The (Terrible) Occupations Of The Future

By on September 1, 2011 in News 57

Human spammer? Digital janitor? Baby refurbisher? The imaginative two-minute film Ghosts with Shit Jobs unveils what you will be doing for a living in thirty years, after your whole family’s data cloud has been repossessed, and the real world increasingly becomes a pale imitation of the internet. (Some questionable Asia-baiting is mixed in.)

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  • http://voxmagi-necessarywords.blogspot.com/ VoxMagi

    Gold farmer…ni hao!

    Trust…WOW for pay sounds great at first…but you can be sure it would always wind up as a low paying job you can barely survive on with pressures upon you so great that you play in a constant state of misery. There’s nothing like desperation to transform play into grinding horror.

  • DamagesFan

    I wonder how much it would be to be a torrent snitch…….

  • Wanooski

    What about console cowboy?

  • Anonymous

    uhm, it’s not a two minute film. It’s a full length film. This is just a trailer.

  • Anonymous

    uhm, it’s not a two minute film. It’s a full length film. This is just a trailer.

  • emperorreagan

    Shadow stats have the true unemployment rate up near 25%.  I think we’re already living in a country where many people are ghosts.

    We’re already well past the point where there are more people than there is actual labor, thanks to the combined factors of automation and population growth.  

  • Wanooski

    Not to mention nation specific unemployment related to outsourcing. Worse in some places than others.

  • Wanooski

    Not to mention nation specific unemployment related to outsourcing. Worse in some places than others.

  • santaownsyou

    Dirty panty maker, someone got to soil all those panties for sale to our new asian overlords.

  • Anonymous

    Yeah this is funny and all but I dont really understand what the implication is…..foreign competition is not to blame; it is our self-destructive leadership, our hollow culture, and our collective head-in-the-sand mentality. I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again, America has every reason to succeed and to enable its citizens to succeed and live happy productive lives, yet we choose to reward crooks and thieves, worship greed and wealth, and shun those who are actually interested in improving our society instead of just looking out for themselves.

  • Will Hutton

    Western problems pale in comparison to china’s

  • Butter Knife

    “There’s nothing like desperation to transform play into grinding horror”

    The fact that you believe desperation is required for this shows you don’t actually play WoW. That’s basically where it starts. I can’t imagine how miserable it would be to play professionally… as it stands I don’t know of any high-end raiders who still have fun “playing” the “game”.

  • http://hormeticminds.blogspot.com/ Chaorder Gradient

    Population growth can probably be handled (if not by depression and suicide as things are going right now)

    Automation however seems to be here to stay, unless of course either we revamp everything, or wait for the whole machine to crumble over its on weight.

    We can either wait for the destruction, or figure out a way to get people to leave the ghost mentality and regain their agency that they once had, even if we have to redefine the definition of a “meaningful life”. In any case the country is gunna look both ugly and weird… lets combine those and we’re left with grotesque.

  • http://hormeticminds.blogspot.com/ Chaorder Gradient

    I wanna be payed to be a game “boss” to beat the game, you have to sign online and play against me to see the ending.

  • Godozo

    Extrapolate from present patterns (and don’t assume they can be reversed), add in a good dose of fatalism, put on it the “American Can-Do” optimism, and you get this movie.

  • Wanooski

    That would be fun at first, but would probably get real old after a while.

  • http://hormeticminds.blogspot.com/ Chaorder Gradient

    I’d rather be a ghost doing that than walking around dropping brand names

  • http://voxmagi-necessarywords.blogspot.com/ VoxMagi

    You’re right that I don’t play…but my chums do…even almost a decade later they still dig it…and they’ve been around long enough that they’re all raid leaders and guild bosses. Just not my style though…I’m more of a Civ5 guy. More strategy and long term planning.

  • Anonymous

    Yes, I remember you writing a book about that.

  • Anonymous

    Nice video I enjoyed watching it… but I’d echo what Will Hutton said lower down on this thread. China has a lot of problems of it’s own, the narrative of the ‘unstoppable rise of China and they’re going to beggar us all’ is mainly American paranoia. So is this zero-sum mentality that where China gains America automatically loses, or in some of the more blow-hardish areas, that China is trying to take over the world.

    Also the socio-economics in China vary quite a lot between coastal and inland areas, plus ethnic tensions (Uighers, Tibetans, fears of Han colonisation), corruption, poor safety standards, poor work conditions, land grabs, suppression of dissent and so on…. China isn’t some all-powerful monolith, it quite visibly has feet of clay. If the West were to be lastingly eclipsed by China I’d say it’s because the West blew it, rather than that China had anything amazing.

    Also, you have to keep in mind, how China grew rapidly richer is qualitatively different to how the West did. The West basically had to invent the modern world, starting with the Industrial Revolution in Britain. China has simply imported everything from abroad, copied it, and done it cheaply because swathes of its population are willing to be paid badly and treated like crap. To be honest, I don’t see anything intrinsically admirable in it, other than the good that people have become less poor.

    There’s more to be said, but it is lunch time.

    Seriously, there’s so much more to what’s going on here than the video, however entertaining, acknowledges.

  • emperorreagan

    The capitalist, automated dystopia has been written about in science fiction since the 1920s.  Some people have tried to push ideas that would fundamentally alter the way society is structured and would have better prepared us for the juncture we’re at now.  It’s not as though prescient people missed this coming.  We should have spent the last 60 years restructuring our economic and social structures.  If I were to sit down and write a history book about the 1900s, I would follow up the “Greatest Generation” by calling the baby boomers the “Worst Generation.”
     
    I have many ideas on how things should be restructured, though I’m not particularly hopeful because the segment of the population that seems hellbent on destruction is running the show now.

    Population growth could be handled – if anyone was willing to talk about it.  However, the dominant myth of the day says growth is good and something to be pursued, so who’s going to try to deal with it?  The only population growth people seem to be worried about in the US is the growth of the Latino population.

  • Anonymous

    Then why do they play? I mean really, the whole point is having fun. Otherwise what’s the point?

    That’s why the only main tenet of the guild I run is “Have fun”. We’re not raiding or rbging three nights a week and you’ll never see us at the top of any leaderboards, but we all have lives outside the game and have a lot of fun when we _do_ get together. Anything else is a waste of both money and time.

  • Pratyush Rathore

    Wasn’t the condition exactly opposite 15 yrs back? Chinese doing shit jobs which Americans didn’t want to? I mean, come on, it is shameful when you have to do it, is it?

  • Pratyush Rathore

    Wasn’t the condition exactly opposite 15 yrs back? Chinese doing shit jobs which Americans didn’t want to? I mean, come on, it is shameful when you have to do it, is it?

  • http://hormeticminds.blogspot.com/ Chaorder Gradient

    Thats the way you should play it, its the way I used to play, loose and fun. However I have relatives in a top guild, and it really might as well be a second job…

    “Hey you wanna go out and do this?”
    “No, man I got a raid tonight”

    Except that is 5 days out of every week.

    I stopped playing because I realized it was essentially half slot-machine, half grind-fest. That and its tiered, you cant use the next slot machine (raid) until you’ve played the one before a number of times, and there are maybe 5~10 tiers per expansion. Its a good way of having people spend thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of hours.

  • Okarin

    when free trade isn’t fair someone gets the short end of the stick

  • Tbsrocker62

    This will never happen in America, as long as we still have the most powerful military in the world that is…

  • Tbsrocker62

    This will never happen in America, as long as we still have the most powerful military in the world that is…

  • emperorreagan

    I briefly tried Lord of the Rings online but found the notion of scheduling playing video games around when other people were available to be absurd.  I play video games to relax, not to add yet another thing to my calender (that people can be angry about me blowing off when I’d rather go read a book by myself in the woods).

  • Wanooski

    You don’t seem to understand that this is ALREADY happening in America.

  • Wanooski

    You don’t seem to understand that this is ALREADY happening in America.

  • http://www.facebook.com/TheJakeyl Jacob Newton

    Or an X-Flare takes out the grid, and all electronics throwing the entire world back hundreds of years.  Then all you have to worry about is living day to day, rifle, ammunition, clean water and food.  That is living.

  • Gaeasdaughter

    Yeah, so the “greatest generation” dumped a dying planet and a global oligarchy in our laps and we’re the “worst generation???” Give me a break. They at least got back Medicare and Social Security. We’re fighting just to keep those funds from being handed over to our war-mongering, short-sighted, millionaire-ridden government. And the kids that follow us are too busy living online to be activists. ENOUGH CLICHES AND GENERATION WARS … we have a class war going on that needs us all to pull together and figure out the future.

  • Gaeasdaughter

    Yeah, so the “greatest generation” dumped a dying planet and a global oligarchy in our laps and we’re the “worst generation???” Give me a break. They at least got back Medicare and Social Security. We’re fighting just to keep those funds from being handed over to our war-mongering, short-sighted, millionaire-ridden government. And the kids that follow us are too busy living online to be activists. ENOUGH CLICHES AND GENERATION WARS … we have a class war going on that needs us all to pull together and figure out the future.

  • Anonymous

    In desperation for their immidate oil needs America commits atrocities around the world. Fact is: China seeks and get alternate energy sources. Google Tsinghua University China, pebble bed gas reactor- – see here an advance over the current U.S. fuckoshima plutonium bomb factories the height of U.S. reactor achievements, circa 1950′s technologies with shiny new digital faces where analog dials once were being the only real radical difference on “New and Improved” models! China strives for and will attain re-engineered Thorium fueled LFTR reactors proven feasible in the 1970′s by U.S. scientists, but foresaken for bomb-making reactors!   http://Www.theoildrum.com/node/4971  tells the whole story. You read, you weep.
    We see an America hell bent on preserving an unsustainable “American Dream’ status quo, consuming huge amounts of the world’s resources just to maintain itself, faced now with sharing world resources, world markets with the new Asian fact.
    We will see America fade from some of her former prowess, as Asian schooling excels, Asians accomplish in the sciences, math physics, chemistry, engineering and the technologies. asAsians tap a very much larger gene pool in search for the very brightest, the very highest IQ’s to educate to excel at communist financed science development programs. American schooling fails today, and has little chance of getting better in the current economic downslide, after all it is sposored, bought and paid for on the rising or falling of the corporations.
    America ‘morphs’ now away from the “Great American Corporate and Capitalist Propaganda Whore’s” ridiculous “American Dream” and her “sales pitch bull Shiite”, towards a more realistic and sustainable lifestyle. As we speak, extreme cases of ‘Off-Grid’ folk are growing, living in realative comfort and gret security, isolated from the vagarities of normal American life-styles, but different! Very differnt, philosophically, morally religionsly, and have even found leverage in communal behaviours much to the chagrin of the “Hard-ass Capitalist -Corporatist American core”.
    America is just at the very beginning of a gut wrenching paradigm shift, that will affect all, from the bottom to the top – not brought on by one or the other factors but by a series of cascading realities, some new some old, all, overpowering the status quo of every day America.
      

  • RiseandFall 0

    funny but this will never happen.

  • RiseandFall 0

    funny but this will never happen.

  • Wanooski

    Uhh, yeah. But I don’t think China is going to come out very golden, they seem to have their sights set on that same idiotic american style dream.

  • Wanooski

    Maybe way out in the boondocks, where I live, but near urban centers, life will be hell for quite some time. It ain’t gonna be all rosy rural, settler/native lifestyle, not for a long time anyway, the ecosphere is heavily damaged, and the surplus human population will be roaming the land eating everything like locusts. I still see very little to be optimistic about, humanity is in so many ways, angling for extinction.

  • Walter Borden

    Definiely Asian Bating. And foolish in that regard, because such already happens there, and should it come to pass in the U.S. it will be same in the East, since we finance their surplus with our consumption. The few spiders pops left will quickly be wiped by the silk thing.

    Otherwise some thought-provoking clips re human spam and digital janitor.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_ZPE24UINM3VPTI6DSIQ2BJVSEI Joseph Ibee

    “Greatest Generation?  Another American fairy tale.

  • Ricardo Obsolete

    Wlliam Gibson would be proud!

  • XXXXX

    This was shot in Toronto… but once again called “America”

  • Fellner Éva

    Thank you, If possible I’ll take a vidi.Fiona(éva)youtob2480

  • Fellner Éva

    Thank you, If possible I’ll take a vidi.

  • Stanford Griffin

    As it is written in the good book.  Save for a remnant this country is becoming one that needs to repent like Nineveh. I fear we shall share the same fate as Sodom and be judged like Gommorrah. 

    The presense of those who name the name of Jesus as savior and still fear God Almighty is the only restraint left.  The worse thing that can happen to a person or a nation is God giving you up to your sins!!!

  • Gibberish

    Oh, boo hoo, hipster has to work a crappy job. Shed a tear.

  • Gibberish

    Well I’m glad that a guy posting on Disinfo.com has all the answers.

    God bless you, sir, for enlightening us plebes. I don’t know what we’d do without your clear-minded opinions and reasoned arguments … oh, wait, you didn’t offer any of that stuff; you simply repeated a bunch of meaningless agitprop.

    But that kind of comment is what got me banned from Disinfo. I guess that all free speech is free, but some is more free than others.

  • Gibberish

    Well I’m glad that a guy posting on Disinfo.com has all the answers.

    God bless you, sir, for enlightening us plebes. I don’t know what we’d do without your clear-minded opinions and reasoned arguments … oh, wait, you didn’t offer any of that stuff; you simply repeated a bunch of meaningless agitprop.

    But that kind of comment is what got me banned from Disinfo. I guess that all free speech is free, but some is more free than others.

  • Anonymous

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  • HC

    He’s backed up by a book from well over a century ago.  Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the end of democracy would come when all of those characteristics he listed take root among the populace.  They will take root when people simply stop caring about anything else but they, their immediate family, and a few close friends.  And apparently the American love of wealth, intellectual shallowness, and workaholic syndrome were around in the 1830s when he wrote Democracy in America. 

    Of course, you probably think the greatest writer on American political culture is a shameless commie…

  • Andrew

    Seems a tad hypocritical that you would whine about a privately owned site deciding who gets to post comments on it.

  • Anonymous

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  • Luxstrangelove

    The guy with the hat & suspenders.. (in the photo)… What’s Brad Pitt doing in this video? 

  • http://www.facebook.com/allison.pelot Allison Draper Pelot

    Very strange and a little scary.
     

  • http://www.facebook.com/allison.pelot Allison Draper Pelot

    Very strange and a little disturbing.

  • OGPimpNasty

    It’s like I always say: I’ll live as a part of society until living in the woods is a better option, then I’ll say “Fuck society! PEACE!!!” Always remember, living in society is a choice! That’s really important to remember! And keep a close eye on what can make it a necessity or an obligation instead.