What does the future of work hold?

In the final installment of Strange New Work, we consider a different approach to power. Instead of consolidating power and exerting control, what if we started to see power as a resource we cultivate together? Tania Luna defines power as the ability to make things happen. How could we work together to activate the power we need to forge a brave new world of work?

On the internet, just about every problem or quandary can be boiled down to an issue of content moderation. Who decides what content can be published or not, how fast content loads, who is allowed to see what… all of these issues are made real through content moderation practices. And yet, content moderators are some of the most exploited workers in the 21st-century economy.

Are you doing the work you were born to do? Have you found your purpose? Your mission? Have you tapped into the life you were meant for? These questions are ubiquitous in self-help, small business, and career development spaces. But what does it mean to be “born for” a certain job or career path? Speculative fiction has some ideas.

An enduring vision of the future is one that is free from housework thanks to robots and smart homes that take care of us (and themselves). We like to imagine that a life with less housework would mean a life with more free time. But “labor-saving” devices often result in far more work, not to mention an even greater dependence on the work we do for an income.

Workplaces are sites of cultural assimilation. At work, we learn how to fit in better and play by the rules everyone expects us to. Every worker has a learning curve, but for marginalized people, the learning process can be long and full of risk. Changing how we approach the cultural rules of the workplace—making expectations explicit, for example—can make it easier for people to participate on equal footing.

Capitalism squeezes and distorts our experience of time. Everything feels like it’s moving so fast, that every problem is an urgent one, that there are never enough hours in the day because the imperative to maximize and optimize every moment is omnipresent. Rethinking our approach to time and adopting a long-term, abundant view of our most precious resource could help us improve our work lives dramatically.

World-building is the process that speculative fiction writers use to think through the setting—geographical, cultural, personal—they’re creating for a story. Tara speaks with artist and writer Morgan Harper Nichols about her personal practice of world-building, and how we might approach rethinking work with world-building as a tool.

The way things are is not the only way things could be. Strange New Work imagines radically different work futures through speculative fiction. Think space travel, exoplanets, artificial intelligence, and—yes—aliens. All that “strangeness” helps us break out of the constraints of the present and break into a whole new way of thinking about work.