FIVE STORIES FROM THE DISTANT FUTURE

The world has changed unimaginably in the last thirty years, yet imagining the world thirty years from now is an increasingly difficult task, foreclosed by arguments over return-to-the office, hybrid work and the speculative impact of generative AI. What if we ask bigger questions: What does a future look like when growth is a nostalgic memory? Who profits when financial trade is a kooky niche subculture? What will we actually do all day if we’re automated out of work? What happens to our stuff if we slow down enough to let the world heal? What does a job look like in a world that’s turned consumers into carers?

In a (not so) distant future, we follow the lives of five characters as they go about their day. Their hopes, fears and aspirations are very much like ours, but they are set against a world of radical new network forms, a world conceptualised as a holistic, regenerative system, a world reordered by climate, social and technological shifts.

Reimagining Work: Five Stories from The Distant Future was originally written, created and produced by Tobias Revell for Whenever Wherever Festival at Orgatec 2024 and delivered as a performance lecture. The longer versions of the stories are presented here with their accompanying animations. Enjoy.

1. VINEYARDS OUTSIDE VIGRE - SUNRISE

Samiha kneels on the soil amongst the vines at the bottom of the hill with her pad in her lap and refreshes the projections again as the sun rises over the horizon. It’s still chilly in the shade and she can hear the rustle of the leaves in the sea wind, interspersed by the crescendo buzz of drones as they pass overhead following their confusing, wandering algorithms. It’s nearing the end of harvest; the vines are heavy with grapes and the drones are rushing around, directed by their own logic to gather the fat bunches to be crushed and fermented.

Three years ago, Samiha and her parents left their home in Feni, Bangladesh after the river burst its banks for the fourth time. Her parents were old, and though they had seen off a dozen floods in their long lives, each time quickly repairing their home and getting back to business, she knew it couldn’t go on much longer, and that she didn’t want to stay to help rebuild forever.

Her mother and father had been together, working and building a family for almost three decades when they decided to leave. Her father had followed his father into shipbreaking, directing the disassembly and recycling of the massive hulks of steel that beached themselves on the shores south of Feni. Over that time, he had grown his small company of three school friends to a member-owned cooperative of almost 2000 employees including Samiha’s mother who he had found tinkering in a market electronics stall and now ran copper and rare-earth reclamation for the co-op.

Later came Samiha (and her two younger brothers, long since left home to Korea and France). Samiha was smart but grounded. She was the first in the family to go to university on one of the international digital campuses and she majored in regenerative design; hoping it would lead her to work on the new cities planned for Bangladesh. But after the flood, Samiha was convinced that the grab-bag of skills her family had accumulated over the decades could be translated and so, with some cajoling, she convinced her parents it was time to go and signed them up with UNHCR Displacement Taskforce Skills Exchange.

Three years later, Samiha sits on the soil of their vineyard on the outskirts of Vigre halfway along the coast road from Egersund to Stavanger with the fingertips of her right hand in the soil, her left hand scrolling on her pad. With her thumb, she cycles through different meteorological projections for their impact on her soil restoration programme.

The family had found themselves on the southwest Norwegian coast thanks to the complex milieu of investments, philanthropic grants and displacement programmes that matched global skills to long-term needs in the Skills Exchange. By 2070, as the climate warms, Oslo will have Parisian summers, and the thawing soil presents an ideal carbon sink if properly stewarded. However, Norway’s population was on average 20 years older than Bangladesh and well into a steady decline, so the government invited families like theirs through the Skills Exchange to help.

2. THE SEA BEYOND STAVANGER - EARLY MORNING

Samiha puts the pad on the ground and pulls herself up to look out at the sea over the cliffs. One of this year’s last shipments left before sunrise from Stavanger and she strains to see if she can spot the white sails heading south along the horizon.

When they arrived, her father had turned his hand from shipbreaking to shipbuilding and with her mother’s guidance had invested in retrofitting a fleet of former diesel cargo vessels as autonomous sailing ships. The ships travel slower and are more susceptible to the temper of the sea but they keep the family’s scope one carbon emissions within the strict terms of the Skills Exchange. Just as in Bangladesh, her father’s entrepreneurial spirit has flourished. All through the end of summer, her parents’ ships carry wine and grapes from the prospering vineyards along the Norwegian coast to mainland Europe and bring back rice, cassava and sorghum.

Samiha is grateful her parents have the ships. The new business gives them a sense of continuity, but importantly for her, keeps them distracted from micromanaging the vineyard. The vineyard is Samiha’s; her programmes constantly tweak and rebalance the delicate systems of restorative agriculture, financial investments, ecosystem resilience and yield to ensure the long-term adaption and resilience the soil and her family needs.

Samiha turns from the sea, casting her eye across rows of vines lining the hill and begins the long walk back up to the house.

3. A ONE BEDROOM FLAT - MORNING

Simone gulps the very last dregs of coffee from their mug, forcing them to lean far back in their chair, and gaze up at the ceiling fan. This stretch of their neck is accompanied by a sudden realisation and they let out a groan: They’ve been up through the night again weaving the d-rhizome and now it’s mid-morning with the bright, low, late-summer sun blasting through the window.

A couple of dozen people are still online watching Simone’s stream, mostly in the US but Simone feels too embarrassed to continue chatting and so, still staring up at the fan, awkwardly grins, waves, thanks them for watching and shuts down the stream.

Simone first got involved with it through the distributed ecology research community. For Simone, with their understanding of biology, the concept came naturally: Huge, live datasets and advanced AI had made it possible to map financial, ecological and social systems into huge, live atlases. The d-rhizome mapped how, by, for example making an investment here, in a particular insurance fund now, that through a series of ricocheting side effects, over years, air quality in Milan might be improved. But, as opposed to the unreliable and reductive predictive models of high finance, the d-rhizome was not a one-to-one mapping. While those models might prioritise one or two variables; for instance, yield or productivity at the cost of negative externalities, the d-rhizome, like its natural mycelial namesake, captured everything. That earlier investment in insurance might restore air quality in Milan but might also, through the winding and meandering paths of intangible global systems, deplete fish stocks off the coast of Cornwall. A cascading series of negative externalities like that and the d-rhizome might unravel, losing the consensus of the people, plants and animals enmeshed in it.

And so, though the AI’s were incomparable in their processing ability, d-rhizome weavers like Simone were needed for their patience, understanding, consensus-building and judgement to keep the d-rhizome stable. Simone was particularly talented at weaving, which is why their stream attracted a healthy number of followers.

Simone puts the mug down and achingly leans forward on their elbows to squint at the paper-screen. They promised they’d just stay up long enough to see the wine shipment from Stavanger off. They’ve been tracking and weaving the vineyards springing up along the Norweigian coast into the d-rhizome for some years, marshalling a small legion of AI agents to micro-slice funds and assemble boilerplate companies to sustain them. This was not because Simone particularly liked wine but because the grapes not scooped up by drones were a massive calorie boost for the Turteltauben birds forced to migrate ever further north each summer.

4. DEEP IN THE KALLENWALD FOREST - MIDDAY

Simone had started small in the d-rhizome. Comprehending that amount of complexity could be overwhelming and so they had taken advice and focussed on something they knew to build out their first few nodes.

And so, they remembered the forest. As a child, they had walked and later studied the beech forest in Kallenwald but since then die-off, invasive species and a warming climate had begun to tip the ecosystem into collapse. Simone had started by pulling the strands together that would make the forest the focus of their work. There were plenty of disconnected, poorly funded charities and conservation efforts to be woven in first, followed by driving the attention of a smattering of venture capitalists to a bioscanning startup in Prague that would use the forest to test its drone, feeding data on species diversity, foliage density, moisture, heat, light and air quality back to the d-rhizome.

Then Simone spread the roots of the forest further. They directed investment to water resilience projects in northern Nigeria so that over the next ten years the spongibility of the soil would be enhanced, in the next fifty years this would reduce surface evaporation and over the next hundred years would calm the heavy and hot atmospheric rivers that were driven north into the Ruhr basin.

And then Simone recruited the Turteltauben which, now endangered and with the declining seed and fruit crop of Europe had developed a taste for the invasive black beetles devouring the beech trees. Now, sustained in their migration by the grapes of Noreweigian vineyards, the birds were returning in number, winning out against the ruinous bugs.

Simone pushes back their chair and stands. The d-rhizome is stable, the wine is coming, the forest is returning to life. With the sun inching higher in the sky, they go to bed.

5. MID-FLOOR OF A DOWNTOWN OFFICE RETROFIT - AFTERNOON

Sara turns her earpieces round into noise cancelling mode. Around her, the half dozen or so people who work on her desk are finishing up for the day and heading over to the kitchen. There are very few swaps left before they hit their daily trading cap and as they edge closer to the limit, it becomes increasingly difficult to eke out a profit from the vanishing niches in the market. She glances at her watch, making a point of the gesture to her colleagues and looks back to the screen, flitting between views, zooming, scanning, panning and refreshing, frantically searching for any last-minute gaps in the market.

Sara took part in her first hackathon at 14. Her parents had sent her to business school in the US and she’d fallen right into the fast-paced, entrepreneurial culture. Before long she was organising her own hackathons, developing strategies and trading bots that were so effective at navigating the swirling tempest of the markets that she quickly attracted the attention of the talent scouting Ais of her employer.

Some years later, at 19 and after some training, benchmarking and onboarding, a vacant one-bedroom apartment came free at one of the company’s most competitive city offices. As the global financial markets were wound down through a rolling series of international accords and regulations, these spots had become increasingly rare. To drive up competitiveness in a dwindling financial arena, a trend of ‘Total Onboarding’ had taken the business world by storm. Offices, once bustling with commuters and hybrid workers, were increasingly retrofit as live-work spaces for the most elite traders centred around trading desks. The best offices maintained their advantage by their proximity to data centres and undersea cables, and the only thing left to do was to bring the people who would work there to live there: Total focus, total culture, total onboarding.

Sara looks up from the screen and glances around. Today alone she’s made more than enough in swaps to have another glowing review for the weekend, more than any of her colleagues at the desk, but she’s hungry for more. She knows there isn’t much time left, not just for the day, but for the whole company. Even as PR people appear in the streams making loud, bullish and determined proclamations about a change in the political winds or the power of green finance, she knows she was born just a little too late for the thrill that had driven her parents and tutors. The boom times were over, and they were never coming back.

For generation betas like Sara the notion of a ‘career’ is a cringeworthy throwback. Instead, her self-perceived value is in her adaptability and breadth. As well as an early stint at business school, she is learning to be an oxy-performance artist, has started apprenticing with a building caretaker and has put some of her own capital and expertise behind bioscanning bots.

But most recently, her interest had been piqued by a message she received on Monday; an invitation to share her data from an AI talent scout at one of the new sunset funds. She opens the message and reads it again.

She has read about these new funds being rolled out from the reformulation of the massive investment and pension funds that used to hold the fate of the world in their grasp. The concept of a sunset fund was simple; instead of a focus on quarterly, yearly or even five-yearly returns, the profits of the companies grew and were held in escrow for at least one hundred years, when they were then released to investors, or more likely their children and grandchildren and the company was shut. With a rapidly ageing population, growing demand on dwindling resources and the increasing regularity and severity of market and supply chain shocks, the sunset funds sought to guarantee some future quality of life uncoupled from short-term speculation and wealth accumulation.

Sara’s thumb hovers over the message on her pad. She glances around at her colleagues in the kitchen and, after a moment’s hesitation, sends her data and sets up a chat with the AI. After all, why not? These sunset funds might be a fad, or they might be the future and, even if her current employer is still here in a year or two, the chances are that the thrill of the daily whirlwind of market activity will be even further reduced by macroeconomic degrowth. Perhaps the sunset fund might give her some of that excitement a little longer even if all her efforts go to reward a generation not yet born.

Sara sits up and looks up from the pad to the main screen, her attention returning to scanning, panning, zooming and filtering. Suddenly she spots something and rapidly scrolls the data. Here! She’s found a moment of uncertainty in the ether of the market that could be turned to her advantage. A shipment from Norway enmeshed in the d-rhizome with a bunch of bioremediation projects. But at this node the d-rhizome is briefly unstable, the weaver doesn’t have full consensus.

Sara excitedly reaches into her drive and is just about to unravel a new bot sequence when there’s a ping in her ear and, distracted, she instinctively glances at her pad to check the message. It’s from the caretaker; she’s late for her apprenticeship and though he’s bumbling, polite and courteous as ever, telling her not to worry, she feels a brief pang of guilt for standing up the old man.

Sara looks back at the screen. The brief interruption has cost her the opportunity; the d-rhizome has stabilised and receded into the noise of the market. She briefly lets out a sigh and removes her earpieces. The sound of talking and laughter from the kitchen comes over the floor as she turns in her chair to stand and stretch. She strides past the kitchen over to her one-bed, greeting her colleagues with smiles and nods, grabs her bag from her apartment and heads out to the elevators.

6. THE SUNNY ROOFTOP OF A BLOCK OF FLATS - EARLY EVENING

Gerrit is relieved it’s not raining as he digs around his tool bag for an 18-millimetre spanner. If it had been raining, he’d have to had put up the tarpaulin to stop water contaminating the bioreactor while he opens it up to repair it. The tarpaulin is big and unwieldly so he always struggles to set it up on his own and would have needed Sara’s help. But Sara is late again. He pings her a cautious message to remind her he’s expecting her and briefly worries again about her chasing the lifestyle and dreams of his own younger years; wealth and influence.

A few weeks ago, as they worked under the tarpaulin in the rain, Sara started excitedly interrogating Gerrit all about his time working in the city, about how he spent all day on calls and in meetings, about bonuses and performance reviews. He had been struck by the realisation that the career he took for granted for most of his life was fascinatingly exotic and glamorous to Sara. As they had knelt there, bent over the reactor with the thunder of the rain on the tarpaulin, she had enthusiastically quizzed him about the ins and outs of the market, sales and workflows.

Gerrit had realised he found Sara’s eager enquiries uncomfortable; reminding him of a world he had chosen to leave behind just as it was coming to an end. At the time, he knew the slowdown transition to a green economy was coming. And though he may have railed against it to his former colleagues, he was secretly grateful for the change.

Gerrit pats his pockets and finds the 18-millimetre spanner in his overalls where he had left it last time. He glances around to check if Sara has arrived on the roof while he was fumbling around. There’s no sign of her, and he can’t hear anything save for the cows lolling and chewing on the grass and the gentle whoosh of the turbines in the park next door. He grunts, Sara’s still young and there’ll always be a rebellious streak in the young. She’ll get here.

He replaces the flange on the reactor’s inlet and tightens it up. He steps back, hands on his hips and admires his work, running a mental checklist that everything is in its right place and cross-checking with the augmented reality report he received from the reactor’s AI when its efficiency dropped below the 97% threshold.

All of it looks good so he leans round to turn on the secondary and main switches, and sits down on the deck, keeping half an eye on the boot up procedure in his glasses while he gazes over the grass.

Gerrit moved into the block right after it was built, almost a decade ago. Even though he was happy to be leaving the world of client calls, stakeholder engagement and sales targets behind, he dreaded the thought that he might have nothing to do and be of no use to anyone.

A friend sent him the caretaker role. At first, he thought it was a joke. Despite himself, his pride stung at the idea of going from a successful career in investing to being a janitor but as he read more, he became intrigued. The communal block was one of a growing trend resulting from the increasing advent of biomaterials, regenerative operations and decentralised grids. The caretaker role wasn’t a service, it was a collaboration: He took the communal block apartment in a quiet part of the city on a rewilding ex-industrial estate and learned, with the help of an online maker network, to care for the building he and his community lived in. He learned to understand the building as a living, changing thing; a complex ecosystem of energy, resources and living beings, nurtured and sustained and nurturing and sustaining the life of the city around it. As he honed his caring craft, learning the tell-tale signs of a stuttering solar panel, the rickety creek of a struggling timber or the slight rumble of the bioreactor pushing too hard, his pride recovered.

And now Gerrit was sharing his knowledge with the next generation of caretakers; with Sara (when she showed up) and through the online maker network.

Gerrit is roused by a ping from the reactor AI letting him know that it’s happy and that the boot-up process has finished. The AI’s on the neighbouring houses confirm they’re also receiving fuel from the reactor and can switch back off the grid. In their slightly weird chorus, they thank Gerrit, he puts the 18-millimetre spanner back in his pocket, and he heads to go back downstairs.

7. A BUSY SHARED KITCHEN - NIGHTFALL

It’s Arne’s turn to cook tonight but he’s had to ask Gerrit to help him. With the kids from number 9 home from for the weekend and Sara over for her apprenticeship, almost the whole floor will be eating together which means a lot of food to prepare.

Arne is just starting to get anxious when Gerrit, carrying two heavy-looking buckets pushes the door open with his back and turns entering the room while mumbling a greeting to Arne. Gerrit has stopped by Simone’s apartment on the way to the kitchen to pick up some tomatoes for the soup and the wine arrived an hour ago, so Arne has poured a glass for Gerrit and himself, partly to calm his own nerves. Arne has a love-hate relationship with cooking, but Gerrit distracts him with menial chatter about the cows while they peel and chop the tomatoes.

Arne moved into the communal block about four years ago; just after separating from his partner and he was happy to downsize to somewhere he could find the easy support of a community. Of course, communal living dated back to the earliest cities and students had been doing it for generations but more recently, designers had been making buildings with more centralised utilities and services to stop the energy and carbon atrophy of everyone having their own cooker, fridge, dishwasher and washing machine. For some this felt awkward. For Arne, needing the comfort and care of others, it was ideal.

With the tomatoes ready, Arne starts jabbing at the cooker controls he can never remember how to use. After a few embarrassing seconds, some combination of pokes and prods works, the hob starts glowing red and Arne heaves the huge pot of peeled and chopped tomatoes onto it.

Arne has always struggled to hold down work. He is excitable, nervous and distractable. He might find himself myopically obsessed by a particular activity for days, at the cost of even his own health. Or else he might drift, glassy-eyed and unable to concentrate or bring focus to the world around him.

One night, Simone had tried to teach Arne to weave. For a while, it had been fun and diverting but then he had got distracted, left his nodes alone too long and they destabilised. Instead, he now preferred to sit and watch, letting Simone work out and strategise her weaving with him as an eager sounding board.

Later, when Sara was a few weeks into her apprenticeship she had invited Arne to the office and showed him how she traded; skimming and gliding across data like a hawk hunting prey. But he had become stressed and anxious just watching her. They still talked all the time, she had so much ambition and vision but was unsure where to put it, so Arne listened and talked and helped her navigate a future she was born too late for.

Gerrit still regularly invited him to help on his errands caring for the building. When Arne had just moved in, he was terrified of the responsibility of caring for the building that kept them and their community safe and fed. But he didn’t so much help as hang out, following Gerrit around while the old man muttered about the sounds of the new timber frame or how the coating on the solar panels was doing in the cleaner air. Sometimes they put a table and chairs out on the roof, listening to the cows munching away and not even saying anything.

Of course, Arne received universal basic income. A decade or so ago he might have felt ashamed but just as with public education, healthcare, social security and European integration, attitudes had shifted, the world had moved on. The meaning of Arne’s days was not in his productivity but in the connections he built.

Arne stirs the pot while Gerrit tells him a story he heard about some jellyfish blocking a cooling inflow down by the river. Just then, Simone sleepily swings open the door and patiently holds it open for a harried-looking Sara who rushes in spouting profuse apologies for Gerrit. Arne relaxes as more of their friends and colleagues filter in, and he serves them up tomato soup and a glass of Norweigian wine and they sit down to eat.

©Tobias Revell, 2024 - tobiasrevell.com