2051, OR WILL WE EVEN HAVE AN ECONOMY ANYMORE?

The year is 2051. The unemployment rate is 46%. It’s still going up. AI took the first 36%. And then humanoid robots, 10% and climbing. But nobody talks much about that anymore. Why talk about it when “jobs” don’t exist anymore?

They call them the Techfugees. When the shockwave hit, people lost everything. Step by step. Incomes, jobs, careers, livelihoods, professions. Then savings, investments, and finally, homes. And then there was nothing left.

They live in what the early 21st century might have called refugee camps. Stretching for miles and miles. Generations now huddle there together. They’ve lived there for decades now, enough time for tents to have become makeshift buildings, even concrete low rises. The camps popped up in the places where they could. Deserts, mountain towns, along forgotten stretches of coast. Now they ring major cities.

Generation Z was the first. To experience the new reality, the new world. Jobs disappeared. And while pundits and economists said that they’d come back, they didn’t. They were the first generation to experience never having jobs, careers, or professions. Those who went into the trades, too, soon enough found themselves made irrelevant by robots. They were the first to have been made obsolete. Sometimes, they called themselves the Useless.

They’re middle aged now. And they’ve tried to teach their young what the world used to be like before, the glimpse they had of it, thrumming economies, opportunity, a chance at building a life. But theirs are the first children to have grown up in the new world. In the camps. They’ve never known any other life. To speak of “jobs” or “careers” or even “livelihoods” to them is like telling fairy tales of another place and time.

What they hope for, the young, the best and brightest among them, is to join the Chosen. The Chosen are what the people in the camps call the others. The ones who were on the other side of the shining, glorious revolution that laid waste to a world. The lords and barons and their lieutenants and lieges.

They live in shimmering skyscrapers. Not packed in by the hundreds, like in the old world, but many, just by and for themselves. Their families have ten, twenty, thirty floors, a dozen for this child, a dozen for that one. They flit back and forth between immense compounds the size of small cities, palaces on beaches, historic country manors and abbeys, mountaintop chalets (and the whole mountain might belong to them.)

What the young in the camps hope for is to join life on that side. Not as one of the Chosen, because those lines are now set in stone. If you didn’t inherit the right shares, enough money, enough Class-A ownership—you are now forever trapped in time. You will never get out. What you can hope for, though, is to be one of the fleets of servants working for the Chosen.

“Working.” It’s not like work in the before times. It’s more like work in pre-modern times. You are a servant, and what’s expected of you is servitude. You serve, you’re at the beck and call, 24/7. You live in servant’s quarters. You wear livery. You learn the correct greetings, and how to kneel and bow.

But at least you’re paid. A pittance. You must leave your family behind, so you the money back to them. It’s a lifeline, the only one there is. Because this is a buyers’ market, the Chosen having all the money and power, they’ll pay as little as possible. Just being out of the camps is reward enough.

At least here there are possibilities. You can be a butler or a maid. Perhaps even a majordomo, house manager. A jester or comedian of sorts. You can be a performer or an actor or a singer, maybe, if your patron is cultured enough (not many are.) A courtesan perhaps, or one of many in a harem. There are many avenues of servitude, it seems, and the appetites of the Chosen are boundless and endless. Each one might have a thousand servants. Families, tens of thousands. Of course, this isn’t enough—nearly enough—to employ what was once a thriving economy. Just 5%, maybe 10%, of people can aspire to even this. But it’s all that’s left.

In the camps, the fourth generation is now being born in this new world. And to it, this world is the only one there ever was. Middle aged Generation Z’s faced are now weary and lined. They are tired and drained. They’ve seen too much. They were standing on the very fault line that ripped through the earth. And they fell right through it.

There are no revolutions. How could there be? The Techfugees are kept mentally and intellectually imprisoned, more or less, by The Algorithm. The Algorithm feeds them an endless series of demagogues, who stoke their rage, and misdirect it. Today, it’s that camp’s fault, tomorrow, it’s this one’s. The idea that the world could ever be different is a distant memory, too. And the barons and lords even throw them a crumb once in a while—here’s an extra few dollars.

There’s Universal Basic Income, true. $1000 a month doesn’t go very far when a loaf of bread costs $250. Inflation exploded. It had to. The enormous pile of debt finally gave way and cracked. As the shockwave hit, people with no incomes had nothing left to pay in taxes. Bang. Money had to be printed—and after the defaults, interest rates soared, then credit became unavailable, the system shattered—and with all that came a catastrophic surge of inflation.

Prices exploded. Hence, the inflationary waves that began in the 2020s never fully stopped. Harvests are down 30%. Agriculture operates in stops and starts. The robotically manned factories can thrum, but what demand is there left? And since everything is still made of oil, and it’s still fought over by barons and lords, prices continue to rise, rise, rise. As they always do in the camps. The idea of owning, saving, or investing—it’s an alien language now. Survival is all there is. Day to day.

A proper meal. A peaceful day. A worry-free afternoon. A roof over one’s head. These things are luxuries now. Which most people struggle for. They are coveted and fought over. Stability exists, true, but only of an unstable sort. Life in the camps is the same, day after day, but they aren’t pleasant or happy days. A new mafia runs life today, prices rise, barons fire entire fleets of servants, wars break out, the young are sent to the front lines, and all this is life now. Whatever can be scraped together of it now.

The year is 2051.

There’s no such thing as an economy anymore.

Umair (and Snowy!)