Negroni in the piazza is really hard work
Now that the work doesn’t colonize half of your waking time, plus the time you spend commuting and the hours you spend thinking about work or checking emails outside of working hours. The oceans of opportunity that open up – what do I do with them?
I ask a friend what he is going to do on vacation. He is going abroad, on a solo trip somewhere in southern Europe. Okay, but what are you going to do? do where?
The answer is as funny as it is unfunny. “Sit on outdoor tables and scroll like that.”
My first thought: wonderful.
Imagine being able to stroll aimlessly, take a pit stop in the sun at a block of flats and fiddle with your mobile phone for a couple of hours. Occasionally, perhaps look up from the screen and to look at passers-by. No standing in line and sweating with the mob.
My second thought: is this really the point?
When we get to choose for ourselves, is that how we want to spend our little time on earth? Shouldn’t life be bigger than that? At the risk of sounding pompous: should we let the platforms absorb the precious hours of freedom from coercion that modernity and the labor movement have worked so hard to enjoy?
But the question might be wrong. Because it is not of genuine and free will that we scroll away from the holiday. The algorithms are so sophisticated now that we can’t, won’t, hang up the phone.
In an article in Damage Magazine wrote Adam Smith (not to be confused with the 18th century economist who established the theory of the invisible hand) recently that the constant connection has made not only work, but also our leisure time, alienated. The boundary between work and time off is now so loose that we can no longer distinguish what is what.
Marxists have ever since Marx resented that working in capitalism makes us alienated. Promoted in front of the product, the work process, the colleagues and finally also ourselves. The employer decides what, when and how the work is to be done. We don’t own the thing: It owns us. We do not cooperate with the co-worker: She is a competitor.
Marx’s ideal was, as he expressed it in The German ideologyone where everyone could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, tend the cattle in the evening, and criticize after the meal, just as one likes, without ever becoming a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critic.” There would therefore not be such a big difference between work and leisure because you could freely dispose of your time.
But Smith believes that alienation today applies at least as much to leisure. Even when we’re not signing up for an employer, we’re “working” on creating an online persona, consuming optimized entertainment, or turning hobbies into income-generating side-hustles. What we take for leisure is governed to a greater degree by economic forces.
The free time is in the work itself is a new kind of alienated labor. We could call it alienated leisure. Vacation is not the same as time off. Rather, it enables us to put one hundred percent of our energy into slaving away on the virtual floor of the SoMe factory. If you lie on a smooth cliff in Bohuslän, you can generate “attention” on the platforms, and thus make others richer while we ourselves waste our lives.
But if it’s so wonderful to look at the Arc de Triomphe or hike in the mountains without cover, why don’t we just do it then? Does it have to be moralized over screen time? By the way, alienation is an inescapable part of the human experience. At least that’s what the philosopher thinks Todd McGowan which has been popularized in the Stormen Utveckling podcast.
But being subjected to human fracking on the digital assembly line is not the individual’s right or wrong. Alienated leisure rings in that it is a material (and virtual?) infrastructure whose whole point is to erode the feeling of belonging to the platform. The perfectly curated flow contributes to a customer experience that doesn’t feel standardized, which it is to the highest degree.
So don’t be fooled if you run into my friend sitting there in the sun-drenched piazza, with a negroni sbagliato and the phone in full swing. He engages in hard, tiring work.
Ruben Lind is a writer on Aftonbladet’s culture page.
