AliUber
*An architecture fiction.
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/software/337954/where-do-you-live/
A scene from a likely near future: an architect wakes up to a chirping phone. She sits up and looks at the messages that prompted the noisy wakeup call. Her banking app says she’ll have $500 spending cash this month. It suggests several experiences she can pay for with this money: drone racing in Brooklyn, a walking history tour of modern art in SoHo, or wine tasting in Suffolk county. She makes $200,000 a month, but she hasn’t had this much to play with in a long time. $160,000 a year is gone before it even hits her bank account. Some of it is in taxes, but two-thirds of her annual income goes directly to AliUber—the megacompany that resulted from a series of mergers and acquisitions in the late ‘20s.
Our architect rarely thinks in dollars, euros, or renminbi since most of her purchases are withdrawn from an allowance of credits, which can be redeemed at bars, restaurants, yoga studios, and even the local aquarium. The rest is funneled to other annual subscriptions that are not (yet) controlled by this single company that is also her landlord at home and work, primary source of food, and utility provider.
Our architect does not own or even rent the room she woke up in. The six figures she sends to AliUber, just like the music and movies she enjoys, gives her access to a catalog of different fully-furnished places to live. Her last two employment contracts required proof that she was subscribed to this kind of service. Her labor is both in and on demand, so she is never sure if she’ll need to spend days, weeks, or months on site in Seoul, Los Angeles, Berlin, or Lagos. All she has to do is give two weeks’ notice and a new, fully furnished room will be waiting for her in the new city. Her AliUber subscription means that whenever she has to move, she can just cram whatever she doesn’t rent—now nothing more than her mother’s old jewelry, a favorite sweater, and a travel mug—into a vintage Herschel duffle bag and catch the next flight out of town. This time it’s to Dubai.
She still has plenty to do before decamping to the UAE. The architect gets dressed and has the usual provided breakfast in her building’s shared kitchen. Her building mates say they’ll miss her. One will be joining her in Dubai—it’s just a coincidence—next month. Others promise to use one of their five annual moving vouchers to visit. She wishes everyone well and heads down the block to Whole Foods. She remembers her parents used to use a similar subscription service to get discounted food, but now you need to be an AliUber member to afford anything in the store: paying with cash can be anywhere between ten to fifty percent more expensive. She gets snacks for the trip and they’re all debited from the food portion of her account.... (((etc etc)))
