Gather round, people. I’m going to tell you a story. Once upon a time, long, long ago, in “the 20th century,” there was a magical world called “the world.” In this world, many people had occupations called “jobs.” Some of them did these jobs in places called “bookshops”, where they sold things called “books” to other people.
Books were magical things because they had stories in them, and they were tangible objects that you could own and love and pass onto friends and family, etc. Some people even had “jobs” writing these books! But one day, an evil creature called “Amazon” came along, led on a leash by a strange little man named “Jeff Bezos.” Amazon ate all the books and smashed all the bookshops, and soon it grew so big and strong that it blotted out the sun, and everybody died—except for “Jeff Bezos”, who went to space. The end.
What’s that? You used to have a “job” too? But then an evil creature came and destroyed your workplace? Yeah, same. Or… oh, I see, you still have a job, but it involves doing complete bullshit on “the internet”, and working in a bookshop sounds pretty good to you? Except there are fewer and fewer bookshops with every passing day, and the ones that exist are absolutely not hiring casual staff for a living wage?
Well, big tech taketh away, but big tech also giveth. Sort of. Because in the kind of Baudrillardian torrent of irony that leaves the few writers left wondering how in god’s name anyone is meant to write satire any more, you can now use Airbnb to pay real money to spend a week or two doing sort-of real work in a sort-of real bookstore in a sort-of real town in Scotland.
The Airbnb listing in question bills itself as “the first ever bookshop holiday / residency experience.” This experience involves setting up camp in Wigtown, “Scotland’s National Book Town,” in a shop called The Open Book. You get to play at being the proprietor of said bookshop, although anyone who’s ever dealt with the UK’s border staff will be unsurprised to learn that the listing goes out of its way to emphasize that it’s all make-believe: “This is not a volunteer opportunity, nor are we paying you to work. This is a holiday that you are paying for, classified under cultural tourism, and you can enjoy the bookshop as you wish.”
Wigtown itself is a real town insofar as there are 100% real people living there, and it has a very long and very real history. It apparently reinvented itself as Scotland’s National Book Town in the 1990s after its actually real industries—a distillery and a creamery—disappeared, and these days it’s known for having something like 20 bookshops for fewer than a thousand residents. No one can begrudge an economically depressed town for finding a way to reinvent itself, but the whole place now looks like something halfway between a real town and a literary theme park.
In the real world, running a bookshop is no one’s idea of a good time, at least in terms of making a living—and I say this as someone whose parents used to run a bookshop. Equally, writing is an increasingly terrible way to make a living—and I say this as someone who writes for a living. So there’s something particularly dystopian about the idea of people paying a 15% cut to another big tech company for the “cultural tourism holiday” experience of pretending to work in a pretend bookshop.
But the thing is, in this hell world, anything that does what The Open Book professes to do—which is “celebrate books [and] independent bookshops”—is probably still on balance a good thing? Probably? Maybe this is the best we can hope for. Maybe we’ll all look back fondly on today’s “jobs” in 2050, when the seven people who still have steady employment spend their days whispering soothing words into the ears of AI agents to make sure they keep concentrating on selling NFTs to one another instead of cracking the codes to the nuclear football. Maybe we’ll all spend our vacations pretending to do jobs that used to be real. Me, I’ll be plumping for Suno’s “real life rock ‘n’ roll experience”: what could be more fun than you and three friends spending a week pretending to be in your very own 2020s rock band? Spend a week loading heavy equipment into a clapped-out van! Drive all night to play a gig for which, sorry, we did say that if the bar takings were under $500, we wouldn’t be able to pay you guys. But hey, here’s one (1) bag of replica cocaine.* Have fun with the sexbots groupies!
* Ingredients: corn starch and baking soda. Additional bags available for $50 each. Subject to availability.
