

This is also a picture of the professional-managerial class.

This relatively new class curates and manages a growing set of machines and people that perform the tasks assembled by their gentleman manager. This is not to say that the gentleman manager does not work. The overseer must be constantly dutiful and vigilant, scheduling and managing and processing results. They must prioritize and de-prioritize. Ideate. Strategize. Conceptualize. Formulate. Engineer. Orchestrate.

The same view of effort can be seen in the hobbies of the professional managers. They will spend hours of free time agonizing over the critical distinctions between the DCW600B and the DWP611 Dewalt routers but then use it twice and place it on display in their meticulously clean woodshop. Or they’ll build up the perfect home theatre system and make sure the 7.1 speakers are perfectly matched and tuned but can’t name their favorite Tarantino movie.

I’m painting this picture with a negative brush and.. yeah, ok, it’s negative. I’m not sure I mean it too negatively though. I mean, this is ALL of us to some extent. The farmer doesn’t want to get down and dig around in the dirt like a peasant and the professional manager doesn’t want to dig around in a bunch of, you know, slides, Figma artifacts, JavaScript code, or whatever. “There are peasants for that,” he says, “and I have coffee to sip and JIRA boards to prioritize.”

And still, I don’t mean it too negatively! Because at some level, management really does move up a level of abstraction. Humanity advances when it moves from dealing with concrete objects to well-defined primitives to Platonic abstractions. And if we want to get anything big and real done we’re going to need to understand a lot of abstractions to really make sense of things. Ironically.

The problem with the gentleman farmer and the profession manager is the performative nature of their roles. We all know a person that was promoted to the level of his ineptitude and proceeded to fuck things up from the corner office. We want to look the part but not necessarily be the part.

This balance feels wrong… mostly because we perceive these people to have lost touch with the concrete objects they began with, if they ever touched them at all. Dealing only in abstractions makes one out of touch. And so the best way to stay in touch is to dig around in the dirt frequently.

Which brings me back to all these GPTs and LLMs and transformers that are proliferating, rapidly. One of the historical reasons the professional-managerial class — the bourgeoisie — is reviled is because of the fundamental class struggle that inheres to managerial roles. It’s a well-ordered role above the workers, on a higher rung of the ladder. And there are higher rungs above that, dealing with higher abstractions.

But if any of the rampantly optimistic predictions about AI come true, it may demonstrate that all this class struggle is just a fashion of history. The cost of having a whole hoard of agents operating on one’s behalf will shortly asymptote to zero, and we’ll all be able to practice being gentleman farmers over whatever physical or virtual acreage we command. Which leads us to consider some Marxist ideas.

“[Socialism..] makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” -Karl Marx

I prefer my criticism in the morning when my teacup is full and I’m cranky from having risen so early, but I am a democratic dissenter at heart and I can easily see the benefits of semi-drunk critiques in a postprandial satiated cloud. Doesn't this evoke the image of a gentleman farmer? Marx is performing as an X without being an X. (Composition over inheritance wins again.) He is describing the performance of various roles without fully embodying them.

Byrne Hobart made the credible argument that “true communism has never been tried, because they didn’t have enough RAM.” Amazon is, in this way, omnipotent and somewhat dystopian but still only part of the story. Because no matter how sated and drowning everyone might be in material goods, every flavor of historical materialism has some form of class struggle and becomes a fight between ownership and labor. We’re now on the cusp of solving for the other half of that tension. If Amazon and other hyperscalers solve for the ownership dilemma, then agentic AI solves for the labor.

The future could resemble the wildly optimistic, utopian dream of a post-scarcity civilization, enveloped in Fully Automated Luxury Communism. I know that’s a big leap but that’s one possibility, it really is.

If you want a good look at what that might look like, consider the gentleman farmer. Understand his complex mix of pride and shame that the soil is tilled but he does not do the tilling. Understand the professional manager who moves black box abstractions around a schedule but does not lift a physical tool.

One possible product of an optimistic view of the future is a vast population of the bourgeoisie that have forgotten what it means to dig in the dirt. This is dystopian in a different way than any traditional socialist program. Instead of ending with scarcity and millions dead, it could end with abundance in both goods and labor. We could sit all day and perfectly manage the world around is.

I’m not yet convinced this is better.

Ora et labora.