First the logic:
- “Life has never been better” – well the first thing to notice here is the absence of the possessive pronoun – “my”. So is she speaking for everyone? That’s the first leaning towards a communist(we are one) / totalitarian (we’ll tell you what to think) society’s musing. Alternatively, it could be a reference to the author’s well-being ‘my life has never been better, it’s peaked and this was the best it ever got – shit!’
- “or should I say, “our city” ” – there’s that nod to communism again, we all own nothing!
- “I don’t own any appliances or any clothes” – Okay as someone that has at one time (I hope it’s just one) had norovirus, you really do want more clothes than the ones on your back, just saying, so that’s a big ewww!
- “It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city.” Why are you speaking for everyone, again? Why “perfect” that’s an enhancement qualifier isn’t it? ‘We’ve achieved perfection’, read on, and fuck me… you haven’t!
- “Everything you considered a product” – Given that the author seems happy(?) enough to speak for everyone, she seems equally joyous to get a little bit preachy with our perspective of possessions, she hasn’t just dropped on to the planet, so why the substitution of “You” for “I”?
- The next part of that paragraph deals with what is free in the future that once cost money. In itself that’s great, alas, it’s also a little bit bollocks! That’s not how economies run, you can’t source, make and distribute something and give it away for free, you’d run out of money in order to keep the process going! Even communism relies on people exchanging funds for items, they’re not just handed out. No, sorry (not), that’s gibberish!
- “One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.” Nuances of ‘tell me you’ve been brainwashed without telling me you’ve been brainwashed!’
- Transportation is covered next and hello, we’ve got flying cars! Does anyone else find this might be a little bit problematic? Lanes keep us in place, from crashing into one another, take them away (unless the sky is full of weird lanes) and you have the potential for airborne traffic chaos. Plus, if you don’t own a car and this car has to be delivered to you, then by the very nature of physics that means two cars (or methods of transport) to deliver one – given the tone of the essay in its entirety that’s seriously inefficient, and slow! Edit: Perhaps she walks to a car showroom and hires one! Ho-hum!
- “…not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?” Well we weren’t! Typically the last thing we think about when developing anything is the impact it’s going to have…on everything. I don’t know if this paragraph was meant to sound pedantic, and I’ll just leave that one there!
- “Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends.” – Your bike? Thought you owned nothing? Who’s been having a sneaky little life code breech then?
- “I enjoy the exercise and the ride” – don’t we all love!
- “It kind of gets the soul to come along on the journey.” – I’m not going to be a gramma Nazi here, so do you think she means “gets to the soul” or is there something a little bit more sinister at work here. Is there a collective soul fuelled by exertion? Christ, that’s scary!
- “Funny how some things seem never seem to lose their excitement: walking, biking, cooking, drawing and growing plants” – anyone who finds growing plants “exciting” is already lacking in excitement in their life! I like to grow plants but ‘exciting’? Really? Plus, if you don’t actually own the plants do you never get a bit pissed off that you can’t keep them? Or, do you grow plants and put them in some kind of communal area? That’d be nice, unless some daft fucker plants some Japanese Knot Weed which is going to start disrupting all the buildings’ foundations in decades to come, but, y’know, ‘exciting!’
- And so to the madness which is the accommodation issue: “In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.” – Where to begin? What if you oversleep and don’t vacate your premises until later than the start of these “business meetings”? What if their meeting overruns and you can’t get in not-your house? It’s just too mad to carry on with that section!
- She describes having to cook for herself as easy, well the description is not easier than our current method because she doesn’t own anything and therefore has to order the ‘service’ cooking utensils and appliances – have these fitted – remember all spaces are up for grab so would a meeting room really require an oven or pasta maker etc, and ingredients, we kind of have those to hand at the moment so how is that easy?
- The environmental concerns issue sounds good until you realise that the earth changes, we have volcanoes which are seldom triggered by mankind, ditto tornados, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes…each of these would still be happening and I don’t think it’s in our power to stop them, it’s an empty vision. She describes having plenty of green space but questions why in the past we filled it with concrete – well that’s one for history, the author’s use of rhetoric borders on arcane at times but suffice to say we built car parks etc because we needed to park our cars!
- “When AI and robots took over so much of our work” – I’ll take this one, ‘And lots of people lost their jobs, went on killing sprees or committed suicide’ – we will see this happen oh-so-soon unless we deviate away from this! AI is a stupid way forward, it just is!
- “Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. ” – Again, tell me you’ve been subject to mind control without telling me you’ve been subjected to mind control! Do people not have imagination in the future, because the rest of the essay suggests otherwise…and then it doesn’t! It’s really kind of inconsistent.
- “They live different kinds of lives outside of the city” – because they’ve been excluded, ostracised, abandoned? Or they just don’t want to live the kind of nothing life you’re portraying, ‘my life is better than yours so I’ll emulate empathy and hope that as part of the journey I might convince myself’.
- “Some have formed little self-supplying communities” – where they can guarantee their living room is going to be in use on a whim, deal – I’ll have that one please! Note: wasn’t that what we already had until globalisation started to take hold?
- “Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy.” – And yet you said life “never been better“, maybe my summation earlier was accurate, it’s always been shit…for you!
- “I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded” – that’s some freakily invasive tech someone has developed, I think Boris Johnson commented on this, but that’s irrelevant now, mind you, if our dreams could be analysed or even edited in the future I’d be happy to not be plagued by spiders every bastard night, seriously, I don’t know what is is but every, freaking night, SPIDERS, just what the fuck? She might have a point here! Yeah, we all know this is to root out anyone having none sanctioned aspirations of maybe overthrowing this blissfully happy pseudo existence! And why would they do that if for all “life has never been better“?
- “I just hope that nobody will use it against me.” – Secret’s safe with us love, you naughty little minx, Shetland Ponies hey, who would have guessed? It’s always the quiet ones! Seriously, you epitomise the ‘on boarder’ so unless you aren’t telling us about your secret plot to overthrow your overlords you’re golden, possibly the poster girl for passive acceptance and maybe you even might get to keep that bike which you stole!
- “All in all, it is a good life. ” – you don’t sell it well miss! Who are you trying to convince, the perceived third person or yourself? Maybe the latter?
- “We lost way too many people before we realised that we could do things differently.” – Or at least that’s how it was sold to you, to us it reads like there was an enormous nuclear war that wiped out most of humanity and this is what’s left over! Or we were pitted against one another until only a manageable few survived, not that such a thing would ever happen!