Brain Splatter: “What’s my Job again?”

Between the trend in Japan of young girls renting out their legs for advertising space and the news that the Egyptian government is considering putting the pyramids and the sphinx up for the rent, it appears no where is safe (or scared for that matter) from a bit of profit generation. Japan, to cast further light on the citizen’s strange money making schemes, has long since thrown the baby out with the bath water and must have had a meeting where the finance minster said “fuck it, what haven’t we done yet?” Another bizarre idea, except from leg billboards, came in the form of rent a friend; for the lonely businessman who works 60 hours, does very little else and, in between sobbing into his ramen, hires out a young socially adapt type to just hang about with him. I personally think this service does an injustice to escorts but I suppose some people just want friendship. Someone to go out to the karaoke bar with, hang out with you while you shop for suits (because that’s all you have the time to wear) and crack a couple of jokes so you squirt bubble tea out your nose.

The nature of work is changing in the modernised, interconnected world. Countries, like China, still operate massive labour production sites to create all the trinkets and gizmos we, in the west, hold so dear. Word was that the conditions they live under, in the these Chinese labour camps, are so poor that Apple had to install suicide prevention nets around the base of the factory; how do you like your Iphone now? But since the deindustrialisation of Europe, with only Germany still holding the fort, labour, much like the rise in data over matter, works not to produce the physical but the obscure immaterial service. Take, for example, these modern job titles – social media architect, social engineer, division administrator, identity analyst, brand infrastructure consultant; I don’t know what any of these jobs entail! To me, business structuring has become so abstract in its form that its speaking gobbledygook and am not sure that people appointed to these positions know what they are supposed to do. As the jazz artists of the ’30s used to say “fake it till you make it” and I would say most young professionals head into these obscure positions and wing it, hoping they’re doing it right. Its okay though because the person directly above them – the senior, regional brand infrastructure consultant – doesn’t have a bloodly clue either and hes been blagging for the past twenty years!

As long as you can attend meetings, fire off professional sounding emails, spout phrases like “We’ll touch base”, then you can work for one of these corporations and earn £35k a year. No one stops to ask what exactly is going on, what “dovetailing” actually means or to question abstract, sometimes antiquated, policy. Its not the case that I would rather be running myself towards an early grave slogging my guts out deep in some Yorkshire coal mine or having to deal with the heat of the steel foundries in Sheffield but at least the work bared some semblance to what you were actually doing. Even Marx was aware of the coming abstraction of labour when he wrote “The abstraction… becomes true in practice” but maybe it should be understood as Zizek wrote in “Living in the End Times”:

“Abstract labour is neither ‘substantial’ nor a performance – it is, of course, a social category and, in this sense “performative”, but as such it has an actuality of its own, as the structure of the actual network of social relations.” Slavoj Zizek p285

So just like the rise of internet and the way in which intense socialising governs so much of our interactions with others (or as I should modify the past claim to “the ability to intensely social”) so too has the workplace come to depend upon a social economy, rather than legitimate skill. Maybe I deplore  it because I’m not cut out for it; the whole thing turns my stomach, makes my back hair stand on end and overall, weep. I would rather be skilled at something and have the work , I can produce, valued by someone, not trained to scrutinise, who can arrive at a conclusion though experience. The problem is in the training and organisation aspect fo business which makes its so intangible and lacking in form.

It reminds of the fact that the English police service has allowed a new policy where an outside applicant, who can have no pervious police training, enter at the level of superintendant. So instead of a bobby who has walked his beat for the past 8 years getting a promotion, eventually working his way up to the position, you can have senior management figure from a Dutch company come in at the top. It somehow seems wrong.

In closing, I read a post on Quiet Babylon that talks about the science fiction fantasy of the sentient AI going rogue, ala Terminator, actually being a rather good analogy as big corporations. The nefarious product of our own creation which was designed to work for the betterment of mankind being ultimately our downfall as it facilitates its own agenda. Tim Maly wrote:

“What if the private pursuit of profit was—for a long time—proximate to improving the lot of humans but not identical to it? What if capitalism has gone feral, and started making moves that are obviously insane, but also inevitable? For a very long time, the AI dedicated to maximizing profit saw the path forwards through innovation, new products, better living for customers. But then at some point it realized that is had the ability to just reshape the planet in its image. So it did that instead.” Quiet Babylon

A chilling prospect…