Barro Is Wrong: You Should Not Bring Any Part of Yourself to Google

Posted on by Doreen
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-work-life-balance-2014-3

A few years ago James Damore was fired from Google for harboring sexist attitudes and declaring in a memo harmful statements concerning the supposed biological differences between men and women. Damore also spoke on the limits of his speech under Google and that the company was responsible for “reverse discrimination” in an effort to curb discrimination itself. Needless to say this brought controversy to Google and a huge social media firestorm started because of Damore’s memo and Google’s response. Was Google in their right to fire Damore? Was Damore making any solid points even though he was clearly a sexist asshole? (Yes and no, respectively)

There are many other possible questions to the possibility of “echo chambers” a phrase that right-wing folks like to use concerning the left a lot. But of course, when leftists oust others because of serious ideological disputes or particular actions then the left is “cannibalizing itself” so ya know, you can’t win either way. But anyways, Damore isn’t the focus of this article, just the backdrop.

Specifically for this article by Josh Barro on Business Insider which sounds promising from the get-go: Google is wrong: You should not ‘bring your whole self to work’. Unfortunately, this is an article I judged by its title alone. Note to self: At least give something (especially an article from Business Insider) at least a cursory glance before adding it to my Abolish Work to-do list.

Then again, having wholly negative articles on this site isn’t such a bad thing. I can’t be positive all the time and sometimes it’s good to rip into an article as I’ve done in the past.

Here is one such article.

When I first read the title I was like, “Ooh! Someone finally understands that work shouldn’t be all there is to your life! And from Business Insider? Wow! Plus hating on Google is pretty cool.”

But then reading the article, well…

But in Damore’s defense, his employer did tell him to bring his whole self to work – and as The Wall Street Journal reported this week, he was hardly the only Googler bringing his politics to work.

Don’t these people have work to do? Maybe they’d be able to better focus on their jobs if they left more of themselves at home.

As a side note: Business Insider makes me have to type these words since it limits how much I can copy or paste per passage. It also forbids me from accessing its site without Ad Blocker (though I got around this via an alternative link) so basically: Heck you and your business model/site.

More to the point though this is not the angle I thought this article was going to take. I thought that Barro was going to tackle how all-encompassing Google asks their employees to behave when under their contracts. I figured this article would attack the notion of work-life balance that Google sees as an impediment to its employees productivity. And I reasoned that although no hardcore anti-work sentiments would arise from this article it’d at least be nice to see.

Nope!

Instead, this article is clamoring for people to leave their politics (you know, those pesky principles of theirs) back at home. Union concerns got you down? Leave it at home! Worried about  discrimination? Back at your house! Thinking about how your boss has been behaving around you lately? Keep it where you live! Basically, ignore issues of power, of disparities in influence, of organizational mechanics within the gigantic corporation you work for. You know, one of the biggest corporations globally and one that literally invented an alternative verb for “search”.

How are you supposed to leave their ideologies at the door when corporations are defined by people with certain worldviews? The people who build corporations are the rich executives making a killing off an economic system that, itself, makes a killing. These people are not agnostic rational individuals who are merely acting for their own self-interest or for the benefit of their employees. They also have very particular principles and ways of implementing them within the larger economy. And these principles and actions affect people materially; doesn’t that matter?

But, that has to be pushed aside because politics is too “bitter, distracting and ever-present” according to Barro. Well, yes, I do actually feel a bit bitter and distracted when (for example) the ever-present threat of transphobia is all around me and makes me nervous to present how I would like to in the workplace or go into a particular bathroom or just be myself. Of course politics are ever-present because they have always been ever-present.

What is so different about now?

The answer is, of course, social media. Politics are just more obvious but that doesn’t mean they weren’t always there before. We had newspapers, political TV shows, magazines that were political, unions in much earlier decades of America, etc. It’s just much harder to ignore that politics is involved with almost every aspect of our lives and that it shouldn’t be ignored. Especially if you are working for a gigantic corporation that is notoriously anti-union!

One [of the two incompatible impulses in society today] is an increased sense that political views are central to personal morality – if you have the wrong ideas like Damore, then you’re a bad person, or at least a person one should not have to interact with.

…

The second impulse is because politics are so important, it must be discussed everywhere. And because everything is at least somewhat political in some way, we must interrogate the politics of everything so we can fix the structural injustices that exist in society everywhere.

Uh…yeah?

The idea that men are women are so biologically different that women should be treated a certain way as opposed to men is literally sexism and that is a bad thing?

Treating women differently than men for arbitrary reasons that have nothing to do with their own behaviors is harmful because it dissuades women from taking part or being more active in their lives. It makes them blame themselves for the sexist actions of men (like Damore) and harms their self-esteem. Of course, some women won’t be harmed by it because they’re numb to this kind of sexism (this isn’t good either by the way) or because they themselves have internalized misogyny, but that doesn’t stop it from harming some which is, you know, bad.

And yes, sometimes that means you have to cut off dialogue with folks who are actively harmful to you, unreasonable or you know it won’t go anywhere positive or productive. I thought America was all about freedom of association? Isn’t knowing when to cut and run a good thing for conversations? Wouldn’t you rather political conversation be made up of folks who know their worth, their boundaries and how to best enforce them when it comes to conversations? I know that’s the kind of world I want and hopefully it’s the world we’re steadily getting closer to.

Lastly, interrogating the politics of everything so we can solve the structural injustices within society sounds awesome. Sign me up! In what universe does that strike someone as bad?

Combine the two impulses and it becomes impossible … [to] do business together

If someone is making you uncomfortable you have no obligation to stick around them. If they are making many people uncomfortable those people don’t have to let that person stick around in their community if they’d rather them go elsewhere. Exclusion is actually just as important as inclusion in certain cases where the discomfort isn’t just discomfort but stems from a real sense of injustice and harm that is being done to the community (intentionally or not).

When you find out your co-worker keeps talking badly about Muslims in your office and about how bad immigration hurts “Our Great Country” and it bothers you, you should speak up about that! You shouldn’t just let racists be racists, you should actively curate your space so its safer for people from all backgrounds. And to be clear, I’m not saying “of all backgrounds” in a neutral way. Being “racist” for your background isn’t a neutral position, it’s an actively negative one.

At work, agreeing to disagree should be especially easy, because we can just agree to not talk about a lot of the not-especially-work-related matters that divide us.

But no, this isn’t easy at all. There are some jobs where this is impossible for example if you are involved in a political campaign. But even your typical manufacturing job, factory job or retail and food service jobs, you have issues of power and politics abound. Issues of who gets paid what and why, issues of how you relate to your co-workers and your boss. There are issues of where your building is located (e.g. is it disability accessible? accessible to the poor? does it cater to underprivileged communities?) and how you best serve your customers and make them feel safe.

And that sense of safety for both customers and co-workers (ideally there shouldn’t be bosses, but that’s a whole ‘nother topic) means tackling our different visions of the world. It means confronting issues of pay, of benefits (especially health insurance) and the disparities between workers and bosses. It means having those tough conversations, not burying our heads in the sand. The fact of the matter is that we can’t ignore politics in our day to day lives and in trying to do so, we only assert that apolitical attitudes are the best political method for progress.

Much as they wish otherwise, liberals are not going to be able to reeducate the entire working force into having the right, woke ideas, and banish those who resist.

I’m not even a liberal and I think this is a terrible take. Sometimes you do need to remove people from your community to make it safer and to help allow others to get better work done. That doesn’t mean you ex-communicate anyone. I agree things like “cancel culture” can always find the wrong targets but there are also plenty of good targets that haven’t nearly been affected enough by this “banishment” (Chris Brown is a great example).

There are better ways forward than just “cancelling” people but when they’ve been given multiple chances (as I know from experience) and show little to no growth, sometimes the best thing to do is build your community without them involved in it. It’s not a decision that should be taken lightly and I think transformative and restorative justice are often superior, but it should be an option.

And, well, here’s the kicker:

It starts with talking less and smiling more.

Okay, Kilgrave.

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Graeber on the “Gigantic Embarrassment” of Work (RSA Replay)

Posted on by Doreen
Source

Lost to the archives are my previous discussions of Graeber or mentions of him at any rate. I don’t recall how many times I’ve talked about Graeber’s infamous article concerning bullshit jobs, but I know I never did any review of the article. But hey, this covers that!

Back in 2018 (approximately a million years ago), Graeber gave an interesting talk based on his then recent book with the RSA (which apparently stands for the Royal Society of Arts?) that I’ve had on my Youtube for a long time now. I’ve decided to get around to taking a look at it, now that I don’t have school and my part-time job is easier than ever thanks(?) to COVID-19.

For starters, it’s a decent lecture though it doesn’t tell anti-work advocates anything they don’t already know. It’s definitely more of a 101 lecture than something anti-capitalist anarchists (like myself or Graeber) would go out of their way to see. But then, that’s the point. It’s a very 101 talk because his audience is a crowd that conceivably flinches at “anarchist” and thinks terrorist.

The talk is split into three sections: A brief lecture section (20 minutes or so), a briefer dialogue section with the host (15 minutes) and the longest section, a Q&A fills out the rest. I took notes on all three of these sections and here’s a list of things that stood out to me:

  1. Graeber looks really haggard, I don’t mean this as an insult; I hope he was getting rest!
  2. Graeber talks a bit too much about how successful he is (especially with Debt)
  3. He loves to envision capitalists with “minions” like a Saturday morning cartoon show
  4. His solutions (UBI) are unpersuasive or vague and his methodology is suspect
  5. He’s certain no one believes in the myths of capitalism, despite them still being parroted
  6. His idea of “everything meaningful as an extension of care-ethic” is an interesting theory
  7. Sadly doesn’t address his own professions BS quality despite doing so in the essay
  8. Not a lot of discussion concerning automation (“robots have already taken our jobs!”)
  9. Has good anti-authoritarian instincts when it comes to the 4-day workweek
  10. Almost no discussion about gender roles in BS jobs, only when a question is asked.

I know a lot of that seems negative, but this is overall a good talk. It’s just unfortunate that Graeber’s biggest issue here is that his methods of talking about the phenomenon of BS jobs is either his Twitter page, an email group or a drunken rant he had done at parties for 10 years. I’m not saying anecdotal evidence is meaningless or that survey can’t be helpful, nor am I suggesting that he is wrong about the existence of BS jobs, just that I wish his methods had more rigor.

Graeber’s an intelligent anthropologist and I’ve read him on anarchism several times to usually pleasing results, but he only seemed to be at his best when he talked less about the symptoms (BS jobs) then the central issue (state-capitalism). Or when he was asked about the 4-Day weekend and noted that surveilling people’s activities would be incredibly costly, difficult and may not even work for his own profession. He’s paid monthly to work “all the time” as he says.

So Graeber admits he’s “suspicious” of calls for the 4-Day workweek, even though he thinks it would help. This is, roughly, where I stand as well and it was such a relief to finally hear and see someone else talk about it. Although, inconsistently and disappointingly he held no such worries for the Universal Basic Income (UBI) even though I’d think they’d equally apply?

I suspect that is because he spoke to a great cultural change (paraphrasing) that we’d need to go under in order for such a policy to happen in the first place. My question is that if we’ve already caused such a cultural shift that UBI becomes palatable then why shouldn’t we aim higher? There’s also another excellent question raised by the host: What about short-term strategies?

UBI may be a decent strategy for the long-term but as Graeber points out it is currently undesirable by politicians despite it gaining more steam in the past 5 years. We’ve seen that especially with US presidential candidates such as Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders. Social democratic ideologies have, in general, become more popular which has lead to the rise of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) gaining momentum. As well, we have publications like Jacobin that have also been steadily increasing in viewership over the years.

Nevertheless anarchism should never be a slightly radicalized social democratic stance. This was (and is) the problem with anarchists like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Colin Ward and others like them. They think of anarchism as a process for improving the state not as abolishing it and replacing its institutions and services with community-based ones.

Now, I understand I’m painting in broad strokes here and I certainly respect the thinkers I’ve just mentioned (Ward’s Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction and Chomsky’s definition of anarchism are both influential) but I think this strain of anarchism doesn’t get enough criticism.

I’m not saying we don’t focus on the short-term benefits such as UBI, 4-Day Workweek, $15 minimum wage, etc. But what I am saying is we need to look carefully at these policy proposals that depend on the ruling class suddenly turning around after hundreds of years (and much more) of oppressing others and suddenly treating us kindly. Yes, there have been some wins such as the unionist victories in the 1930s in the US but those were notoriously reformist and ended up weakening the unionist movement in the US in the long-haul. Even the IWW isn’t near where it used to be and neither are most other unions that fought for worker’s rights back then.

As the title suggest, one of the best parts of this talk is at the beginning when Graeber mentions that work is a kind of “embarrassment”. Everyone implicitly recognizes what they’re doing is BS but no one has a solution. Or if they do, it’s often discounted as “communism” or as Graeber said “it’s us or North Korea!” Any solution to our current problems would only make it worse, so why bother? Or it’s just an excuse for bad and lazy (let’s be honest: it’s the same in capitalism) people to get out of their debts, which, of course, Graeber wrote a whole book on and has responses to.

As for BS Jobs themselves, I have an interesting mix because I take care of living beings (dogs) but 90% of the time I’m doing nothing these days. And even before COVID, I still had hours and hours where I was on my phone or playing video games or doing something else. These days it’s just hilarious how much of my job is just sitting around and looking at screens. The pretense is someone needs to be there in case the place burned down (why would it?) and more crucially because the dogs need their bowls refilled and to be taken out once in a while (more sensible).

But in essence, most of my job feels like BS. Like, it’s amazing to me I get paid to just sit and read , play video games, watch wrestling videos on Youtube or whatever I want, really. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. I technically have a list of responsibility but due to COVID no one cares and even before that, so few people want to do overnight shifts that they often can’t make mountains out of molehills when much of the cleaning asked for is minor. The major cleaning to the facility happens throughout the day so even when we were busier there were periods of hours where, as an evening worker or an overnight one, I had hours where I did nothing or even napped.

Another interesting aspect of this lecture/dialogue is that Graeber briefly mentions how we sacrificed our leisure time for our commodity time. Instead of having more time with our friends or families we are spending more time with our smartphones. It’s worth asking: Can we have both? Is it possible to have a life full of commodity-based pleasures and enjoy bountiful time with our loved ones? Graeber doesn’t provide any answers to this question (nor does he even ask it) but I think if we abolished state-capitalism we could certainly get much closer.

Maybe Graeber believes that as well, I don’t know for sure. In any case, the benefits of technology can be dispersed and widespread instead of concentrated into the hands of the rich and powerful.

So, why do BS jobs exist?

Graeber has some answers:

  1. Making up jobs to suit those in power
  2. To keep people off the street (despite abandoned homes)
  3. The poor must pay their debts and the rich must provide them those opportunities
  4. If you don’t want to work you’re a bad person!
  5. Much easier to believe you think you’re doing something and aren’t.
  6. If you’re a manager you need 5-6 flunkies/minions or you’re not important
  7. Duck tapers: People who apologize for the lack of solutions
  8. Box Tickets: Efficiency designers who aren’t listened to
  9. Goons: PR, Marketing, Telemarketer(!)
  10. Taskmasters: Supervising people who don’t need it (Middle-Managers)

In addition, many of these industries (as Graeber points out) feed off themselves and the people Graeber heard from admitted this to him. From corporate lawyers, people within the financial industry Graeber concludes in this discussion that even if half of the current jobs were eliminated it likely would not impact anything materially.

Perhaps we are seeing this currently with the COVID-19 Pandemic, most of the job currently are “essential” ones that are (at least in my profession) an extension of the care-ethic, as Graeber puts it. Providing dogs care as well as other essential services like getting food to people reliably, nurses and hospitals are all extensions of the care-ethic, as Graeber would say.

On the other hand, society has never seemed so chaotic and disorganized. There’s a discomfort in the air wherever I go. I either have this gnawing feeling that there are too few people outside or making noise (e.g. a ghost town) or way too many and this isn’t safe and oh Glob I should really be home and not Here. I fluctuate between these two gnawing feelings but then, to his credit, Graeber didn’t have a pandemic in mind when he wanted corporate lawyers gone.

But what is the opposite of corporate lawyers? For Graeber it seems to be nurses, teachers (which he himself is one), tube workers (more on that in a second) and people whose jobs bear some actual value for the society around them. But what does that value look like and how is it best harnessed within a given society? Graeber doesn’t give us much besides the care-ethic I’ve now mentioned a few times, which I think is interesting but may not be enough on its own.

The discussion about tube workers was interesting. For those non-UK natives/folks unaware of the UK term the “tube” means subways tunnels for us Americans. Why would these folks be so tied to the care-ethic if the trains can mostly run themselves at this point and most folks know where they are going? Well, some people don’t for starters (hi, it’s me!), plus sometimes women are harassed by drunk men, sometimes people lose their laptops or even their children. So yeah, you could definitely argue (as some tube workers did on Twitter) that they’re very much essential.

BS jobs plague our lives, Graeber is no doubt right about that, but his evidence for that needs a bit more rigor for someone who says he’s more of an anthropologist than an anarchist on his Twitter bio. There’s also the curious incidents of people loving their job they know is a lie. Graeber reasons this could be because they’re just glad to be away from home (bad home life/hate their families) and within Graeber’s survey it was a measly 6% at any rate.

But for most of us, we’re all too aware of the bullshit we’ve got to endure within our jobs. The anti-work movement is forever benefited from Graeber’s insightful essay. Maybe we should let more academics publish their drunken rants from parties they’ve been crafting for 10 years?

The world might be a better place for it.

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John Oliver from Last Week Tonight on Automation

Posted on by Doreen
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h1ooyyFkF0

John Oliver has been a (somewhat) compelling individual when it comes to the news for a while now. He’s lost much of his charm for me throughout the years as I find his jokes do more to hurt his message than help and I also find the Daily Show style presentation outdated. Nevertheless there’s no denying he can be (at least at times) funny and insightful. Sometimes he even uses his platform on a given topic to give money tthat does good work or otherwise brings attention to folks who he thinks could use the attention (for better or worse).

This video on automation recorded in the first half of 2019 is another video I’ve had on my Watch Later list for a while now. I was never making it a priority to get around to since I always had more compelling articles to analyze, movies to watch, chapters of books to review, etc. But now that I’ve finally watched it I can tell you that my time away from the video didn’t end up mattering much.

The best part of this video is also its worst: It’s a very 101 video on automation; what it is and why it both is and isn’t as scary as pundits try to make it. I already knew a lot of this information and in fact seeing David Autor I was reminded of John Danaher’s excellent articles addressing Autor on automation, all three of which you can find here.

That being said, given I’ve restarted the site and I don’t have any posts (technically) on automation, this may make a solid general introduction for folks reading this site!

Oliver starts the program making the point that kids are often asked about what kind of job they want when they grow up. This is part of our culture’s obsession with work and having it be crucial to our sense of identity. If you don’t know what you want to be adults might look at you disapprovingly or perhaps remind you that you’re still young (so why ask?) and you may figure it out later! If both of these responses seem unhelpful to you that’s probably because the whole conversation is unhelpful for all involved. You are asking a child what they want to do with their lives. By some estimates, that part of our brains aren’t fully developed till our mid-twenties!

This doesn’t mean we can’t ask kids tough questions or that kids cannot take responsibility for their actions, but that we need to give kids more autonomy to figure that out for themselves.

At any rate, Oliver notes that many folks believe that automation is a “huge part” of job loss in the US especially. But the reality is much more complicated than that with only some jobs actually being taken away from workers. Oliver uses an example that I believe Autor uses as well, the rise of the ATM and the feared decline of the bank teller. Back in the 80s when ATMs were becoming popular, many bank tellers feared the loss of their jobs. But instead of losing their jobs, their jobs simply changed to involve other operations within a bank.

In addition, even when it is true that jobs are being lost, Oliver smartly points out that this can at times be a good thing. Don’t we want less loggers falling out of trees and hurting themselves? Wouldn’t we want industries where workplace injuries are currently rampant to trend downwards so more people wouldn’t get hurt? It’s an intuitive reason to automate for sure.

But automation can also be done for more capitalistic reasons such as profits and the rate of production within a given company. There’s a trend amongst CEOs praising the rise of automation because it’ll allow them to fire more workers and increase the pay for those left over or, better yet, keep it the same and increase profits and production for the whole company.

As Oliver notes, who controls the rise of automation is also very important and right now we have some no-so-intelligent leadership in the White House. But even if we did we still live under capitalism, a point Oliver, of course, doesn’t mention given his liberal tendencies. This economic reality means that automation is ultimately being done to better serve capital, not labor!

There’s also a study that was thrown around a few years ago about 50% or more jobs being automated, but as usual it was a study taken out of context by news sources. What the study was actually documenting was whether jobs fell into the high risk category, which is different from an all-but-guaranteed-automation. And again, even when automation does happen there is the complimentary effect which Autor and Danaher have discussed in the links above, check it out.

On top of that there are jobs that may exist in 50 years or so that we could never imagine. Oliver uses the example of how agriculture has shrunk to a shadow of its former selves. America used to be dominated by independent and small-scale farmers but overtime due to mechanical automation and improvements, the huge size of agriculture became less and less necessary.

Many feared what would happen to the farmers and their equipment but many just found jobs in the city. And now we have many jobs that those people could never have imagined such as coders, Youtubers, Uber drivers and much more. That said, the transition is not always easy from one industry to another. Oliver points out that older truckers are not going to suddenly start coding, despite the threat of losing their jobs thanks to machine learning and self-driving cars.

So what do we do about them?

Oliver mentions tax increases, federal funding for retaining for those who lose their jobs and teaching the young a different strategy. Instead of, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” You can instead ask them, “What five things do you want to do when you grow up?” which seems much more reasonable given many people don’t have careers in 2020, just a series of jobs.

Whatever the end result of automation Oliver is surely right that it isn’t going to stop anytime soon and that we all need to be better prepared for it and educated about it. Maybe in the process of bettering our strategies surrounding automation, we can also challenge capitalism?

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How Work turns our Brains Off (And then Blames us for It!)

Posted on by Doreen

It’s Not the Best Choice, It’s [Amazon’s] Choice! Source: http://www.carlybird.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Bored_At_Work.jpg
Another video on my Youtube Watch Later list is on the docket and only a couple left! This time we’re talking about the last Big Think video I saved before I unsubscribed to them however many months later. Part of the issue with Big Think is that they’ll have some interesting videos done by cool folks. But then they’ll also have videos by assholes or they’ll try to get “all perspectives” on a given topic, which, just so happens to include right-wing folks. The comments section is also a pretty big cesspool, especially when anything even marginally left-wing is posted.

I once posted that liberals are not leftists (from an anarchist perspective but they didn’t know that) and it got hundreds of likes quickly because people thought I was insulting leftists!

Anyways, this is a fun and interesting video. I don’t think it tells us much we didn’t already know about work but there are some concepts in it that I was unfamiliar with such as the “seeking system” in brains that often get turned off during work. Many people try to keep these systems within our brain active with podcasts, the ones that help with curiosity and discovery. There’s a technical term for this system which psychologist Dan Cable identifies as the ventral striatum but I’ll just call it the “seeking system” for the sake of spellcheck and my sanity.

This seeking system can’t only be held aloft by podcasts, but they do get us thinking and concentrated on something else besides the menial and repetitive work we’re doing. I know when I’m listening to the NeoScum Podcast (a Shadowrun podcast) it helps me laugh, get myself out of my own head a little and make me think about a far away land. But it also doesn’t replace what’s going on in front of me with something better. It doesn’t take that mop out of my hand and give me a wand or make what I’m doing not menial, just a little more bearable.

These seeking systems are important because they help us learn and as a result, when they are minimized or even turned off we can get bored easier. Our brains are trying to tell us something, that it isn’t us but the work we feel as if we need to, as Cable puts it (paraphrasing), “…get through to make it to the weekend”. After all work is where we typically cannot be with our family, friends, loved ones, beloved hobbies or have the time to do as we please and go on a relaxing walk and explore what’s around us. Cable goes so far as to call this experience an “epidemic” and a “humanistic sickness” which tends to drive us to utter boredom.

One thing that frustrates me about his analysis though is that it focuses in not only on how this harms the workers but the organizations they’re a part of. He notes that this streak of boredom can result in a “lackluster performance” from workers but who cares? Shouldn’t the bosses get lackluster performances when they’re giving us lackluster work?

It’s like that saying goes, “Minimum effort for minimum wage!”

Cable traces back the origin of this boredom to the way work has been scaled up in the past few hundred years. Especially through supposed visionaries and industrialists like Henry Ford who, as Cable denotes, saw curiosity as a problem and a bug, not a feature of the workplace he wanted to build and thrive under capitalism. This kind of workplace breaks work into many small tasks which means that individual workers and even groups of them are all cut off from each other.

This likely reflects a capitalist’s dream of making it much harder for workers to communicate easier about their shared issues and then potentially forming a union and striking. This also led to the punishment/reward systems we tend to see these days in modern workplaces. The employee of the year for a punishment and a firm “talking to” or “notice” for valuing our own autonomy.

Generally, tedious and repetitive tasks are going to tend to drive you to listen to podcasts, music, the whirring of the ceiling fan above you that makes your office just a little bit too cold. It’s going to get your brain starved for things to think about, to process, to understand and discover. And through that starvation you’ll often be told that you are the problem in some way. Why don’t you get another job? Why don’t you go back to school? Why don’t you switch departments or talk to your boss? Anything but try to address the issue: Work itself.

Now, Cable claims that smaller companies tend to do better at increasing curiosity because the people involved are more likely to be engaged with their work. If there are only 50 people as opposed to 50,000 you won’t have the corporate decree of “stay[ing] in your lane” as much. And that seems plausible to some extent.

But even smaller businesses can fall into capitalist traps that punish workers for trying to flex their own autonomy in even the most basic ways. In fact, it can often lead to even worse micromanagement because the firm is much smaller and therefore the employees are much more legible to their bosses. And while Cable is surely right that the cultural expectations of a given company matter more than any given standard, those expectations are driven by economic ones.

Ultimately, tackling our cultural expectations around work, the way we victim-blame workers and laud bosses for making work as menial as possible, means tackling capitalism and work itself. Either through worker organizing, worker-owned organizations, individual slow-downs to preserve our own cranial integrity or maybe, just maybe, a revolution someday.

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