

"Zero Hours" - working in 2023 London - curiousdannii
https://medium.com/futures-exchange/f68f17e8c12a

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bobx11
This is the best story I've read on medium, worth the read for the imagery
alone.

~~~
danpalmer
Agreed, best Medium article I've read yet.

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contingencies
Key theme on this one is the continued breakdown in workplace relations and
citizen/government relations, omnipresent surveillance and class society.

The full ten stories are available from over here:
[http://www.nesta.org.uk/news_and_features/future_londoners](http://www.nesta.org.uk/news_and_features/future_londoners)

~~~
waps
I wonder if someone would ever write a similar story about 100 years back. It
would be much more relaxed, but in the same vein, and there'd be constant
complaints about basic creature comforts. Heat, food and water. 99% of the
time there is nothing to do, no way for anyone, never mind a young girl, to
improve her circumstances. (The following is about life before the industrial
revolution, or at least in the early parts of it)

Working to improve your own life was a pipe dream for most young people back
then. Of course you were only young until you were 8 or 12 at the most. No
school. Why ? And after that work on the field, or if you were lucky in the
factory. Work was hard and dangerous, on the field as well as the factory, and
if you were severely hurt, you'd essentially be left to die.

And it wouldn't be a system of government working against you. It wouldn't
(for the most part) be people. It'd just be cold, hard reality. You could
work, or not work, but if you didn't you'd starve to death in a few months. If
you had a good community around you, you'd still starve, just not to death.

And the only ways out, without money, were few and far between. Becoming a
monk. Becoming a soldier. And even those were absurdly hard to get. Monk was
by far the best. Still hard labour, but you'd be protected from most of the
environment. A chance to become a priest, maybe even a learned priest or a
scientist. The only real way to a position of some limited power open to the
lower class. Actual books, and plenty of people around you who not only could
read, but cared about reading and usually cared about teaching others to read
as well. As a soldier your main job was to make sure rich-born kids could rape
young girls on the countryside, protecting them from the obvious consequences.
To keep starved people away from food.

~~~
contingencies
Interesting premise, for sure.

Personally I don't buy the "things were worse back then" argument, because I
travel between many societies and live longer term in quite a few of them.
It's clear to me that before the industrial revolution the quality of life in
_many_ societies was excellent as attested by their art, oral or written
literature, numerous annual festivals, etc. They weren't doing 9-5 with an
hour commute either side and numerous government, insurance, bank, and other
related chores. Sure, their diets were less sophisticated and closer to the
seasons. Sure, the products available were limited. But there was freshness
and quality, social security, time and freedom!

I do see the argument being accepted by many westerners, though. Perhaps
understandably if we are sort of taught in a way (IMHO) that skips over the
great evils of the industrial revolution (and subsequent wars) like they never
happened and asked to be happy and complacent in our modern
consumer/automobile culture: great things that have liberated us from the dark
ages of times past!

It is said that the Dark Ages followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. What
shall follow peak oil and the global neocolonial consumer culture?

Because we have the internet, are we educated? Perhaps less so: at least in
those times, the people could live from the land, perhaps even move if the
situation warranted it. No longer: there is a global conspiracy of governments
seeking to monitor and control our movement.

~~~
waps
Keep in mind that Italy had 2-3000 artists out of a population of > 5 million.
Most artists were rich aristocrats or their proteges. Comparing their lives to
today's lower classes ... well yes.

And yes they had time. They had space. That's about all they had though. Sex.
With the kids that came of it of course.

What will (eventually) follow the energy glut ? In some ways that's easy to
predict and in some ways really hard. 1) cities will operate independently
from states 2) there will be some group (ethnic maybe, or religious, or
ideological) that will play robbers. Kill and rob, along the roads between
cities 3) vast majority of people move back into agriculture 4) at least 80%
of the population starve 5) wars about the remaining resources before it runs
out, for a century or two before 1-4 start to really happen

Of course this only needs to happen if we do run out of energy, which frankly
seems unlikely.

~~~
contingencies
I'm no expert on European history but I do think your example of Italy in such
a period, despite the stupendous romance of the western art world for its
painterly accomplishments, should probably be viewed as only one pre-modern
human situation. Still earlier on and in proximity I think you would find more
interesting situations, for example all of the great steppe metalwork (gold,
etc.) preserved from the Slavic lands eastwards, bronze work from the eastern
Mediterranean, the great art of Central Asia, Iran and India, Tang China, the
Zomian region, etc. These places show not only metal work but textiles,
architecture and utilitarian objects of beauty that in many cases strongly
suggests a common wealth that truly permeated societies.

Re: end of empire energy failure - yeah, I agree a doomsday situation is far-
fetched (but don't tell the deep Americans digging bunkers and stocking up on
ammo! We may need them yet! ;). Serious systemic reform, on the other hand, is
but a certainty... purely a matter of time.

(PS. I love threads like this!)

