Working 2050 is a speculative oral history about workers of the future.
"It's nice to make boxes. But... it's a niche, not my passion."
Thanks to Molly Pease for providing the voiceover. Show Notes and Transcript: NK Guin lives in a cooperative outside of Oak Lawn. She’s lived in the short term dormitory for 4 years: “I guess I just like bunk beds.” We met in the dorm’s kitchen:
“I don’t really know why I became an artist.
When I was 10 my dad put my art capstone for 4th grade on all of his social channels.
It was an artisan project: a really big deal for me, I’d spent months working on it, but nothing special, a 3D printed reclaimed mahogany box inlaid with silver. Special for a kid artist, not special for an artist artist.
I was a cute kid and the box was pretty nice, so I viraled for a minute, like anything with a cute kid with an out of the ordinary talent does.
I was reaching 2, maybe 3 million people at one point -- so my dad helped me set up my own channel -- an editorial calendar, microniches, keywords, a shop with sales items. There was a high demand for more wooden boxes like the type I made for my project, it didn’t matter to the buyers if they were 3D printer or not. So I started mass producing those, managing my own channel, taking art and marketing courses, and… here I am today.
What is your typical day like?
It’s pretty much the same every day. Wake up, read through all the comments on my channels from the night before. Answer all the shopping and community comments. Schedule some posts for the next few days. Make some videos, answer some questions about the boxes on live video.
Make boxes. Go to bed.
What do you like to do for fun?
Every now and then I’ll have some free hours, I’ll walk around outside. Be in nature. I like to write poetry, when I have time for that.
Do you ever think about switching over to that? Making more nature or poetry oriented work?
It’s not really my niche, you know? A lot of other producers are doing that, it’s a pretty competitive track. It would be hard to shift gears.
[Awkward silence].
I mean, I made a box with a tree on it a couple of months ago. Check it out.
[he projected an image of the box onto their projected home screen].
I mean… it’s cool, right? It’s a beech tree. For a while they weren’t sure if they were going to be any of these left in Illinois.
Really?
Yeah!
Why?
Oh… That’s all I know about it.
Is the box made of beech?
Oh… no. It’s way cheaper to buy red pine. And people don’t care what kind of wood the box is made out of, as long as it’s wood.
Do you like what you do all day?
I mean… who does? I’m not trying to save the world or anything. It’s not my passion -- it’s my niche. We all have different niches. My niche isn’t about teaching people how to build better sanitation systems, or stopping pandemics. My niche is that I build boxes. “
Reading/Resources:
The Passion Economy, Instructables.com,
