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One of my favorite books is Working, by Studs Terkel, an oral history and radio interview collection. Terkel interviewed over 30 people to get at the nature of their work, or as the collection’s subtitle says, “People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do”. It’s beautiful for so many reasons, but especially because so many of these stories uncover powerful truth about what it means to have purpose, hope, and joy under capitalism, in and beyond their work.
Another book I love from a very different genre, is World War Z , a fictional oral history where everyday people talk about their experiences surviving the zombie apocalypse. It’s a sociopolitical zombie story (more literal than the rest of the genre), with stories about celebrities having nervous breakdowns over the new post class society, zombie warfare strategies adapted for a Chicago with no electricity, and elaborate tax code descriptions that I can actually stand to read (this is an overt KSR call out).
I’ve been thinking about both of these books a lot over the last few months as I’ve read and collected a lot of data about the future of work, technology, and social change. Though this research started as a way to prototype a better curricula for nonprofit communications, it took me down many unexpected rabbit holes: aquaponics and the circular economy, the neuroscience of…
