Definitions of Class for an Uncertain Future

Aclassification
Aclassification is the process wherein one is stripped of class without being assigned a new class. If you lose your job at an auto assembly plant and start supporting yourself by giving massages and upgrading websites part time, what are you — middle class? Not really. Lower class? That sounds archaic and obsolete. In the future, current class structures will dissolve and humanity will settle into two groups: those people who have actual skills (surgeons, hairdressers, helicopter pilots) and everyone else who’s kind of faking it through life. Implicit in aclassification is the idea that a fully linked world no longer needs a middle class.

Douglas Coupland, who writes fortnightly discussions about culture and money for the Financial Times, talked to assembly-line workers who were working at a Shanghai factory producing internet routers, and asked them what class they believed they belonged to. They were unable to provide him with an answer. This got Coupland thinking about how we might think about class in the future, and he put together a (facetious) list of “new words for a new era.” (i.e. jeudism: “In the future, every day of the week will be a Thursday. We’re all working to the grave, and life will be one perpetual fast food job of the soul. The weekend? Gone. And we all pretty much know it in our bones.”)

Photo: Psit

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