...and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
An Introduction to "This Was a Real Job"
“An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.”
-Nina Simone
This Week in Work
Before we embark on this long, strange journey together, it might be instructive for both of us to establish a clear outline of why I’m doing this.
“This Was a Real Job” is, of course, about the world of work—“contributing productively to society” they call it, as though the contributor is guaranteed an equitable exchange—but is by necessity about so much more than simply clocking into a shift.
Check it out: the basic deal of our entire system centers around a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, the ever-obtrusive Puritan value (which is openly challenged by its central figure in-canon, but that’s another email).
It doesn’t take a very long walk around your typical supermarket, where basic essentials can cost a store employee multiple hours of labor, to understand the fundamental absurdity of that loftily-held ideal.
Any mattress ad will eagerly remind you that factoring in the recommended 8 hours of restful sleep (lol), you’ll spend approximately one-third of your life in bed. I’m here to remind you that you’re expected to spend an equal amount of time at work…and that’s before accounting for travel and prep time. You quickly run out of waking hours, eh?
For me, that means an hour of someone’s time can be seen as far more valuable than we have been encouraged to believe…but the problem is we’re just about out of time for it to matter what I think.
You see, my background may be in Political Science, the study of power dynamics and human systems so often dismissed as “liberal arts,” but I do have a fundamental grasp of economics, the laws of supply and demand that dictate the value of people, places, and things. The labor market of today is specifically engineered to devalue human contributions…after all, labor is always the largest of an organization’s expenses.
Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to eliminate it entirely? Cost-free labor is the endgame.
Between ChatGPT and Indians on Fiverr, 2023 will surely be the last year I am called upon to write some inane mission statement or write some content almost no one will read on a local tourism website. I stand face to face with the fact that my profession is nearly obsolete—at best, human writers will be a quirky hipster throwback like rotary phones and fixed gear bikes.
I’m not bitter about it, I guess. I’ve made my peace with it. Technology marches on no matter who ends up under its boots. In the Great Neoliberal Middle, fertile farmland of toxic compromises, ChatGPT and Indians on Fiverr are not Real People, and can be freely enslaved without attracting undue attention.
I’m not here to try to topple that consensus, the bed of nails on which our chrome-plated future rests. More distingushed individuals than I have tried to halt the progress of humanity for their own personal gain…two of them invented the airplane.
With the tools at modern fingertips, including outsourcing, automation, and AI, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which costless labor is the competitive standard.
I suppose I typed all that to say that from now on, if I’m going to write some content almost no one will read, I’m at least going to solicit donations.
Maybe Update Your Resume?
Hell, as a writer, I don’t have to imagine what a post-labor world looks like…that world has arrived for people like me. As business models make a quickening return to cost-free workforces, I’ll also take a look at other members of the labor class who may also want to find something new to do sometime soon. Sorry about any bad news.
Cannot Be Unseen
I’m proud to say that I’ve held essentially every job in the economy on my way to becoming a freelance writer. I’ve thrown out supermarket circulars (“trashbag padding” to use an industry term) at 5am on a freezing Northeastern morning, I’ve loaded an airplane with packages at midnight at a shipping facility. I’ve been shift lead, office manager, and social coordinator as well as led, managed, and coordinated.
I’ve tended bars I couldn’t afford to drink at, cooked meals that a lowly peasant like myself would never be allowed to eat…of course, I didn’t let either circumstance stop me. I’ve worked retail, scrubbed stadium seats, sold weed long before it could land you on the cover of Vanity Fair. After college, I even spent a few years in the legal field.
I even survived the COVID pandemic (so far) on the job, a surprisingly tricky feat.
My colorfully checkered resume has given me just about every possible vantage point on American labor, from apex to asshole. As a result, I have gained what I believe is a comprehensive view of modern workplaces and a clear-eyed glimpse of its future.
Some things, once seen, cannot be unseen. This segment is where you’ll see it too.
Color Commentary
During my career as a human writer I managed to publish a book (hold for applause), and the takeaway from writing it was that color has a profound effect on our perception of the world.
For instance, you can probably guess that the most common color for national flags is red, and as different as, say, China and the US or Spain and Thailand may seem on the surface, the use of red in a flag always stands for the same thing.
Someone’s job is to identify these chromatic tropes and use them for your convenience (or inconvenience), and so each installment of “This Was a Real Job” will examine a compelling color choice. Basically it’s an excuse to shout out my book, “64 to Infinity: Love Letters in Crayon”…but hey, I need all the promo I can get these days.
Talent Visa Tracker
Perhaps it’s that world-class national PR, but as an American, it can be easy to forget that there are other places to live in the world. In a time of rapidly collapsing professional stability in the domestic marketplace, countries around the world are looking to bolster their own internal resilience by attracting incoming workers across industries. Each week we’ll be taking a look at one of these nations to determine whether there is a better deal out there for today’s talent (spoiler: of course there is).
Hope Spot
In an age of atomized workplaces, insecure employment, gig subsistence, and shrinking safety nets, it’s easy to get the impression it’s all bad news…and that’s not always true! Whenever possible, we’ll wrap it up for the week with a look at something that’s going right in our world…tangible progress in technology, policy, and good old fashioned class awareness will find their home in this segment.
Gotta leave folks wanting more, eh?
Enjoyed this... I imagine you’ve read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (long book but worth the time). The frogs have already been boiled... now what? That’s the question. I never jumped into the pot and don’t intend to.