Only 7 more newsletter issues to go before Art of Gig wraps up on April 30th!
As I wind down this newsletter over these last 8 issues, I find my thoughts drifting naturally to the really long-term outlook for the future of work, like 500 years out, way beyond our own lifetimes.
It seems almost silly to ask a question like “what will the gig economy look like in 2521?” Not only do we have almost no stake in the question, making our thoughts rather frivolous, even our terms and concepts are almost certainly entirely wrong for thinking about such a question. Whatever the biggest divides in the world of work in 2521 — if “work” is even a meaningful category of human activity then — the chances that “gig economy vs. salaried” will be one of them seem quite low to me.
But the world of 2521 is still revealing to speculate about, because it puts things in perspective for you and me, living through 2021. So is there a way to get at it?
A C. S. Lewis quote I just discovered (via a tweet from Michael Nielsen) suggests one way to approach the question:
All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook–even those, like myself, who seem opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united — united with each other and against earlier and later ages — by a great mass of common assumptions… The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only be reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past…To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
The quote got me thinking — in the nearly two years I’ve been writing this newsletter, like most people who write about the gig economy, I’ve sort of assumed the committed, careerist, salaried employee as the “opposed side” in our discussions. Though I’ve been careful not to cast them as antagonists, and have framed the salaried lifestyle as merely another, equally valid lifestyle choice, there is no doubt that at some level there is a deep contemporary philosophical divide between the two sides. And we’ve spent a lot of time over these past two years exploring aspects of that divide.
But what beliefs do we share with the salaried world? And what would it mean for those shared beliefs to be falsified in the future?
I’ve done my share of reading on the history of work (some of which has informed what I’ve been writing about here), but with all due respect to C. S. Lewis, the “clean sea-breeze of the past” is not actually very helpful. Unlike Lewis, I am pretty sure, if we could actually get at them, books from the future would actually be vastly more helpful than books from the past, not merely “just as good.”
How we all differ from 19th century workers is interesting to learn, but not necessarily that helpful. In fact, if we are not careful to inject irony and satire into our own nostalgic tendencies, it is easy to be inspired by the past into silly behaviors like unironically larping medieval guild life. I mean, C. S. Lewis was a talented writer, but ultimately one whose sensibilities were rooted in the past, via theology. So it’s not surprising that he thinks of the past as the source of “clean sea-breeze” rather than unpleasant smells from unidentified rotten things.
How we all differ from the people of 2521 though — that would be kinda helpful to know, since the differences should point to the weakest parts of our collective assumptions today.
We don’t have those books, but maybe we can get somewhere working backwards via a two-step formula: identify visible beliefs unquestioningly shared by both paycheck and gig economy types, and then consider them from the point of view of futures where they are not true anymore.
I tried going through the exercise and came up with the following 3 excerpts from future books:
I.
It may seem bizarre to us in 2521, but in the early twenty-first century, there were fierce arguments about whether “paycheck income” or “gig income” offered superior freedoms. The question drove strife similar to the religious strife that had dominated earlier centuries.
“Gigs” and “paychecks” were common patterns of work in the 2020s, and the differences are irrelevant for this book, but we need to understand the concept of “income” before proceeding.
“Income” was compensation for work in the form of tokens, with fixed nominal numerical values called “currency,” which were issued for circulation by governments that interfered with, limited, and constrained every aspect of individual lives, largely through the regulation of these “currencies.” “Income” played the societal role religion had in earlier centuries. All adults in the premodern era were entirely dependent on “income” to meet their needs, and were required to participate in one or more “currency” religions. In many parts of the world, you could end up imprisoned or even dead if they failed to possess enough “income.” A great deal of criminal activity was related to the acquisition of these tokens. A small minority thought the problem was the fact of government control of these currency tokens, rather than their very existence. They invented various “cryptocurrency” tokens that were supposed to eliminate such control, but ended up creating their own cult-like religious governing authorities that dominated much of the 22nd and early 23rd centuries. Another small minority thought everybody should have “universal basic income” instead of having to work for it, but they never made serious inroads.
It wasn’t until the late 23rd century that the tokens themselves were recognized as the problem, and the first serious proposals to do away with them came about, and the required kinds of Artificial Coordination Intelligences (ACIs) were developed. The result was the modern humane economy as we understand it, with freedom largely decoupled from “currencified” economic activities. Today mechanisms similar to “income” can be found in the protocols robots and computers use to coordinate use of scarce resources, so one way to understand “currencies” is as a protocol for coordination in a world where humans had to perform various essential functions that are only performed by machines today, due to lack of sufficiently powerful ACIs.
— from When Currencies Ruled the World, published in 2521, Timeline ZZ9913
II.
A startling feature of early twenty-first century life was that all humans not only expected to live only about 80 years, but they expected their final decade or two to be spent in a state of steady physical and cognitive decline, accompanied by economic hardship, known as retirement. It is a concept that is largely forgotten today, but ruled human life for nearly four centuries. To a large extent, the design of lifestyles was in fact the design of retirements.
Retirement was a period that, for most people, was shaped by pain and illness, abandonment by the young, and a barbaric system of health management that subjected most humans to painful end-of-life conditions. Writers from the 22nd century, for whom the system was still a living memory, often referred to retirement as the “death casino system.” Voluntary ending of life was illegal in most parts of the world until the late 21st century. So the last years of life were spent dealing with an array of debilitating diseases and even more horrifying patterns of “healthcare” that would be considered torture today under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 2414. Most humans spent the first 45-50 years of adulthood working as hard as they could to save enough resources to make “retirement” slightly more bearable and pain-free.
The retirement period itself, which typically lasted between 5 to 35 years, was marked by near-complete economic inactivity, with most available attention being devoted to the management of increasingly burdensome health conditions. From our perspective in 2480, this seems like barbarism. Most of us today expect to live to between 120-150 years, but have no conception comparable to “retirement” outside of temporary restorative retreats (which were called “mini-retirements” in the 21st century. Barring accidents, most of us choose to end our lives by age 130 on average. Arguably, no one alive today would tolerate the barbarism of enforced “retirement,” but incredibly enough, as late as the 2130s, people actually looked forward to the period as their “golden” years, and thought it represented a hard-won freedom! Some even tried to “retire early” as young as 30, and generally spent the rest of their lives dealing with various mental health issues.
— from Retirement: The Strange Mania that Shaped Four Centuries, Published 2480, Timeline A1871
III.
Be careful not to be caught with this book. Hide it carefully, and only make copies when you’re sure you’re not being watched. Disguise it as a junkyard temple bible if you can. In most North American junkyard tribes, being caught with this book is punishable by instant death. The warlords with their water hoards and rusty forts don’t want you to know the truth, but the world was not always like this stark desert we call home, and it doesn’t have to be that way today.
Only a few centuries ago, the world contained 9 billion people, all of whom lived lives of great luxury, with as much food and water as they wanted, and powerful medicines that could cure most diseases. All humans had marvelous computing machines in their pockets, from which they could read all the books in the world via a global communication system called the TikToks. There was no harsh struggle for survival. Most humans only worked a few dozen hours a week, and had entire days off on what was called the “weekend,” when they didn’t have to work, let alone fight. All possessed dozens of machines driven by oil, wind, and solar power, of the sort only warlords possess today. Ordinary people had more such machines then than our most powerful warlords do today. And the key to it all was a system built on something called “money” that anyone could easily earn and trade through arrangements called “jobgigs,” for whatever they needed or wanted. There was no need to kill and fight and barter. There was no need to obey the warlords. In fact, the warlords of that time were petty leaders in a few corners of the world. There was no need to scrounge through the junkyards. In fact, the junkyards of our time were not temples of secrets like the warlords’ priests say, but places where the ancients threw away broken things. We only have to live like this today because it suits the warlords. There is a better way: the way of the ancients.
But the system of the ancients had a fatal weakness, which led to the Great Collapse. You have all heard tales of the Great Collapse, and all of them are true, not myths like the warlords would have you believe. We can rebuild a world like the one that once existed before the Great Collapse, but without the flaws. But the warlords don’t want us to. So they tell us those old stories are myths. They spread lies about how the machines we have today were left behind by alien gods who built the junkyards as puzzle temples and gave the first warlords their guns. The junkyards are in fact the discarded things of our own ancestors. This book will teach you what you can do to overthrow the warlords without getting yourself killed, so we can rebuild the world that once existed, with enough jobgigs and TikToks for all.
— from Return to the Golden Age, underground book from 2621, Timeline B331
What else do we all take for granted, salaried and gigworkers alike?
What are other uncontroversial shared assumptions that might seem crazy to the future, making our disagreements seem irrelevant by comparison?
Note: If you are forwarded this newsletter, please be aware that it will be shutting down on April 30th, 2021, and the archives published as an eBook. So if you’re interested in subscribing, I recommend waiting for the eBook instead. If you do subscribe, please use the monthly option, not the annual one, to save me trouble wrangling the refunds.