"A few months ago, I went to a birthday party at a bar in Neepsend, an old industrial neighbourhood by the River Don in Sheffield. The bar had been a steelworks once, but now it was another example of the international style you find everywhere, from Portland, Oregon, to all the other Portlands in Canada, England, Australia, and New Zealand: exposed brick, steel beams, concrete floors, Edison bulbs. The steelworkers had been transformed into accountants and brand managers, the molten pig iron into £9 cocktails."
"When we sat down for dinner, I was placed next to a German who ran a small publishing company specializing in AI-generated motivational e-books. Trying not to be rude, I asked him how he'd gotten into this line of work. He told me he had trained as an academic philosopher. A post-graduation period of unemployment had given him plenty of time to play around with AI software, and he soon realized there was more money in inspirational quotes than there ever would be in phenomenology."
Neepsend, an old Sheffield industrial neighbourhood by the River Don, has been redeveloped into gentrified leisure spaces housed in former steelworks featuring exposed brick, steel beams, concrete floors, and Edison bulbs. Former steelworkers have been replaced by professionals such as accountants and brand managers, and heavy industry has given way to consumerized activities like expensive cocktails. A German publisher trained as an academic philosopher now runs an AI-generated motivational e-book business after unemployment, finding inspirational quotes more profitable than academic work. The industrial past provided purpose and identity despite hardship; automation and decline have erased much of that working life.
Read at The Walrus
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]