Given these likely futures, what might the effects be for art, for poetry? One of the arguments of this book is that since 1960 poetry in particular and art and literature more broadly have derived their force from a massive demographic and occupational transformation, as workers moved away from goods-producing to service-providing sectors of the economy and as women entered the workplace in massive numbers. As argued earlier, this kind of shift is not likely to happen again. Even if new lines of service occupation open up and begin to present very high demand for labor, it seems highly unlikely that these will be as qualitatively different as factory was from field, or office from factory. The economy will remain split into a small industrial sector and a larger, low-growth service sector. There is no sector beyond services; there is only the science-fiction scenario of full automation and the end of capitalism at the hands of the all-purpose robots discussed previously. Here, then, is one dimension in which we are unlikely to see a labor-determined transformation of literary and artistic production on the same order as the one narrated here. Since periodizing categories such as modernism and postmodernism depend, largely, on industrialization and deindustrialization, respectively, this explains why no viable, periodizing successor to postmodernism has emerged. There are, however, some important qualifications to make, since one result of low demand for labor and falling wages in the postindustrial countries will be a rising number of both self-employed people and small proprietors, engaged in various forms of petty production. The category of self-employment is notoriously murky and is often merely a legal disguise for what is fundamentally a wage relation. We would want to distinguish the self-employed carpenter from the artisanal pickle makers of Brooklyn, who sell a product direct to market, and we would want to distinguish both of these types of workers from the self-employed collector of bottles or scrap metal, who represents a type of informal making-do that dominates in the developing world. As demand for labor becomes increasingly weak, such forms of petty production and self-employment are likely to increase, both in the United States and elsewhere, and it seems possible that, as a result, we will see a renewal of the sorts of values that accompany artisanal modes of labor—craft, skill, truth in materials—as well as the ideological entrepreneurialism of the truly petit bourgeois, which has already been, under the sign of self-management, a large part of the new ethics of work. In the big cosmopolitan cities that Cowen thinks will soon house only the rich and those who serve them, we see a turn to high-priced, handmade production, often enabled by the disintermediating and coordinating power of network technology (the meeting of high and low tech, the handmade and machine) and drawing on collectivist, dissident values (“sharing economy”). The handmade also meets up with high touch, as artisanal bakers and coffee roasters cluster close to masseuses. How large this sector could grow, and what its effect might be on aesthetic ideology, remains an open question, but it is certainly an area to watch. Artisanal rhetorics, with their emphasis on skill and organic form, tend to be limited in their appeal because of their backward-looking, nostalgic character, but it is possible that some compromise formation, at the intersection of artisanal and high-tech logics, might exert a strong effect on the arts and aesthetic ideology.