In this fifth episode of With Reason, we talk to the co-author of Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism on how the logic of work has crept into all we do, and how we might untangle ourselves. Will the Covid-19 pandemic offer a way out? Or will it simply increase the twin blights of under- and over-employment – not to mention our addiction to digital labour.

For readers of David Graeber, Donna Haraway, Aaron Bastani, Paul Mason and David Frayne.

Host: Samira Shackle

Co-host: Niki Seth-Smith

Producer: Alice Bloch

Music by Danosongs

Podcast listeners can get a year's subscription to New Humanist magazine for just £13.50. Head to newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe and enter the code WITHREASON

Transcript:

Samira Shackle:

Hello, and welcome to With Reason from New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association with me, Samira Shackle -

Niki Seth-Smith:

And me, Niki Seth-Smith.

SS:

This is the podcast where you can hear about bright new research and ideas from writers and researchers who deserve to be heard, but aren't exempt from being challenged either. It's the place where you'll find intelligent thinking to illuminate our often murky, turbulent times.

NSS:

In this series, we'll be meeting thinkers who prompt questions like, what does it take to truly listen? How might we think differently about reason and unreason? And what does the future hold when it comes to the complex relationship between intimacy and technology? Coming up next week, we'll be talking about the so called "cool Britannia" years, about nostalgia and also our blind spots. But in this episode, we're meeting an author concerned with the world of work and desire in our current era of late capitalism.

SS:

Our guest today is Mariele Pfannebecker, who's the co-author, with James A. Smith, of a new book called Work Want Work. It's a really fascinating book that looks at the way that the logic of work has crept into pretty much everything that we do, even when we try to escape it. And even as work for so many people has become ever more precarious.

NSS:

In fact, now that a global pandemic has upended work as we know it, the book couldn't be more relevant. But first we started by asking Mareila to define the term "life work regime", an idea that's central to the book,

Mariele Pfannebecker:

I guess the two things I was struck with, on the one hand, the way in which work tends to take over life more and more for so many of us, so that many people are over-employed, and are working too many hours to be able to do their jobs in all sorts of professions, from doctors working at hospitals to Uber drivers, that at the same time, there was the sense in which even when we are ostensibly enjoying our free time online, just hanging out, doing nothing in particular, that is, of course, as we all know, now working for platform capitalist companies that are extracting value from that. But not just that, but also the way in which we are acting online, the way in which we are always compelled to self-valorise, our self-representation in our free time is also a sort of work. And I guess that just made us think of the way in which this is a very peculiar moment where on the one hand, there's this incredible anxiety about work vanishing, and at the same time, work has taken over everything.

NSS:

There are all sorts of punishments aren't there, for avoiding work? I mean, not only the obvious one of not being able to finance your life, but more complex, nuanced ways in which we're punished for not working

MP:

Well, yes, absolutely. If you don't work, you don't exist, I guess. And in a time, where so much of life happens online, more and more people are isolated from other people, then of course, if those platforms require that you work at your self-valorisation, your self-presentation in a saleable format, then, of course, that means that there isn't any room to be, to exist outside those narrow formats.

SS:

How did we get to this point? So if you look back to the earlier 20th century, and you talk about this in the book, people like Keynes and other thinkers hoped that in the future, we'd be spending less time working. But actually, that's not at all what's happened, even though we do in theory, have all these labour-saving devices and increased automation and so on, we've still ended up working more and more. So why do you think that is?

MP:

I mean, I can't give you a very detailed, complex economic answer to that. But I think ultimately, it's simple it is capitalism. Capitalism does always extract the maximum amount of labour out of people. Not just that it will find the, and in some ways that is even more interesting to me, it will find ways to extract value from the rest of life, the life that isn't labour, that isn't wage labour that you're not paid for. And it will find - obviously in an unregulated free market, capitalism will always keep on going because of its need to expand in whatever crevices of life It can manage to access.

SS:

So we'll talk more later about this question of how we're put to work online in our era of late capitalism, and also questions around how our desires are performed and profited from but for now, we wanted to talk a bit about the traditional world of work. So some concepts that you discuss in the book are malemployment and disemployment. Could you tell us what those mean?

MP:

So I guess when we were thinking about malemployment, we were just thinking about a way to combine in one term, a phenomenon that affects different people in different ways, different ways in which work has gotten worse. So malemployment is both the person that is over employed and working too many hours in order to fulfill their contract contractual obligations, and those who are underemployed, who are part time without wanting to be, who are precarious without wanting to be, in order to show that those two phenomena are related. Disemployment then is the even bleaker term, which again, shows a sort of fusion of different situations. And this time, the fusion is that between the position of the person who is actually unemployed, and the position of the person who is officially employed, but whose life situation and work situation is just as bad as that of the person who's unemployed. So there's a sense in which those two are fused, and then beyond that, disemployment, I guess, also speaks to those who just vanish from the figures altogether, those people who no longer turn up in unemployment figures, because of the draconian measures that have been put in place, you know, the incredible amount of hoops you have to jump through to even get any sort of benefit, the various humiliations that are built in, the various ways in which you get rejected, that more and more people just sort of disappear from those stats altogether, and just subsist in whatever way they can.

SS:

It's interesting to hear you talk about those concepts in the current moment. So the Covid-19 pandemic has seen such drastic, sweeping changes to the world of work. I wonder how you think those concepts might help us think about some of the changes we've seen - like there's the furlough scheme, or all manner of other shifts,

MP:

I think there's no end of things we can think about there. And maybe the first one is that certain things that are already the case become even more apparent through the Covid crisis regarding work. So for example, the fact that if you think about the way in which so many of us do what David Graeber has called "bullshit jobs", jobs that aren't really very meaningful and that people don't feel particularly personally satisfying. But some people do - people who are, for example, carers, or teachers, carers, whether that's social carers or medical carers and teachers, and those important public services are so cruelly underfunded. And through the political choices that have been made, that it's become very undesirable to work in those professions. And they've come under a lot of pressure. A crisis like this just brings those pressures out more. Then more generally, I think the furlough scheme is an interesting one, of course, on the one hand it is this terrible sort of cloud on the horizon. If there are 4 million people on furlough right now, but won't be in a few weeks, then what will happen? What will happen to them? What will happen to the economy, which has been so good at airbrushing employment figures for so long, but also, I guess, on a slightly more positive note, or at least a slightly more sort of surprising, weird note, there have been quite a few people who, thanks to the furlough scheme, have actually had nothing very much to do for a few months. And I guess, in terms of the utopian ideas of post-work that we also discussed in the book, the question was: what did that mean? Did that mean that there was some sort of utopian potential in a small way unfolding? Some people have started baking sourdough bread or whatever. But really, quite a lot of people have also reflected, you know, on social media and elsewhere on how they just felt anxious and stuck, and how know they couldn't just sit down and read a book, just because suddenly, there was some time in the day. And that seemed kind of interesting, as a sort of symptom of how anxious and weird and terminally unhealthy our relationship to our work has become that when it's gone, there's just nothing left, like nothing left of life, other than to be stressed and anxious, because you don't know what's gonna happen next.

SS:

It's like, we don't know how to conceive of ourselves outside of our jobs.

MP:

Exactly.

SS:

Even though those jobs aren't always satisfying.

MP:

Yes. And that shows the profound way in which, you know, our subjectivities have been shaped by this very anxious work scape. And how you know, that's why we need utopias because they may not be around the corner at any given point, but they will help us to - we absolutely need them to begin to think about what we want instead, and how we might get there.

SS:

It's interesting on that kind of subject - the way that the furlough scheme ostensibly gave lots of people free time and a salary. Lots of people have said in that context, that the Covid-19 crisis could give us a chance to think differently about how to organise society. But I mean, obviously, that doesn't particularly seem to be happening in any kind of long-term sense so far. But some of those problems that we've spoken about so far, so the lifework regime and malemployment and disemployment and so on. Are there practical things that we could do in the short to medium term that would offset those. So with something like more robust labour protections, for instance, help, or are we talking about something much more wholesale, like a shift in the very definition of work?

MP:

I think that absolutely more robust labour protections is the first step to any sort of change in Britain right now. And you know, especially with the political sort of situation as it is now, and some of the hope rather, having gone out of it, I think that is that is precisely the place to locally make a difference. And, you know, to kind of reunionise, up from the ground to try and try and fight for those rights is definitely, definitely a starting point. But of course, the context, the great historical context of the union's post Second World War is very different from one from the one that we have now. And it's not that easy to unionise, as people have found against capitalist platforms. And that, I guess, is where the political struggle has to begin, to identify what's different, and what's standing in the way of precisely that sort of collective organisation in the kind of work scape that we're stuck in now,

NSS:

We've talked about the bad sides of work, and also the anxiety that some people feel when they're suddenly being given free time. But maybe we can talk about the sense of purpose in life that it gives too many people. I mean, maybe their sense of purpose can be found through other means. Would you say that work is no more than a distraction from thinking about what we really want? Or what we would otherwise maybe do with our lives?

MP:

Well, that's an interesting question. In a way, it's not so much that I'm interested in getting rid of work. But the question is really what that word means work. People, of course, do want to do things with their time that gives them a sense of achievement, a sense of satisfaction, in one way or another. But what that sense of achievement might be, what that sense of satisfaction could be - that really is the question. And this is something that James and I were interested in, when we were looking at what post-work writers to date were thinking about regarding what that utopia should really look like. And we were really struck by the way in which people were pretty quick to gravitate towards a very bourgeois sense of self improvement. Even Marx himself talks about, oh, well, we'll reorganise work in such a way that you can go fishing for a couple of hours, and then do some agriculture, and then do some criticising in the evening. All of these things are great, but they're not everybody's idea of fun or having a good life. So I guess we're interested in - it's not that there's anything wrong with those things. But what we're interested in is precisely that philosophical juncture of making ourselves aware that if we're talking utopia, if we're talking about a complete reorganisation of what work should be, then we also have to be clear about who decides what's good. Who decides? What's the good life? You know, where does autonomy and self-determination come in? What's great for one person isn't for another and as a culture, I think we are quite confused about what's good about the work we do and what kind of work we might be doing instead. And I guess, one of the most obvious examples that a lot of feminist writers have began to talk about, is the question of revaluing what social care, and care work more generally means, how it's valued by a culture and by society and how it could be reorganised to be more pleasurable to the people who do it, as well as the people who depend on it.

NSS:

You're listening to With Reason with me Niki Seth-Smith,

SS:

And me Samira Shackle. And today we're joined by Mareila Pfannebecker, who is talking to us about her book Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism, co-written with James A. Smith. If you're enjoying this episode, please click subscribe right now in whatever app you're using, or leave a review. It's a small action that can really help us to reach new listeners. And to say thanks, we're offering you a year subscription to the New Humanist magazine, where I'm the editor for just £13.50. That means you'll get four beautiful print magazines delivered to your door, packed with pieces on subjects such as capitalism, conflict, digital life, and much more. Go to new umanist.org.uk/subscribe and enter the offer code WITHREASON.

NSS:

So far, today, we've heard from Mareile about the way in which work pervades almost all of life today, whether or not we have a job. We've also talked about the misery of mal and unemployment,

SS:

But beyond the material world of work, Mareile's book also talks about digital labour. We asked her what this means. After all, if it refers to what we do online in our free time, how does it relate to work?

MP:

In terms of what you do in your own free time, I guess on the one hand, it talks about the way in which we present ourselves online and how that is, you know, very hard work when you're self-valorising when you're turning your social media profile into a CV, but we're also thinking about digital labour in a slightly different way. We're thinking about people who - and of course, these are exceptional figures, but they're useful for thinking with anyway - we were thinking of people who, via internet celebrity are literally turning their social lives online into a profession. Now this happens on YouTube and Instagram and various platforms. Of course, it doesn't happen nearly as often and isn't anywhere close to as likely a career as many young people I know seem to think, but it is something that happens. And I feel like it's become paradigmatic for the kind of aspirational idea of how to make money right now. So the idea that somehow on social media, you can simply be yourself in as charming away as possible, and then get immediately remunerated via these platforms, whether it's via advertisement revenues, or via commissions, or whatever, is very attractive, of course, because it literally turns working into something that's more closely related to receiving a reward. And that, of course, you know, is related to a concept that we talked about, which is young girlification. But I guess what we're interested in is what an illusion that is; that this idea is offered out that you can be famous not by working really hard at becoming a footballer, and then being famous or whatever - no, you can be famous by literally just being yourself online and then getting money for it. Of course, what that also means is that the traditional structures of the workplace are abolished at the same time, so that of course, if one day you no longer please your social media audience, then that job has disappeared. There's no sick pay, there's no tribunals, there's nothing you can do. Now, of course, we aren't scholars of internet celebrity, and we're not Media Studies people as such, what we were interested in nonetheless, is how this is paradigmatic for the way in which work works increasingly, for everyone. So that the extent to which people become disposable, and the extent to which there's an effective way in which people have to sell themselves regardless of the other skills that they bring to their job. So it's not about you being perfect at your craft. But no matter what you do, you have to be perfect at that craft of self-representation at the same time.

SS:

You mentioned there the young girlification. So in the book, you draw on this theory of the young girl and young girlification, which was advanced by the French anarchist collective Tiqqun. Could you tell us a bit about that? And what that theory tells us?

MP:

Yeah, certainly. So quite a controversial little book, that has been decried for being sexist. Just one line from it that really struck me, or struck us, sums up what we're interested in there, which is the idea that these days everybody is a young girl, even the Pope. So this idea that young girlification has something to tell us about the way in which the world of work, but maybe even subjectivity itself, under disorganised capitalism looks like. And I guess what I'm particularly interested in here, isn't the question whether there is something you know, femme about the way in which we're being duped by the workplace now, but more specifically, something to do with actually the history of industrial capitalism, and the way in which women lost so much power when there was that move in the 18th, 19th century in Britain first and then the rest of the world, where the home economy moved, was broken up by the move towards the factories, and women were disempowered by the fact that increasingly, they didn't have access to the wealth of the family, by virtue of the wage. And what is the effect of that? Well, people have called it different things: in the 80s, housewife-isation, feminisation of labour, but one way or another, we're describing a situation where on the one hand, you have a precarious relationship to work, whether that's by literally having to, you know, be sexually attractive to the wage earner in order to not be kicked out as it were, or whether it is just having a more precarious relationship to work itself, such as domestic labour, etc. But one way or another, I guess, young girlification, historically. It's just a history of how women were excluded from the family wage, from the more secure forms of labour, but ultimately how there's something about that situation of women under industrial capitalism, which grew and grew into something, which now everybody does. So everybody has to be desirable in order to have any chance to make money. Everybody is precarious. Everybody has this anxious all-encompassing relationship to their work. And I guess what we're particularly interested in that - sorry, to just wrap that up - is this idea of the link between desirability and disposability. So if the way in which you get to work is by presenting yourself as desirable in yourself, your person and your looks in every way, then the instant that that judgment is: no, you no longer are desirable, you vanish from that workplace. So this abolition of skill and craft as the thing that qualifies you for work, and this move towards this desirable celebrity simulation inall forms of work. An Uber driver has to do this, because of the way in which they're reliant on feedback and and in getting good feedback from every single customer. Just as much as a university lecturer has to do it, who now depends on getting 100% student satisfaction in order not to fail, they're the next assessment. So it's a strange way in which that way in which you have to, please the big daddy of capitalism has sort of encompassed all of life and all of subjectivity that we're interested in there,

NSS:

Just to summarise, as it is quite a complex theory. So the idea would be that today, regardless of what gender we are, we all could be said to be young girls, to the extent that we're obsessed with perfecting our own image, or rather, we need to be attentive to our self-representation. But surely, this relates to some people more than others, like some people are more disposable than others, or some people are more precarious than others. And a provocative question: would Mark Zuckerberg be a young girl in this context?

MP:

Well, good question. And just before I answer that part of your question, I wanted to say that it is, of course, also important to remember that this isn't only a trope, this isn't only an image for thinking with, it's also a useful way to remember that the absolutely, unequivocal vast majority of precarious workers in the world are women. So there is a real, material connection to being a woman in this idea of the young girl. But nonetheless, capitalism has clearly worked out a very good way at maximising value extraction by virtue of putting people into that subjective position. Mark Zuckerberg, well, I would probably say, yes. He doesn't strike me as a very happy sort of guy. And I feel that it's an empty sort of system. There's ultimately no reward at the top. You don't get the good life by being at the top of the pile. There's no escape. So yeah, that would be my answer. This reminds me of an interesting moment, actually, during the run up to the election where there was a Question Time where a man got up in the audience and said, "You said you were going to tax people who earn more than £80,000, I earn more than £80,000, and my life is awful, I'm really stressed, it's really difficult. You can't take that money from me." And lots of people were outraged by that. But it was just really interesting to see that earning a lot of money doesn't make you happy, doesn't somehow reward you - that doesn't get you out of the stresses of this total all-encompassing system of value extraction. And, again, it also speaks to that idea of over employment, those who make very much money, while they do exploit the rest of us, they nonetheless, also often do work insane hours, not in a way that's virtuous. It's stupid. It's not virtuous, but it is part of the system.

NSS:

And you've talked about the damaging effects of the internet, for example, eroding the work life balance, but you're not wholly pessimistic about the internet. For example, you mentioned that it's often where progressive activist networks are built. Are there ways in which the internet can help us make change in the world of work?

MP:

I think, and I'm probably slightly more pessimistic about this now than I was when we were writing the book, but nonetheless, roughly basically the same position. I think that the internet as it is right now is a very bad and very damaging place because of the way that those platforms work. Now, people do find ways around that. But those ways are very limited. I mean, it is interesting to see, of course how, in recent years, we've been engulfed by culture wars online, which very often seem to be focused around proxy battles and proxy wars that really don't get to the material basis of the situation that we're in. And so I think, absolutely that, yes, it's not the answer to go offline completely, or to get rid of the internet, I think we will need to change it. And I think we will be able to do that. But we can only do that when we have a public internet, we can't improve the way in which we are living our social lives online, and the way in which as you say, we organise, and the way in which activists try and work against it online, if we don't also fight for different kind of internet. And different people have various ideas about quite how a public internet might look and how we might be able to bring it about. I don't know, exactly, but I definitely am convinced that people are beginning to think about that. I think that is the direction that we need to go in.

SS:

Interesting. So we've talked about the very serious struggles that are faced by the mal-employed and the dis-employed. And the less tangible but equally real and pressing issues around the digital labour of life online. So considering all of that, how could a post work world that tackles all of this actually be structured? And how could it come about? Sorry, a big question to end on.

MP:

It is a big question. Well, in terms of how it could or should be structured, I guess, one thing that we were trying to point towards and that we were interested in is that if we're gonna have a utopian new world of work, then we would have to find ways for people to have room to determine themselves that aren't predetermined as it were. There's going to be some room to work it out as we go along. I mean, what are the options? So far, we've had ideas of more or less bourgeois self improvement - working your allotment, learning instruments, that sort of thing in your free time. I guess there's the psychoanalytic idea of self-determination, of just following your desire, then there's the question of well, how do we actually organise the work that needs to be done? How is that going to work? Is it some sort of idea of an altruistic service to others, service to the community? I guess, basically, our ideas aren't going that far beyond basic Marxist ideas, which are that you share out the work that actually needs to be done in as fair a way as possible. You make sure that everybody has the things that they need and as fast as possible, and you make room for there to be some free time, some actual free time. And then I guess we're we're interested in the political potential of that free time, a real free time to change the shape of the whole thing, because it's out of that time for art out of that time for creativity, that new thought and new AI, even new new desires can come out of which there isn't really room for right now. And how can we get that? Well, I mean, it's impossible really to talk about these things without talking about politics. And not so long ago, it seemed like Britain was the one country in Europe, which had a plausible left program. And that didn't get anywhere. So this is this is a very bleak moment politically. So if you still believe in social democracy, if you still believe in the, in the political system that we've got so far, then it's probably a very grim hard slog involving things like organising in the workplace, finding a kind of new process of unionisation, and of political education, which helps people to rediscover how they can support each other to make their work more like the kind of work that everybody in a particular workplace wants it to be like. But yeah, that's a painful and slow process and nothing like an instant utopia.

SS:

So now it's time to turn to the New Humanist archive for a piece that resonates with what we've been discussing today. So Mareila, we thought we'd look at a piece that Niki wrote in 2019, called 'Fighting for the Future'. Her piece takes in books about work in the future by Sophie Lewis, Aaron Bastani and Paul Mason. In the piece, Niki writes that traditionally its left wing and radical anti-establishment thinkers that have taken it upon themselves to imagine new worlds and utopias in turbulent times. So one thing that your book does is talk about the pitfalls of attempting to envision a post work future. Could you tell us a bit about what those pitfalls are and how one could avoid them?

MP:

I guess, one of the pitfalls is that we tend to take for granted that in the future, we will want the things that we want right now. But of course, the things that we want right now are profoundly shaped by our own cultural moment, our own subjectivities and our outlook. So I guess the thing to be mindful of when thinking about a future utopia is how there can be room in it for desires, for ideas that we can't even envisage from the limited horizon of our own moment, at the same time. The other problem is that, of course, and Kate Soper talks about this, interestingly, in 2000, when she's talking about this idea of post consumerist life, when she says that, of course, when revolutionaries do envisage the future, they also have to take into account the things that we desire at this very moment. Otherwise, people won't want it. So it's the balance between those two things. That's that's the trouble, the tricky bit.

NSS:

Oone of the big changes that might occur is automation on a mass scale, both Bastani and Mason in their books saw that as a big change that's coming. Where do you stand on this? Is it something to fear? Or could it actually be freeing?

MP:

I guess in Bastani's version, it could potentially be freeing. And I think there certainly is room to think with, rather than against automation. And, I guess the ideas of the Green Industrial Revolution would would sort of take that into account. In Mason's book, of course, automation is a bit scarier, where there's this idea of the machines taking over. I'm very suspicious of that as an idea. I think it's a fake problem. I don't think we need to worry about the machines taking over tomorrow. I don't think it's going to be Frankenstein. I think the real question is simply who is in control of the technologies and who, you know, automation for whom, to what end? And with what results? I don't think that technologies are necessarily neutral. I can't think of a great way to repurpose, say, the weapon industry. But I do think that quite a lot of the technologies that we have, if we repurpose them into a different direction, we can all benefit from them. And automation, I think can be a case in point.

NSS:

And I also discuss Sophie Lewis and her book, Full Surrogacy Now in the piece. So that book explores the possibilities of new technologies to create more options for having and raising kids. So it's a work of cyber feminism. And I just wondered, would you say that you share common ground with Sophie Lewis and her work?

MP:

Yes, sure. I think what I appreciate about Sophie's work is something quite specific and quite specifically to do with the question of technology. So when she takes this idea of surrogacy, you know, something that we might describe as the absolute apotheosis of alienated women's work under neoliberal capitalism, to literally put your womb to work, to reproduce for rich people - to take that and instead of jumping to conclusions about the wickedness of this, as lots of campaigners have done, to try and hold on to the surrogacy as an idea, and to ask what would happen if we stripped out the exploitative capitalist conditions under which it's currently being used altogether and imagine what surrogacy could be like in a different world, where it just simply might be a very good way of sharing our body's ability to make new humans in it, perhaps a generous, and a different way that might ultimately lead to a different shape of society altogether. What I appreciate about that is the way in which technology is looked at as something that needs to be separated from the political uses to which it's being put, and then there is room for us to change it - and there's no point in vilifying it as itself. I guess if you know some of the post structuralist thinkers that the James and I talk about in the book, like Derrida talk about the idea that technology really part of human life, if language is technology, if clothing is technology, if all of our buildings and infrastructures are technology and obviously the internet etc, ICT technologies as well, then it's really just a question about what we do with them and how we use them to better the social fabric of our lives and our work lives, rather than something that is an object that can be good or evil as such.

NSS:

Mariele Pfannebecker, co-author of Work Want Work, concluding they're on the peril and promise of technology. So Samira, what will you take away from today?

SS:

One of the things that I really liked was this definition of malemployment, I think it's really useful to bring together both things, the idea of people with too much to do, and people with too little to do. Because I think often you don't think of those as being part and parcel of the same picture, which is a dysfunctional relationship to work more broadly. And I don't know about you, but I've definitely had both experiences, being quite junior and basically not having anything to do, but still having to be in your miserable job all the time. And that's a horrible experience. And it's equally horrible, being completely overloaded and just feeling like there aren't enough hours in the day. So yeah, I thought that was really fascinating. And despite the fact that thatbrings together so many people at both ends of the spectrum, we still continue to define ourselves by work, which is this not necessarily very happy thing.

NSS:

It's also that experience that you get when you're just hustling. I mean, whether you're a freelancer or you work in the gig economy, you might not have work, but you're spending every waking hour of your life just looking for work, which is obviously incredibly demoralising, but keeps you in that mindset.

SS:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that idea that we can't really switch off was also quite present in our discussion about furlough. And the way that so many people had this block of time off, probably the first time ever, but ended up grimly trying to improve themselves, to do something that was productive. So she talked about the sourdough baking, which became a bit of a trope, but you know, feeling like you have to be learning a language or you have to be learning to bake this complicated bread or whatever - it doesn't feel valid to just sit and read a book, because you've suddenly got this time off that's effectively paid. And obviously, there's a whole load of other considerations such as, you know, general anxiety that the pandemic brought, and people's worried that they might not have a job to go back to. But I do think there's something about that, that really kind of crystallises something about how we're so defined by this anxious workscape that we just can't conceive of ourselves without work at all.

NSS:

Yeah, and just anecdotally, it seemed that a lot of people were struggling with not being sucked into the online world, especially in lockdown where there didn't seem to be anything else to do or you couldn't leave your home. And that sense of lost time. And I guess Mareile also discusses that in her book, that notion that while you may feel like you're not working, digital labour can be work. And that question of actually, who profits from that?

SS:

Yeah, totally. I think that the idea of digital labour is super interesting, because there's the double facet on the one level, the way that our activity online is literally doing free work for companies who profit off our data. And also this constant work we do around personal branding in the way we're projected to the world. I found it interesting how she talked about influencers and the way that their monetisation of their own lives and the totality of themselves, in a way is not just a unique set of traits to influencers, but it maybe tells us something more generally about how all of us act online and how all of us feel the need to present ourselves and monetise parts of ourselves and our lives that in bygone eras may have been more private.

NSS:

Yeah, it's really interesting and just so complex. So that's it for now, and I hope it wasn't too much hard work. Next week, we'll be talking about music, race and identity when we meet the sociologist Jason Arday, who had written about cool Britannia and its blind spots.

SS:

Remember, you can find reading lists and transcripts for all episodes of With Reason, at newhumanist.org.uk. This podcast was presented by me, Samira Shackle, and Niki Seth-Smith. It was produced by Alice Bloch. See you back here soon. Goodbye.

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