A long time ago, I wrote two posts listing dozens of entry level jobs in the grim darkness of the near future - not the dreamy tech-graduate aspirations conceived in optimistic futurist blogs but the street level roles left behind as every low income career gets automated out of existence.
These are the roles your 'runner characters found so horrifying they chose a life of shooting computer programmers and chopping off their own arms to fit ugly metal replacements. These are the jobs their relatives scrabble for. These are the jobs their fixers and mob contacts pretend to hold in their front offices. This is the sprawl and the people in it.
Wage Slave 1 covered everything from 3D Printshop Attendants and Chicken Little Trimmers to Industrial Origamists and Intercourse Trainers.
Wage Slave 2: The Restructuring began with Kelp Strainers and followed up with Persona Bums, Ractors and Scop Scoopers.
A year and some later, Wage Slave 3: The Redundancy finally presents thirty more dead-end careers for your cyberpunks to aspire to when they finally choose to retire from the 'runner biz.
Apprentice Nostalgist: the great mass of elderly people, unable for their all collective political efforts to return the world to an imagined 1950s, can at least remake their own living spaces. With the aid of historical textbooks, vast databases and few 3D printers, you help your employers turn their home into something resembling whatever idealised prior-century year they care to wallow in.
Architectural Beta-Tester: every new physical and virtual environment is now carefully designed according to nudge theory and the architectural precepts of a generation brought up on video-games, where every element is designed to channel the human
Depending on circumstances you may find yourself testing physical architecture in a virtual environment or virtual architecture in a physical mock-up, because the near-future is nothing if not painfully meta.
