Andor has an amazing example of this kind of place - covered in junk and barely surviving, riffing on the retrofuturism of Star Wars in a really interesting way.
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More than that, I wanted the grievances to feel real. Around the time I was writing Sunward Sky, many stories were coming out about the way people like Musk and Bezos were treating workers at their factories.
Musk forced people back to the factory, creating hundreds of new Covid cases in the process. Six people died in an Amazon warehouse when they weren’t allowed to leave prior to a natural disaster.
This has been going on forever. The Hawk’s Nest tunnel saw hundreds of people die of silicosis because of cost-cutting and profiteering. The union movement began because of the exploitative conditions in factories during the industrial revolution.
This is an ongoing problem with the nature of Capitalism. In order to maximise profits you have to be truly innovative to charge more money, or you have to minimise your costs, and human labour is a massive cost, so what’s a board of directors to do?
What’s more, in most of these cases the responsible parties are the companies themselves, who operate as a set of intellectual ideas rather than manifest agents. So many times, it’s functionally impossible to punish those who have caused manifest harm.
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