Disrupting Housework (Without Robots or Replicators)

Think the future of housework looks like Rosey the Robot from The Jetsons? Or maybe just a fleet of Roombas keeping every inch of a house free of dust or dirt?

Think again. Housework is ready for a much, much bigger disruption. Of course, housework is rarely portrayed in pop culture space cowboy science fiction. And when it is, it's all about the high-tech solutions to trivial issues like making dinner or scrubbing dishes. But many quieter (and more constructive) speculative stories do consider how housework might evolve in a completely different direction.

How we restructure housework—domestic and reproductive labor—is key to rethinking how we approach the future of all kinds of work. How we live impacts how we work. And how we work impacts how we live. And this episode is going there.

Footnotes:

• Frances Gabe's Self-Cleaning House
• After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srincek
• A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
• Embassytown by China Miéville
• Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer
• "What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal" on The Ezra Klein Show
• Everyday Utopia by Kristen Ghodsee
• The Perennials by Mauro Guillén
• "The demographics of multigenerational households" via Pew Research
• Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk and Robot) by Becky Chambers
• A Spectre, Haunting by China Miéville
• Can't Even by Anne Helen Petersen

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What is Strange New Work?

Lots of people are talking about the future of work today: remote work, artificial intelligence, white-collar unions, robots, 4-day workweeks... But those things are either here already or will be soon. What about the far future of work? What alien advancements await the office of the future? This podcast wants to boldly go where no other future-of-work podcast has gone. Host Tara McMullin (What Works) brings this limited series about how speculative fiction can help us imagine strange new ways of working and understanding ourselves. We'll explore questions about how we can transform work to be more humane and inclusive. We'll imagine new ways of working together, managing the economy, and providing for others.