That's what I feel like in reading Mark Mosedale's and Si Smith's Gigs which came out back a few months ago. The summary on the back cover reads...
A.I. took the work. Gigs replaced jobs. Ordinary people are left to scrape together lives in a world that's no longer built for them.The book is set up like an anthology, with six stories that essentially stand on their own but all connect by virute of presenting the same world. Indeed, some of the characters are even present in multiple stories, though they may be a secondary or tertiary character in one despite being the protagonist in another. Collectively, the stories paint a picture of a world that, despite clearly being set in a future we haven't gotten to, might be more frighteningly closer than most people would care to admit.
The world presented in Gigs is very much a dystopia. There's a small handful of (unseen) wealthy elite running (and owning) things, a significantly smaller but seemingly financially comofortable middle class, and everybody else. I believe there's a line somewhere that says something like 75% of the population survive on gig work -- relatively temporary jobs that provide only just enough income to survive. It's not a dystopia where people are routinely disappeared or are given "re-education" or anything like that (well, I suppose it could be like that but we're not shown any of those aspects) but rather it's the type of dystopia where everyone is so caught up in just trying to earn enough money to survive that whatever time they're not working is spent in a kind of fugue state as they stare at their phones. 🤔
20 minutes into the future.
Mosedale and Smith don't offer any solutions. At least not anything at scale. What they do is point out that in bleak times, humans still want to human. They want to express themselves, they want to connect with others, they want to live. And that it's in small acts of personal rebellion that people can find themselves once again. Maybe it's running a personal book-sharing program. Maybe it's tracking down an old Walkman and listening to bootleg cassettes of bad punk music from before you were born. Maybe it's putting on a pair of sneakers and running out into the now-desolate countryside. Sure, there are protests and hacktivism and all that, but the message here is that there's a lot of hope in the smaller things that make us human. That it's in those personal acts of rebellion that we re-connect with ourselves and keep "The Man" from winning.
It's not pretty out in the world right now. A lot of people I know are dealing with it by ignoring it, and trying to carry on with their day-to-day lives. Even as costs for everything rise. As their friends and family find themselves out of work. As the products they buy get increasingly worse. As they increasingly have to pay rent just on simple distractions like games or TV. Gigs tells us that hope is the dandelions growing between the cracks of the cement. The small, singular acts of beauty where things had been paved over before. It's an excellent message to hear these days. An increasingly necessary one in fact. And Mosedale and Smith do a stellar job at executing on it.
Gigs is published by Top Shelf and came out back in June, so you should be able to order it from your favorite bookseller if they don't have it in stock. It retails for $24.99 US.
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