<p>If you are among the top 10% of Bengalureans, living in one of the high-rise gated communities or leafy villas on the outskirts of the city, it is only a matter of time that you will wish to get away from it since your idyllic neighborhood has been transformed into a squalid, traffic-choked section of Bengaluru. You have found yourself no longer in the suburbs but right in the middle of metropolitan Bengaluru. Since you worked from home and had your everyday needs delivered, be it a single banana or a quart of ice cream, you rarely stepped out. You were largely oblivious of the dramatic transformations taking place under your nose. But where would you go? The Jetsons may provide the answer. As to who the Jetsons are, please read on.</p><p>The Jetsons, an animated TV cartoon as well as a comic book based on the TV series, made its debut in 1962. The storyline of the cartoon revolves around the day-to-day activities of the Jetsons, a model white family (husband George, wife Jane, and two kids, Judy and Elroy) who live in outer space, a smart world filled with all kinds of automatons, including sentient robots and flying cars. Curiously enough, George only works for one hour, two days a week. The comic book version reveals the reason why the Jetsons moved to outer space, viz., an environmental catastrophe on Earth. In her critique of the Jetsons, which appeared in Verge, writer Devon Maloney had this to say – “The Jetsons is a perfect dystopia, built on the corpses of a billions-strong underclass deemed unworthy of a life in the clouds.”</p><p>Pie-in-the-sky predictions and futuristic vision statements for Bengaluru invariably feature a virtual work environment, largely freelance and remote, and revolving around a gig economy. You and your environs will be under 24/7 scrutiny by smart sensors, ably aided and abetted by AI programmes to ensure you are putting in your 70 hours of work a week (Sundays too, if you are required to work 90 hours). Future innovation will be powered, of course, by green technology. Seems to me that, in a tacit nod to climate change, everything these days has to be advertised as being green. It has more to do with the colour of the dollar bill and little to do with nature.</p><p>If local employment opportunities are tied to the geographically tethered gig platforms, the biggest losers will be the unorganised workforce since the workers are no longer classified as employees but as ‘independent contractors’ with zero benefits and wholly responsible for all costs associated with carrying out their tasks, be it in delivering groceries, ferrying people or providing cleaning services.</p><p>For an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which workers are impacted by internet work platforms, you may wish to read the reports published by Fairwork India, a joint effort of the International Institute of Technology-Bengaluru, the University of Oxford, and the German Government. In what is a ranked study of employment practices at twelve national gig platforms, the fact that media darlings such as Uber, Amazon Flex, Ola, and Zomato have done extremely poorly should come as no surprise. While these companies may have created many jobs, why applaud these companies when their workers, sorry, contractors, don’t even make a minimum wage? Don’t expect the start-ups and the unicorns waiting in the wings to do any better. Angel investors are no angels, no matter what the financial newspapers may say.</p><p>While the same is true of location-independent cloud platforms that facilitate remote work, there is an additional price to be paid, which has to do with the worker’s health. While work-from-home certainly reduces the traffic on the city’s arteries, it does add to drastic increases in diabetes and obesity, brought on by a lack of exercise and desultory eating habits.</p><p>If green energy is the city’s future, how will the city handle the enormous amount of electronic and plastic waste soon to be created when lithium batteries, solar panels, and sensors are discarded in favour of the newest models? To conceive of Bengaluru as the R&D capital doling out money to attract research talent from across the globe is, to put it mildly, frightfully naive.</p>
<p>If you are among the top 10% of Bengalureans, living in one of the high-rise gated communities or leafy villas on the outskirts of the city, it is only a matter of time that you will wish to get away from it since your idyllic neighborhood has been transformed into a squalid, traffic-choked section of Bengaluru. You have found yourself no longer in the suburbs but right in the middle of metropolitan Bengaluru. Since you worked from home and had your everyday needs delivered, be it a single banana or a quart of ice cream, you rarely stepped out. You were largely oblivious of the dramatic transformations taking place under your nose. But where would you go? The Jetsons may provide the answer. As to who the Jetsons are, please read on.</p><p>The Jetsons, an animated TV cartoon as well as a comic book based on the TV series, made its debut in 1962. The storyline of the cartoon revolves around the day-to-day activities of the Jetsons, a model white family (husband George, wife Jane, and two kids, Judy and Elroy) who live in outer space, a smart world filled with all kinds of automatons, including sentient robots and flying cars. Curiously enough, George only works for one hour, two days a week. The comic book version reveals the reason why the Jetsons moved to outer space, viz., an environmental catastrophe on Earth. In her critique of the Jetsons, which appeared in Verge, writer Devon Maloney had this to say – “The Jetsons is a perfect dystopia, built on the corpses of a billions-strong underclass deemed unworthy of a life in the clouds.”</p><p>Pie-in-the-sky predictions and futuristic vision statements for Bengaluru invariably feature a virtual work environment, largely freelance and remote, and revolving around a gig economy. You and your environs will be under 24/7 scrutiny by smart sensors, ably aided and abetted by AI programmes to ensure you are putting in your 70 hours of work a week (Sundays too, if you are required to work 90 hours). Future innovation will be powered, of course, by green technology. Seems to me that, in a tacit nod to climate change, everything these days has to be advertised as being green. It has more to do with the colour of the dollar bill and little to do with nature.</p><p>If local employment opportunities are tied to the geographically tethered gig platforms, the biggest losers will be the unorganised workforce since the workers are no longer classified as employees but as ‘independent contractors’ with zero benefits and wholly responsible for all costs associated with carrying out their tasks, be it in delivering groceries, ferrying people or providing cleaning services.</p><p>For an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which workers are impacted by internet work platforms, you may wish to read the reports published by Fairwork India, a joint effort of the International Institute of Technology-Bengaluru, the University of Oxford, and the German Government. In what is a ranked study of employment practices at twelve national gig platforms, the fact that media darlings such as Uber, Amazon Flex, Ola, and Zomato have done extremely poorly should come as no surprise. While these companies may have created many jobs, why applaud these companies when their workers, sorry, contractors, don’t even make a minimum wage? Don’t expect the start-ups and the unicorns waiting in the wings to do any better. Angel investors are no angels, no matter what the financial newspapers may say.</p><p>While the same is true of location-independent cloud platforms that facilitate remote work, there is an additional price to be paid, which has to do with the worker’s health. While work-from-home certainly reduces the traffic on the city’s arteries, it does add to drastic increases in diabetes and obesity, brought on by a lack of exercise and desultory eating habits.</p><p>If green energy is the city’s future, how will the city handle the enormous amount of electronic and plastic waste soon to be created when lithium batteries, solar panels, and sensors are discarded in favour of the newest models? To conceive of Bengaluru as the R&D capital doling out money to attract research talent from across the globe is, to put it mildly, frightfully naive.</p>
