When I was a kid I was always being told that in the future people’s jobs would be taken over by robots. But that was in factories - places I never intended to work, and even though as we entered the future I saw factories disappear, they just went to other parts of the world where people costed less.

But now as I’m watching magazines, record stores, the NZPA, and bookstores shutdown, I come back to this idea. Who would have thought that this giant, decentralized robot-like thing would appear, a benevolent force that had no intention to take over human jobs - but it so radically changed the way people found information, that they no longer bought the things they used to, or traveled to the places they would go to get them, making many of the jobs I thought I might do irrelevant, or at best, in a state of painful and prolonged transition.

Change is a constant, and a river changes course, but always runs to the sea. But I think it’s more than nostalgia to value the things that developed around this disappearing system - where information was physical, and where collecting value from stories was laid out in clear blue prints - make a thing and sell it. A world where city centres were full of the foot traffic of those looking for and buying stories, and where the telling, production, and distribution of stories created professions as respectable, tangible and stable as engineering or science.

As members of a unique generation that started in this old system, and will enter the prime of our lives fully in the new - this story itself is one of most important stories we can remember as we build the new world, and tell to those that come after us.