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2024: The road back to freedom?
2024 — what on earth do you look like?
Will we still be reeling from this pandemic? Will be suffering at the hands of the next one? Will we be taking sides in a global civil war? How will our gamble on climate risk play out? Will we be arguing about mass migrations of climate refugees? Will I have had enough of the future and fucked off far away to my homestead in the mountains to tend my survival garden?
I am very curious about what the future holds.
In 2018, I wrote my first ever Medium article. It was a glimpse into the future, triggered by an email I’d sent: an appeal to politics to save us from ourselves. Now in 2021, three years older and — mid-lockdown— markedly less free, I return to that vision and start to paint a new one.
That email in 2018 was addressed to our political leader in Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. I told her that as a nation we faced a cultural and technological issue where businesses were not adapting to give people what they desire in their working lives — autonomy, flexibility, and ownership in their work. As such, I believed Scotland faced a brain drain of talented, educated and ambitious people — I actually referred to it as an epidemic.
I delivered my call to action, which was about creating support systems to enable…