The publication RockstarCMO asked our Managing Director Keith Smith for his predictions for the year ahead. In typically disobedient style, he offered a vision of 40 years ahead, inspired by The Doors’ retrospective – The Future Starts Here.
January 01 2060:
” ‘The Future Starts Here’ – an advertising line for a gig worker sponsor, lifted from a music album from the turn of the century.
It just popped up in my visual feed and it
got me reminiscing.
My father had the record – a 40th
anniversary celebration of music by a band called The Doors and I used to sneak
into his study and listen to it when I was a kid. The Doors was one of his favorite
bands even though they were a bit before his time.
“Music
was music back then,” he’d tell me. “Not like this electronic, mind numbing robot-manufactured
crap you all have today. Music had a personality.” I miss his rants against
my generation. I think it was trying to deal with the stress of his work that
finally blew up his heart. I only got to know him for 13 years of my life and
he hadn’t retired. He was still on the wheel, trying to make sure he had enough
cash to live on when he finally got off – which he didn’t.
I often wonder what he’d make of life now. “How can you live with all the uncertainty?”
he’d say. “How can you do all this ‘work
a bit here, work a bit there’ way of life? It’s so…Romany.”
I consider myself to be one of the
fortunate ones. I found my gig worker sponsor early in life. Gig worker sponsors
pay for your lifestyle, like a retainer. They gamble on your future and in
return, you provide them with a drip, drip, drip of regular income, like a
tithe from the old days. Many tithes make a fortune and that’s what my sponsor
is banking on. It’s all he can bank on really. The old days of buying and
trading company shares is a lock out. It’s the privilege of the institutional
investor now because they got sick of all the get rich quick strategies that
sent the markets soaring and then plummeting. So Phil, my sponsor keeps me in the
lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed and, in return, I generate money for
him to fund his lifestyle.
I’m one of his gigs.
I’m lucky really that I’m always so busy. I
have gigs in three countries now, three in Britain, one in The Netherlands and
I just picked up a new one in Australia. I make lots of different products for
the gaming and entertainment industry, which is cool because I’m always doing
something different – it keeps my mind active and I find that work I do, say
for the Australian outfit, crosses over into other jobs I do. But the main
thing is, I do them on my time. I can control the deadlines and I’m known for
always delivering as promised, which makes me a more successful gig worker. The
better your brand, the higher the fee you can command.
Phil funds all my healthcare needs and in
return, I make sure I stay in peak condition. I eat well, using products grown
in the community garden in my block. I can’t remember the last time I had a
burger – probably when I was a kid, but if too much bad cholesterol shows up on
my monthly health scan, Phil hears about it and then he’ll be all over my ass
about keeping myself healthy so I don’t affect his revenue stream.
The block, where I live and work is one of
the better ones in the area. It’s got massive storage for all the elements I
need for printing out the prototypes I use for work, as well as for all the
practical things I require for life. I just printed out a new bike, which I
need, but it’s just so handy to have all the raw materials piped into the building.
I can’t go out that much because of the state of the air but my block has its
own velodrome and me, and a bunch of other gig workers run a competitive
league, so I built the highest spec I could afford.
Jenni, my partner and I live apart, but in
the same lifestyle block. We met after we both made ourselves available on the
in-house dating network. She’s pretty cool. Her family are mostly gig worker
sponsors and she’s trying to recruit me into their network but three things
bother me about it. Number one, we’re not a permanent item and if that all goes
south – awkward. Number two, they don’t have any entertainment experience in
their portfolio – mostly sales and marketing operators, so I would have to deal
with trying to justify my every move to them. Lastly, I like Phil. He took a
big gamble with me, given my father’s untimely demise but he’s done a lot to
connect me with new opportunities and I feel I owe him a lot more than just a
slice of my income.
Besides, the sales, advertising and
marketing sectors are so unpredictable. The new economy drove a flying bus
through their revenue models. I choose what advertisements I see, and when. My
block is signed up to an agency that covers a lot of buildings in the area.
We’re all what they used to call upper middle class. We’re all professionals in
a high-earning gig-working neighborhood so the agency that broadcasts all the
in-vision ads we see is very particular about the brands and products vying for
our attention. It works like this: We sign up to an ad-view list, specifying
what things interest us, what we’re looking for, and the agency tenders for
bids from suppliers. The ads are then broadcast to the system in my lifestyle
block and I get them on my entertainment screen, my Hololens and all my comms.
I can also earn credits for recommending products to my contacts, based on my
own credibility and influence factors. All in all, it’s a pretty sweet deal.
I’m not much into politics. Because I work
around the world, which is such a vital part of the global economy, the global
political system dominates the local, country-specific one. All I’m concerned
with is that I don’t get blocked or banned from any of the international gig
working network directories, so as long as the powers don’t screw with that,
I’m happy.
Politics became such a street-fighting
process, people got fed up with it because it was taking up all the precious
oxygen which, ironically, they continued to ignore concerns about. The air
became so toxic because governments repeatedly refused to deal with the problem
and eventually, they were all in danger of losing their jobs, so the balance of
power transferred back to the people. It was too late to stop global warming
but we slowed it down considerably and within the next few decades we’ll be
looking to new, other worldly solutions.
New planets offer new opportunities and wherever these pioneers fly, they’ll need to be entertained, which is great for people like me. There’s always hope, right? You just need to know where to find it. “
The original article can be found here:
