Nomadland, Banksy, and Our Web3 Future of Work

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Nomadland, Banksy, and Our Web3 Future of Work

About 30 minutes into Nomadland—last year’s Best Picture winner—there’s a scene that takes place around a campfire. Nomads (played in the film not by actors, but by real-life nomads) tell the stories of how they came to be nomads.

One woman shares how she grew disillusioned with her “normal” life:

“I worked in corporate America for 20 years. My friend Bill worked at the same company as me. Bill had liver failure a week before he was due to retire. HR called him to plan his retirement, and he died 10 days later. He died never having been able to take that sailboat he bought out of his driveway—he missed out on everything. And he told me before he died, ‘Just don’t waste any time, girl. Don’t waste any time.’ So I became a nomad. I didn’t want my sailboat to be in the driveway when I died.”

Nomadland is a portrait of people who have been chewed up and spat out by corporate America. Its protagonist is Fern (Frances McDormand), a woman who loses her job when the construction plant in her Nevada town shuts down during the Great Recession.

Frances McDormand as Fern in *Nomadland*

Fern lives in her van and subsists on the odd job—during the holiday shopping rush, for instance, she takes a job at an Amazon distribution center. (The scenes from the movie were filmed at a real Amazon facility after McDormand emailed Amazon and “asked nicely”.)

Nomadland captures the slow decay of the American dream. Watching the film helps you understand modern America: it helps you make sense of support for Donald Trump on the right and support for Bernie Sanders on the left; it helps you understand the rise of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the rise of WallStreetBets in 2021. Watching Nomadland contextualizes the world that Gen Z grew up in.

Over the weekend, I went to a Banksy exhibit in LA. I was struck by how much Banksy’s work—much of it 20 years old—embodies Gen Z’s worldview. His work is anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, anti-institution. It decries a broken system.

One of my favorite Banksy pieces is “Barcode”:

“Barcode” reminds me of Gen Z’s growing antipathy to Amazon and Jeff Bezos. We saw flashes of this hostility in 2019, when condemnation from AOC and others led Amazon to cancel its HQ2 plans in New York. And more recently, we saw vitriol aimed at Bezos when he became the richest man in the world, when he retired, and when he went to space. Scrolling TikTok, you’re hard pressed to find a positive comment about Bezos.

Banksy’s “Sale Ends” captures a similar anti-consumerism attitude:

It’s well-known by now that Millennials are the first American generation to be worse off than their parents. Despite being better educated than Boomers, Millennials earn ~20% less. Even before COVID, 15% of Millennials were living in their parents’ home—double the share of Boomers and Silents who lived at home at the same age. Homeownership rates, across every income and education level, are lower for Millennials than for every previous generation.

And when young workers were still reeling from the Great Recession, COVID hit. A report from Data for Progress found that 52% of people under 45 lost a job, were put on leave, or had hours reduced due to the pandemic, compared to 26% of people over the age of 45. The lifestyle millions of young people were promised—the house, car, white-picket fence, 2.4 kids—inched even further beyond their reach.

Or in Banksy’s words: “Sorry! The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock.”

Banksy graffiti on the side of a failed housing project in London

But where Millennials were idealistic, Gen Zs are pragmatic. Much of Banksy’s worldview, like Gen Z’s, is borderline nihilistic:

This is a key difference between Millennials and Gen Zs. A recent Dazed article examined why Gen Zs reject Millennials’ work-focused mindsets and pop culture.

Having entered the work market in the midst of an economic crisis, much of what is now considered ‘Millennial culture’ celebrates a capitalistic, work-focused mindset. It’s all about ‘side hustles’, having a ‘five-year plan’, ‘making your job your LIFE’, and aspiring to be ‘a boss’. To Gen Z, the Millennial attitude towards work has provided much opportunity for mockery. In fact, it’s a key part of the so-called “beef” between the two generations, which started with TikTok videos mocking Millennials for supposedly being overly corporate, among other things. Gen Z are more likely to have the mindset that work is simply labour, rather than a person’s entire identity. So the idea of dreaming to be a cog in a big corporate machine, or working in a job you hate because it’s in the ‘five year plan’, probably seems less aspirational—as does a monologue like the ‘cerulean speech’.

To Gen Zs, Leslie Knope’s sunny optimism is impractical, and Anne Hathaway’s character in The Devil Wears Prada isn’t admirable, but pathetic.

This sets the stage for the revolution happening in work.

Part of this revolution is a disaggregation of work, as young people reject “traditional” career paths in lieu of more autonomous and flexible opportunities. We see this in the gig economy (Uber, DoorDash, Instacart) and in the creator economy (Roblox, TikTok, YouTube). By 2027, America’s workforce will be majority-freelance.

A new infrastructure is being built for this new economy by companies like Found, Creative Juice, and Collective.

Rex Woodbury @rex_woodbury

Jobs of the future:
@Roblox game developer
@recroom creator
@JoinClubhouse host
@airtable app builder
@YouTube creator
@tiktok_us creator
@webflow builder
@popshop_live seller
@Twitch streamer
@TryMetafy gaming coach
@discord community manager

Part of the rise in self-employment, of course, isn’t voluntary—it’s a symptom of the Great Recession, the pandemic, and growing inequality. But part of it is intentional, a massive shift to embracing autonomy and flexibility.

Where prior generations rented time to a corporation, this new generation “manifests” their own fortunes with equity upside. A celebrity of yesteryear might appear in a Gatorade commercial; earlier this month, the YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI leveraged their massive distribution to launch their own Gatorade competitor. Times are changing.

Rex Woodbury @rex_woodbury

The power of creators & community:

The YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI, who have a combined 125M followers across social platforms, launched a Gatorade competitor called Prime.

Within a few days, Prime has 558K Instagram followers—already half of Gatorade’s following.