0289 2026.05 Cube World

A story about wealth and poverty and why the gap should be reduced.

In the late 20th Century, people reached new heights, literally. Better health, better nutrition Taller people. Simple logic.
Five hundred years earlier. Poor health. Poor nutrition. Shorter people. A visit to any medieval house still standing requires some serious ducking to get through the door.
Or it used to.
We’re back in the age of a segregated population of short people again, mostly in industrialised cities, where population density is too high, but spreading out to larger towns where there are cube houses.
I know this because I just visited one such place, saw what horrors we — humanity — are doing to ourselves; correction, to others.
For a moment try to think what a melange of storage units, overcrowding, Tetris, AI, Japanese pod hotels, big box stores, compactus filing systems, poor nutrition, an unemployed underclass of people and shipping containers would produce.
Struggling?
In case you don’t know; the result is a very Blade Runner dystopia, that’s a spoiler alert.
This has evolved over the last two hundred years, subtly, but surely. Space has become a finite resource. Not the outer space beyond the sky that currently appears limitless, but land on our little planet. So more things need to squeeze into ever smaller spaces.
Now people in small houses need storage space. This led to the rise of storage units. Many of these are too big for the contents stored, and rarely visited. So they could be made smaller, anyone wanting more could rent multiple smaller units. Result equals more efficiency, and also more rentable units for a given floor area.
Then someone looked at shipping containers. They stack. They are used for emergency housing. So let’s stack the storage units. Make them a standard size, but smaller than a shipping container. Like Tetris, but not.
Make them a cube, with removable walls. Then when stacked you can get a storage unit of 1, 2, 3 or more cubes. Horizontal for long things, vertical for tall things.
With the shortage of affordable housing, and increasing numbers of people becoming homeless, Japanese pod style accommodation became not only a last resort, but potentially desirable. With Cubes all you needed to add was plumbing and wiring. Easy to do off a vertical core.
With people involuntarily and voluntarily choosing Cube life, it’s better than van life, there was a reduction in the number of big box stores as no one was buying much of anything. So that left huge empty warehouse style buildings that could be used for stacked homes. A permanent ceiling meant waterproofing wasn’t an issue, and they came with air conditioning, plumbing, wiring and a large car park. 
Have I missed anything? Ah yes, the same people who could not afford conventional housing were, generally, unemployed because of AI taking out the middle class. Cube housing conveniently kept them off the streets.
Unemployed people generally don’t have much income, so ate less well, life expectancy reduced but, counter intuitively, reproduction rates increased. Perhaps the close proximity and extra free time? With new generations emerging quicker, and eating less well, there was a noticeable reduction in the average height. Adaptation? Survival of the shortest? Cube towns are full of short people.
Finally, as Cube housing spread, some entrepreneurs noticed that there were too many access ways that could, optimally, be rented out. With everything a standard size, adding small wheels mean that, suspended in a three dimensional grid, Cubes could be moved around to create a passageway. It used to be called an office compactus, full of paper. Same principle, but now full of people.
Suddenly two passage ways became one. If you wanted to go left, you pushed the housing to the right. And vice versa. AI did some optimising, and voila, minimum communal space.
Why am I sharing this history? You know about it even if it’s ‘over there’ and far away from your comfortable existence in the leafy suburban utopia you call home.
Because all that overcrowding was, like Dharavi in 20th Century Mumbai, fun to start with. Small industry started, recycling was optimised, communities were built. Not ideal from a town planning perspective, but it worked.
Too much greed — I don’t use that word lightly — disguised as benevolence slowly but surely took away human dignity and the desire to work and live together. New generations had it worse, not better, than their unfortunate parents, and resentment has grown. Cube living has become one step above a prison cell with an unlocked door.
For you, and the likes of you, think the underclass will be grateful for menial jobs hand pruning your lawn, licking your dishes clean, getting abused by your narcissistic children, and taking your drunk and drugged friends home after yet another bacchanalian party. Home to a near empty mansion that could support ten Cube families, rather than two adults and an overworked cleaner wondering why you need five bathrooms.
You, who think working hard is buying another AI selected property, and jacking up the rent until you drive the occupants away to Cube life, and the price of remaining property ever higher so fewer and fewer can afford the price of entry.
You, who live in indifferent affluence funded by tax minimisation schemes and don’t give a hoot about social conscience or the sharing of wealth for the common good.
You, who think you are smart merely because of an accident of birth, luck, and a family trust. 
You have no idea what it is coming.
It is called a revolution.
Conveniently located in a shopping mall near you.

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Theme #mini-sci-fi
Type #digital
Colour #brown

Published on #Medium May 2026