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"Beyond Remote" makes me think of dystopias. I think in the future much fewer people will commute, so if it isn't remote, what will it be? I can think of several possibilities:

1) Living near a corporate campus, with plentiful housing nearby, perhaps company provided? How about if this is one way besides Basic Income, that people are protected from automation? Guaranteed Jobs is an alternative that is proposed to Basic Income.

2) Remote but you aren't really remote, because you're hooked into a VR system. Travel is in video games. This helps solve the climate problem by people flying and driving less.

3) Remote but you aren't really remote because your employer is watching your every move while you're on the clock. There is plenty of this happening, and everyone who loves remote work thinks this is bad.

4) Virtually everybody is remote so people stop calling it remote, much like people started referring to their mobile phone as simply "my phone" instead of "my cell phone" in the early 2000s.



You weren't kidding when you said it reminded you of dystopias! Riffing on your ideas in a not so serious way:

Guaranteed Jobs would be more like Mandatory Jobs, or "Work for Welfare", a step toward government indentured workers maybe? Couple that with supplied housing and we're basically at serfdom again. Sell their time to corporates to add in that capitalist twist we know and love!

Remote but hooked into VR sounds like it's just another way to measure butts in seats. Monitor peoples time and actions while they're on the clock. Fuck it, sell that data too. How can we monetize knowing how often people pick their noses?

The first step into a VR first society perhaps, all the better as the environment around us collapses. We stop travelling thanks to various catastrophes, then we stop noticing the world being further exploited.

While Australia was held captive by catastrophic fires, barely able to breath the air in our cities, our government was fresh off the phones selling vast forests to mining companies and opening up clearing rights to export farmers.




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