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Tangentially related:
- All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
- Through the Flash in Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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So normal life, except all the non-human things become unchanging?
The economy is sure as hell going to be different in a hurry. Pretty much only service industries will survive, because anything else gets reset tomorrow. In a way this will be great, because people will be just as well supplied anyway, so it will give room to pursue personal development in earnest. Or maybe we'll find a new way to fuck ourselves.
Why would service industries continue at all? Why would anyone work service jobs? Next day they just reset. They never get paid but never go broke. No reason to work.
You could potentially hole up in your house and live the same day forever, I guess, but a lot of people are going to want to use services. In order to have them and to pay for them, then, you have to provide services of some kind as well, and you get an economy.
Note that giving away the use of something you own for a particular day may be a really common one. Like, maybe I want to eat something that's not in my fridge so I pick up leftovers from a neighbor for a fee. You could call that a good, but since there's no manufacturing and probably little shipping I wouldn't.
You wouldn't get paid in paper for obvious reasons. At first it would be just barter, but we'll get past that pretty quickly with all our accumulated knowledge. Like the other guy said, it might turn into bankers remembering your balance (or something like that) by heart.
Some people will just work to do something. It’s pretty boring doing nothing every day. Especially customer facing roles where you can talk to people instead of staying home. For cooks they can hone their skills everyday.
I imagine most things would become a service barter situation. Like you make me a great meal and ill give you a massage. Or whatever. People would be pretty confined to a particular region if theyre returned there at the start of every reset, so you'd probably have a build up of a sort of reputation economy. Probably mass marketplaces would form up where people could trade 'favors'. There'd probably be a new occupation that crops up where someone keeps track of credits and exchanges them, but any kind of physical currency would be useless. But if you wanted a service from a particular person who didnt want anything you could ogger, you'd need some sort of middleman to vouch for you or things could get complicated fast.
And if the middleman uses numbers to keep track, you now have currency again, and they're a banker.
Naive to think landlords wouldn't start charging by the day
It's a pretty giant, sudden shift we're talking about here, and with that comes opportunity. I'm guessing we'd opt to start from scratch in a lot of ways.
In the long run people could potentially accumulate large amounts of (weird, new kinds of) property again. I have a feeling it won't work the same without generational turnover to hide the unnaturalness of the process, though.
What difference does that make? If I pay my landlord $30 today, that money is back in my account “tomorrow.” Plus, it’s not like you can get an eviction through, all paperwork is blank at the end of the night, so only the things that people can remember are maintained.
Yeah but money is already fake and we already live in a post-scarcity society. The people at the top of social hierarchies aren't just going to let the world go to temporal communism. Why would someone who lives on the street play nice if they can murder a guy with a mansion and try again the next day if they lose?
They'll figure something out. Accountants will become teams of oral history keepers. Cops will torture and murder you for jaywalking.
But they can’t stop you from waking up there and they’re not going to spend every morning rounding the same people up. Even if they did, go ahead, throw all my shit on the sidewalk, I’ll still wake up there tomorrow. It would be interesting to see how they react to it, because there’s no meaningful way for them to control people (that I can think of, but they’re pretty creative when they need to be)
OP mentioned physical pain. If you choose to ignore the paper-thin coating of instructions like "don't follow the guards out of the prison's front door", that's the main way they make you follow rules now. Tasers, batons and stress positions being most frequent specific methods.
In the West we're so deep in the ideology and the rules we forget there's force everywhere, but there is.
What for? There’s no reason to try and force anyone to do anything. It’s all completely pointless because whatever you get out of them will be gone the next day. Plus, how do they collect the people every day? Unless you surprise them every morning somehow, I think most people would just say no, even upon pain of death (potentially suicide) after the first few torture sessions, especially if you know that people have died and they still come back the next day.
You can make plans for the beginning of the day, but you can’t intentionally wake up earlier than you did the first time, so raids or similar tactics are unlikely to work unless you’re targeting someone who originally slept until noon.
Well, I was just pointing out there ways to do it, if the need arises. I'm not actually convinced, like OP was, that they'd try to continue collecting rent the same way.
I doubt we'd go back to stretching on the rack or something; besides peoples ethical objections it would be impractical as pointed out, especially when you can't build new racks. But, inevitably someone will get in a dispute with someone else, and will want it solved by force. Cops already rough up or taser people on the spot, and making it the punishment itself would be an easy deviation.