More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
When the relationship of time to literal money is expressed as a natural fact, it obscures the political relationship between the seller of time and its buyer.
In the drive to make time equal more money, the employer has two strategies to pursue: extension (increasing the amount of time that money buys) or intensification (demanding more work in the same amount of time).
But unlike the Ancient Greeks, who imagined that, someday, machines might replace slave labor so that everyone might enjoy some free time, capital only “frees time in order to appropriate it for itself.” In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase profits. Thus the paradox: The factory is efficient, but it also produces “the drive toward the consumption of the person’s time up to its outermost, physical limit.” Or, as the workplace adage would have it, “The only reward for working faster is more
...more
Humans make these decisions,
Cheaper by the Dozen
I called it!
As Braverman puts it, “Every step in the labor process is divorced, so far as possible, from special knowledge of training and reduced to simple labor. Meanwhile, the relatively few persons for whom special knowledge and training are reserved are freed so far as possible from the obligations of simple labor. In this way a structure is given to all labor processes that at its extremes polarizes those whose time is infinitely valuable and those whose time is worth almost nothing.”
In the United States, when domestic work did become waged, it was often done by Black women, and it was (and is) devalued compared to work that directly produced a profit.[*3]
(One kilogirl was “equivalent to roughly a thousand hours of computing labor.”)
It seems that the more temporal surveillance a job entails, the less likely it is to be done by someone white or male.
What is less headline grabbing, however, is an eternal meantime in which some humans are not replaced by robots but, instead, must act more like them. In On the Clock, Guendelsberger describes feeling this reality in her body, lamenting how humans “increasingly have to compete with computers, algorithms, and robots that never get tired, or sick, or depressed, or need a day off.”
Taylor, who hoped the resulting increase in productivity would produce value shared by the worker.
Now, not only does increased productivity not lead to free time, but it doesn’t lead to money for American workers. Their time is more money, but for someone else.
But the best is when they time how long it takes to punch a time card:
Writing in the 1970s, Braverman describes what now sounds like content moderation or other cognitive busywork: “The work is still performed in the brain, but the brain is used as an equivalent of the hand of the detail worker in production, grasping and releasing a single piece of ‘data’ over and over again.”
While I was researching this book, I was thinking about how social media users’ time is also money for platforms and advertisers.[*5]
love Wonder. It’s like having an on-demand, personal, graduate level Ivy League research assistant who never sleeps (or complains).”
In his history of Luddism, Gavin Mueller gives a useful overview of such reconfigurations, including “Potemkin AI,” Jathan Sadowski’s term for what he calls “services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans somewhere else acting like robots.”
While the legacy of Taylorism gets smarter, work continues to get duller, cheaper, faster, and more far-flung.
On the one hand, being a human (with bodily needs and, just as important, emotional limits) is seen as a barrier to work, given that the sale of labor time implies a worker who is full of work time but devoid of other kinds of time, like biological or social time. But content moderation also requires human traits like empathy, morality, and culturally situated judgment.
To some degree, content moderation could be considered a “cyborg job.” Yet the fact that it requires its workers to be both robot-like and indelibly human raises questions about many other seemingly un-Taylorizable forms of work.
If you have reason to—and many do—you can measure anything in a way that seeks to maximize a certain numerical outcome: words of content per day; test score increases and “learning outcomes” per semester; and clients, customers, or patients per hour.
Keiichi Matsuda’s short 2019 sci-fi film, Merger.
Ironically, her time is so effectively absorbed that it’s hard to imagine her having a free moment to read yet another listicle about how to be more productive in these trying times.
Now it’s not just the employer who sees you as twenty-four hours of personified labor time; it’s you, too, when you look in the mirror.
More important than any New Year’s resolution is an annual report to yourself. Your “fiscal period” can be any day—any day that you decide the time has finally come to adopt this practice of self-accounting which balances the status of your being in the world about you. —P. K. Thomajan, “Annual Report to Yourself,” in Good Business, 1966 Just because you’re going forward doesn’t mean I’m going backward. —Billy Bragg, “To Have and to Have Not”
IN AN ARTICLE titled “Why Time Management Is Ruining Our Lives,” Oliver Burkeman observes that when employment is insecure, “we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing.”
After gesturing toward efficiency increases in offices, houses, and cars, Laird hazards “a personal question”: “Have you given as much attention to your personal mental efficiency? Are you laying your mental bricks with eighteen movements or with five?” The book is shot through with the cultural moment’s fixation on speed, mastery, and a single-minded mission to cut out the useless. After a section that tests you on speed-reading, Laird urges you to “avoid excessive eye movements” while reading and offers this rather puzzling advice: “Do not read on trains, cars, or busses. Nor should you look
...more
In place of the question “How Much TIME do They pay You?” we now get something like “How Much TIME do You pay Yourself?”
Generally, their advice can be summed up as follows: Keep an ever-more-detailed log of how you spend your time, in order to identify deficiencies and measure the increase in your productivity. (This part often involves filling in a time spreadsheet, with increments as short as fifteen minutes.) Identify your most productive time in the day and arrange your work accordingly. Militantly eliminate distractions, anything not having to do with your work. (What used to be stealing time from your boss is now stealing time from yourself-as-boss.)
It’s the fungible time we saw in the previous chapter, and the concept that each individual has an equal “supply” of these fungible hours to exploit is still the bedrock of mainstream time management.
Appropriately enough, the modern meaning of bootstrap—to “better oneself by rigorous, unaided effort”—arose around the same time that books like Laird’s were coming out.[*1]
In a 2017 study, compared to Democrats, U.S. Republicans predictably attributed a person’s wealth to their having “worked harder” versus their having “had advantages in life,” and they attributed their poverty to “lack of effort” over “circumstances beyond [their] control.”
Voilà! A miniature version of structural inequality.[*4] The real torture of this game is that, when you’re the asshole, no one sees the good cards you had to give up or the bad cards you were stuck with. Therefore, no one knows how much your poor performance had to do with the initial exchange and how much with a lack of skill in playing the cards you were dealt. And because the rules of this game are not negotiable, your only option as the asshole is to try desperately to be strategic. You must be the master of your own cards.
The pairing of freedom and mastery might be incidental, but the idea that one could be both the freed and the mastered speaks to the dual face of “empowerment.”
morphed into an unhealthy fixation on morning routines.
The 4-Hour Workweek, which promises freedom from others—and from the necessity of selling your time at all. The idea is that by constructing passive income streams, you free yourself from the constraints of capitalism by recapitulating it within your very person.
“The computer chip didn’t free us. It coerced us to produce at its speed.”
myth of equal hours.
Just as your experience of a game of Asshole will depend on what happened in the previous round and where you are sitting, “individual experiences of time depend upon where people are positioned within a larger economy of temporal worth.”
Becoming more man-shaped in order not to die in the car was my unwitting description of a Lean In type of feminism, and of time management aimed specifically at women.
Just as a gridded schedule reproduces the idea of time as fungible units, advice for “becoming more man-shaped to not die in the car” reproduces the life of the wrong-shaped car. It is great advice to seek your dream job, but in many of these books, the implied answer to the question “Who will do the low-wage work?” is that it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not you. That answer doesn’t feel so good.
regarding the phenomenon of burnout: “Do you need a therapist, or do you need a union?” At some point, you hit the limit of what an individual can do.
In the realm of policy, that would mean things that seem obviously related to time—for example, subsidized childcare, paid leave, better overtime laws, and “fair workweek laws,” which seek to make part-time employees’ schedules more predictable and to compensate them when they are not. Less obviously related to time—but absolutely relevant to it—are campaigns for a higher minimum wage, a federal jobs guarantee, or universal basic income.[*5]
In a piece on the “time tax” experienced by people dealing with government services, Annie Lowrey observes that poorly run bureaucracy deepens gulfs between the rich and poor, white and Black, sick and healthy. She calls it “a regressive filter undercutting every progressive policy we have.” Lowrey suggests the elimination of hurdles like asset tests and interviews, as well as the use of better tools—for example, well-designed forms easily readable in one’s own language. But she also notes that the history of the time tax has deep, persistent roots in racism, skepticism of bureaucracy, and an
...more
For example, in a talk called “The Racial Politics of Time,” author, activist, and cultural critic Brittney Cooper opens with the provocation that “white people own time.”
In place of the equal-hours myth, Cooper has this suggestion: No, we don’t all get equal time, but we can decide that the time we do get is just and free. We can stop making your zip code the primary determinant of your lifespan. We can stop stealing learning time from black children through excessive use of suspensions and expulsions. We can stop stealing time from black people through long periods of incarceration for nonviolent crimes. The police can stop stealing time and black lives through use of excessive force.
burnout is a major concern, a failure of the machine.
Within this state of conflict, Rosa duly highlights the role of digital technology in the expansion of “legitimate claims” inside and outside work—the idea that someone could be reachable by anyone anyplace and at any time. Linda does not have access to Feierabend, the feeling of leisure that peasants and farmers might have had when the cattle and children were in for the night.
mismatch between what Linda can do and what is asked of her is not an “abstract fact of life” but, rather, an “acute dilemma” she experiences in every moment.
