#73: You Can Jump into the Fire
One of the most unmistakable effects of the internet is that physical offices are increasingly not necessary for many types of work. This is so obvious by now that's it barely worth pointing out, but there's less consensus about what exactly is replacing offices. The popular idea, probably introduced by The 4-Hour Workweek a decade ago, was that a technology-assisted escape from the office meant swapping the worst aspects of work, like commuting or explaining to Lumberg what happened to the TPS reports, for extended beach vacations facilitated by passive e-commerce income. The 2015 zeitgeist movie We Are Your Friends turned this into a mantra the characters would blankly recite: "We can invent an app, start a blog, sell things online." If this narrative about post-office work has persisted in residual pockets, the broader reality has proven quite different. It's not that easy to discard the unpleasant parts of work and keep the rest.
A few days ago, Venkatesh Rao described wrote an interesting thread about what he calls the Consumerization of Employment: a software-driven shift toward "bagging your own admin groceries in self-checkout admin bureaucrat machines in the dark staff cloud." This is another example of technology hollowing out a middle layer formerly occupied by humans, in which end users take on the labor within that layer that can't be automated. Rao argues that this transition makes the distinction between free agent and paycheck employee irrelevant, along with physically-enclosed offices: "Employer organizations are now increasingly like virtual switchboards connecting workers to Dark Staff services. If there’s an office, it’s for either specialized physical equipment or community services. The watercooler IS the office now." So, instead of escaping the office and relaxing on the beach while work happens on our behalf, we have the opposite: The work part has decoupled from the day job, while many of the advantages of traditional employment—the camaraderie of the watercooler, along with things like income stability and health care benefits—have remained there.
Viewed through this lens, employment takes on a feudal quality, where companies no longer provide the tools or resources for getting work done, but instead primarily offer security, a mission, and a tribe to be part of. In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze describes a transition from "environments of enclosure—prison, hospital, factory, school" to "ultrarapid forms of free-floating control," best exemplified by the market and the corporation. In the former spaces, you only followed their rules when you were physically inside them; the latter are systems that you don't fully exit (amazingly, Deleuze wrote Postscript in 1992, before the internet had illustrated his point even more perfectly). Meanwhile, the global market for many kinds of freelance gig labor has driven down the price of many once-lucrative tasks. In the old world, Deleuze writes, "one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything." The world is increasingly a massive, permanent office where we never badge out; bizarrely, the increasingly scarce arrangement of traditional employment in a physical workplace is less a "control space" than a shelter from the roving hordes of uncertainty and precarity.
Reads:
How dollar stores are an "invasive species" proliferating in low-income neighborhoods and small towns.
Google Street View's creepy practice of blurring out houses where high-profile crimes occurred—which obviously makes them even creepier.
A guy got arrested for setting up a secret apartment inside a Providence mall's parking garage and living there on and off for four years. Every paragraph of this article is fascinating. He said he was "inspired by a Christmastime ad for the mall that featured an enthusiastic female voice talking about how great it would be if you could live at the mall."