All Day

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BK · Book · 2004 · novel

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell

The machines

Fabricants — engineered human servers, grown for the job.

What people do all day

Sonmi-451 works nineteen-hour shifts at Papa Song's dinery, engineered to want nothing else, sustained on Soap, promised retirement at twelve years' service. The promise is a lie and the retirement is a slaughterhouse.

Pattern

Capital captures it — Nothing is abolished. The gains are simply owned by someone.

Note

Only one of the six nested narratives is relevant here, and it is the sharpest depiction anywhere of labour designed from scratch to be content with itself.


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