Join the new world

Oh boy, day 999. An auspicious time for another wild and crazy Sunday afternoon tl;dr rant, innit?

Thanks to The Invisible Committee for the anarcho-inspiration.

Whether this is a serious critique, or just crispy cereal, or food for thought, or sugar-filled word-candy, or whether this is a painting of a pipe, is of course entirely up for you to decide!



Pithy summary: The world-order of work turns us all into prostitutes. And e-work in eRep is a reflection of that. Resist the tempatation to sell yourself. Go to ground. Return to your villages. Overthrow the local authorities and start to build a new world in your neighborhood. Get un-hooked. Demobilize yourself from the dominant social paradigm.



Thoughts about e-work in general...
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No question is more confused in RL than work. No question is more confused in the New World than e-work.

No relation is more disfigured than the one between Players and work.

In many parts of the New World, the players despise work. Profoundly. In other parts, they revere it.

But the basic condition of work in the New World is getting down on all fours to climb the ladder of hierarchy, while privately flattering ourselves that we don't really give a crap.

We work eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours, but then never have any scruples about jumping ship for a better opportunity. We hate exploitative bosses, but want to be employed at any cost. To have a job, especially a well-paying one, is an honor, yet working is a sign of servility.

In short: work is a perfect clinical illustration of hysteria. We love while hating, we hate while loving. When the hysteric loses his victim -- in this case, his employer -- stupor and confusion set in. More often than not, it is a terminal condition.


Critique of Old Ideas...
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The e-equivalent of welfare checks and drug dealing -- meaning an ever-expanding commitment to war and perpetual fear-mongering with respect to "the other" -- are the only guarantees, as both Dear Admin and many e-States have recognized, against the possibility of a social explosion (or mass exodus) at any moment.

But excuse me if I also don't give a damn about the Old Left view on these matters.

It's the psychic economy of the New World as much as the political economy of the game that is at stake in the maintenance of "workerist" fictions regarding this situation.

The truth is that most players belong to a generation that lives within this fiction. They have never counted on a pension, or the right to work, let alone rights at work, in RL. So they don't count on it being present in the New World. The hysterics of e-work seem entirely normal and realistic to them.

This isn't a precarious situation, as some of the most thoughtful factions of the militant e-left like to theorize, because to be precarious is still to define oneself in relation to the sphere of work, that is, to its decomposition.

We accept the necessity of finding e-money and e-gold, by whatever means, because it is currently (and increasingly) impossible to do without it, but at the same time we reject the necessity of working. Why? Because we don't work: we do our time.

Business is not a place where we exist, it's a place we pass through. This true in both RL and in the New World.

We aren't cynical. We are just unwilling to be deceived. We are not disappointed. To be disappointed, one must have hoped for something. And we have never hoped for anything from business: we see it for what it is and for what it has always been, a fool's game of varying degrees of comfort.

With regard to our parents, to the previous generations, to the old Labor movements, our only regret is that they fell into the trap, at least the ones who believed.



Sentimental Confusion and the Horror of Work...
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The sentimental confusion that surrounds the question of work (and e-work) can be explained thus: the notion of work has always included two contradictory dimensions: a dimension of exploitation and a dimension of participation.

Exploitation of individual and collective labor power through the private or social appropriation of surplus value; participation in a common effort through the relations linking those who cooperate in the universe of production.

The two dimensions are perversely confused in the notion of work, which explains many workers' indifference, at the end of the day, the both old-school Marxist rhetoric -- which tends to deny the dimension of participation -- and managerial rhetoric -- which obtusely denies the dimension of exploitation.

Hence the ambivalence of the relation of work, which is shameful insofar as it makes us strangers to what we are doing, and -- at the same time -- adored, insofar as a part of ourselves was brought into play. This is not a developing situation. The disaster occurred long ago: it resides in everything that had to be destroyed to bring this system to life, in all those who had to be uprooted, in order for work to end up as the only way of existing.

And in this respect, e-work is simply a camera obscura for RL-work.

The horror of work is less in the work itself than in the methodical ravagings of all that isn't work: the familiarities of one's neighborhood and trade, of one's village, of struggle, of kinship, our attachment to places, to the earth, to beings, to the seasons, to ways of doing and speaking.

E-work, in its warped reflection of RL-work, actually pushes this alienation from not-work even further. We are literally cogs in the e-machine. We have been assimilated. There is no alternative.



The Paradox...
==============



Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing. At the same time, workers have become superfluous.

In RL, advances in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the manufacture of any product.

E-work both reflects and concentrates this reality. E-work means pushing a few buttons on a screen.

We live and play the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they were supposed to distract us. In the west, coal mines once famous for violent strikes are being converted into entertainment multiplexes that feature museums providing simulated methane blasts for vacationers.

In corporations, work is divided increasingly into highly skilled positions of research, conception, control, coordination and communication which deploy all the knowledge necessary for cybernetic production processes and, on the other hand, unskilled positions for maintenance and monitoring of this process. The first are few in number, very well paid and thus so coveted that the minority who occupy these positions will do anything to avoid losing them. They and their work are effectively bound in one anxious embrace.

Managers, scientists, lobbyists, lawyers, researchers, programmers, developers, consultants and engineers literally never stop working. Even their private lives serve to augment productivity. They are evaluated not in terms of number of hours on the job, but on the basis of objectives attained and quality of results. They are, effectively, entrepreneurs.

The series of tasks that can't be delegated to automation form a nebulous cluster of positions that, because they cannot be occupied by machines, are occupied by any old human -- warehousemen, stock people, assembly line workers, seasonal workers, etc. This flexible, undifferentiated workforce that moves from one task to the next and never stays long in a business can no longer even consolidate itself as a force. It is outside the center of production process, employed only to plug the holes of what has not yet been mechanized, pulverized into a multitude of interstices with no unifying node.

The temp is the figure of the worker who is no longer a worker, who no longer has a trade -- but only abilities that he sells where he can -- and whose very availability is also a kind of work.

And in the New World, nearly everyone is a temp.



The Restless Ones...
====================



On the margins of this workforce that is necessary for the functioning of the machine, is a growing majority that has become altogether superflous, useful to the flow of production, but not much else. This class of superfluous workers introduces the risk that, in its idleness, it will set about sabotaging the machine.

Do I need to point out that this is already happening in the New World?

The menance of a GENERAL DEMOBILIZATION is the specter that haunts the present system of production. Boredom is the fuel for uprisings in the New World and in the Real World.

Not everybody responds to the question of "Why work?" in the same way as your respectable ex-welfare recipient who says "For my well-being. I have to keep myself busy."

There is a serious risk that we will end up finding a good use for our very idleness.

In the interest of Control, this floating population must somehow be kept occupied. But to this day the oligarchs have not found a better disciplinary method than wages. "Social gains" have to be dismantled so that the restless ones, those who will only surrender when faced with the alternative of dying of hunger or stagnating in jail, are lured back into the bosom of wage-labor.

The burgeoning slave trade in "personal services" must continue: cleaning, catering, massage, domestic nursing, prostitution, tutoring, therapy, coaching, psychological aids and so on. This is accompanied by a continual raising of standards for security, social hygiene, control and culture, and by an accelerated recycling of fashions, all of which establish the need for such services.

The discombobulation of "skills" in V2 is a reflection of this need on the part of Control to ambiguate "skills" and "keep people busy" in RL.



The Order of Work...
====================


The order of work was the order of the world. And it provided the framework on which the order of the New World was constructed.

Evidence of its ruin is paralyzing to those who dread what will come after it.

Today work is tied less to the economic necessity of producing goods than to the political necessity of producing producers and consumers, and of preserving by any means necessary the order of work.

Producing oneself is becoming the dominant occupation of societies where production no longer has an object: like a carpenter who's been evicted from his shop and in desperation sets about hammering and sawing for himself.

All these young people smiling for their job interviews, who have their teeth whitened to give them an edge, who go to nightclubs to boost their company spirit, who learn English to advance their careers, who get divorced -- or married -- to move up the ladder, who take courses in "leadership" or practice "self-improvement" in order to better "manage conflicts"...

This swarming little crowd that waits impatiently to be hired while doing whatever it can to seem "natural" is the result of an attempt to rescue the order of work through an ethos of mobility. To be mobilized is to relate to work not as an activity but as a possiblity. The unemployed person removes his piercings, goes to the barber, works on his "employability" because this is how he demonstrates his mobility.

Mobility is a slight detachment from the self. This minimal disconnection from what constitutes us. This condition of strangeness whereby the self can now be taken up as an object of work. Thus it becomes possible to sell oneself rather than one's labor power, to be remumerated not for what one does but for what one is, for our exquisite mastery of the social codes, for our relational talents, for our smile and our way of presenting ourselves.

This is the new standard of socialization.

Mobility brings about a fusion of the two contradictory poles of work: we participate in our own exploitation, and all participation is exploited.

The present production apparatus --of which e-work is a simulator-- is a gigantic machine for psychic and physical mobilization, for sucking the energy of humans that have become superfluous, and, on the other hand, a sorting machine that allocates survival to compliant subjectivities and rejects all "problem individuals", all those who embody another use of life and, in this way, resist the machine.

On the one hand, ghosts are brought to life, and on the other, the living are left to die. This is political function of the contemporary production apparatus.



Demobilization...
=================



To organize beyond and against work, to collectively desert the work-ordered regime of mobility and prostitution, to demonstrate the evidence of a vitality and a discipline precisely in demobilization is a crime for which a civilization on its knees (or a simulation of it) is unlikely to forgive us.

In fact, though, it may be the only way to survive it.

Today, rage streaks across this desert of fake abundance, then vanishes.

But remember how the insurgents of Oaxaca, for example, found accomplices in Paris and filled more than one American household with joy?

A day will come when Capital and its horrible concentrations of power will lie in majestic ruins, but that will be the end of a process that will be far more advanced everywhere else. The same is true in the New World.