I’m beginning to feel like a crunchy chip of Soylent Green

One day in the very near future, neither you nor I will have a job, the robots will be doing everything instead of us, but it’s ok. I, for one, will be making a living scavenging bottles and cans from the recycling, and sticking them in a volta machine, for 10 cêntimos a piece.

It won’t matter that a whole room in our flat will be unusable, filled up with the number of bottles and cans that I will have to collect to make enough money to eat, because that room used to be my office and I won’t need it any more.

There won’t be a universal basic income to compensate for the lack of jobs, because they will have decided that it would just make us lazy, or artists. Better that we go out scavenging for rubbish in perfect condition and do our bit to save the environment. Less time in the day for thinking and/or eating.

There won’t be any money for UBI anyway as they’ll need the cash to pay for the data centres and electricity that the robots need to function.

Back to the present.

I saw a video of one of the big recycling bins, somewhere in Portugal, the yellow one for packaging, pushed over onto its side. An arm protruded from it and threw out plastic bottle after plastic bottle. I thought “oh dear, that’s going to be a thing everywhere soon”, and I was right. The very next day, I was leaving the car park, which has recycling bins at the entrance. There was a man in his sixties, half in, half out of it, his feet off the floor, and he was chucking bottles out to collect in big shopping bags.

A few months ago the Volta system came into effect in Portugal. We now have to pay 10 cêntimos extra per plastic bottle or drinks can, which will be refunded when we stick that bottle or can in the shiny new volta machines, mostly in and around supermarkets. Thank you, corporations and government, for valuing my time at 1€ per 10 plastic bottles!

On the volta website, there’s a delightful line that stands out for me: part of a bullet list of “What impact will volta have in Portugal?”

“Greater citizen engagement in the circular economy”

Blorp.

So, it’s not enough that we’re giving them all our money already, giving them all our data, giving them ultimate control over how our society evolves, we can now give them more of our time, and, of course, give them even more money, i.e. €0.10 per item.

Let’s see. They say that 2,100,000,000 disposable receptacles are bought in Portugal in a year. If each one is charged at an extra 0.10€ on top of manufacture, logistics AND existing profit margin, that’s an extra €210,000,000 per year being paid by US to THEM.

Now, imagine the 11 million permanent inhabitants of Portugal. For the them to get all that lovely cash back, every single person would have to save and return 190 bottles every year, to keep €19, for storing them and traipsing back and forth to the machines.

But it’s not just permanent inhabitants who are consuming those 2.1 billion things. Millions of tourists come to Portugal each year. Those millions of tourists won’t be doing the 10 cêntimo nonsense, and won’t be caring lovingly for those bottles that they use and discard (you can only return pristine bottles, clean, with lid and the all-important intact barcode), so there’ll be a lot of 10 cêntimos that the THEY will be keeping for themselves, or, as the volta website says:

“What happens to unclaimed deposit values?

Unclaimed deposits remain within the system and are reinvested, supporting technological innovation and the ongoing improvement of infrastructure.”

Right. Got it.

Back to the future. What actually is it that the THEY, the MAN, the whoever they are, corporations and governments, want for us simple folk, the normal people who aren’t sickly rich, we who find Dubai tacky, who don’t like cream-coloured furniture, who don’t spend our lives draped over the various enormous sofas in our enormous houses in enormous floaty trousers drinking iced decaf while we survey our stock portfolio, when not popping off to fly a yacht or ski on the moon?

Watching how the world has gone in the last 20 years, and the way in which it’s hurtling forward now, there seem to be only two possibilities for what the THEY want of, from, or for us. I’d really like to give the culprits, the unnecessary billionaires/trillionaires and heads of the huge corporations, some sodium pentathol and see what they say when I ask them “what do you ACTUALLY want for humanity, for us normals?” (I’ll dispense with doing the same for politicians. At least they’ve been elected into their positions of power and they have less power than the corporations as to how society evolves.)

Do the THEY think that, if they give us nice robots to do our jobs for us, we will all want, and be able to have, their beige idea of a utopian existence? I can imagine few things worse that floating around, doing nothing, in palazzo pants, for the rest of my life. A week, tops, would be bearable. I’m sure they’re not expecting us all to have houses and yachts as big as theirs, that would be silly, because theirs have to be the biggest and the best (because they are children), but we would be living a life of leisure, living like the people in architects’ mockups of new builds, with absolutely nothing to do, except put our recycling in the right box, for fun and a few extra pennies to buy a coffee once a year. Do they go to bed in their robot-print pyjamas, thinking about all the things that they can get machines to do instead of humans, just because it’s fun?

Has it just not occurred to them that there are consequences? Do they just not give a jot about anyone but themselves and their money pots? (we watched Marathon Man this afternoon, and I’d forgotten how very satisfying the final scene is, where Dustin Hoffman throws all of Lawrence Olivier’s diamonds away (it’s been 50 years, I’m not spoiler warning that)).

Or are we genuinely just commodities to them?

Saving bottles in perfect condition in space I don’t have, with time I don’t want to give away for free, feels like my being commodified even more than I already am. I’m beginning to feel like a crunchy chip of Soylent Green, waiting to be fed to a future chip of Soylent Green.

More on the subject of the people who have too much having too much of an influence on how the rest of us live:

I know how to end unbridled capitalism

·

April 2, 2025

Even with the clocks going forward, on Monday morning I bounded out of bed to get to work in my office next to the bedroom. I’ve got a load to get done this week, and, with Spring suddenly appearing this past weekend, I have the energy to do it.