Is your work truly essential?
When keeping your job is worse than losing it
by James Kaelan
When I got the delivery notification text, I rushed to the mail room and began sifting through my neighbor’s holiday packages until I found the envelope with my name on it — and the Verso Books address in the top left corner.
I tore it open.
“DEMAND FULL AUTOMATION / DEMAND UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME / DEMAND THE FUTURE,” screamed the black block letters on the flame-red background. Amidst the stacks of Amazon Prime and Blue Apron boxes — and despite the fact that I was in the middle of copy-editing an article — I folded back the cover and began to read.
“Where did the future go?” ask Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in their introduction to Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work.
For all the glossy sheen of our technological era, we remain bound by an old and obsolete set of social relations. We continue to work long hours, commuting further, to perform tasks that feel increasingly meaningless… The glimmers of a better future are trampled and forgotten under the pressures of an increasingly precarious and demanding world. And each day we return to work as normal: exhausted, anxious, stressed and frustrated.
