I didn’t want to comment (unless posting on Flame was in itself a comment). I had hoped a NeoMarxist perspective of high tech consumer telephony and its socioeconomic and political aspects might be of interest to Zoners, but I didn’t want to bias the reader with my own thoughts about it until after the reader had a chance to absorb it himself.

Essays like this are not meant to be catalogs of facts which can be debated, debunked or confirmed. They are an interpretation of subtle and subjective phenomena going on in the world. The author is not attempting to present what is, but a way of thinking about what is that is consistent and useful, and hopefully, suggests something new, something that might have not been thought of otherwise. Social sciences are not physics, but they can still be open to rigorous investigation.

Besides, are these not valid and useful insights?

The evolution of work over the past three decades has been characterized by a number of trends — the lengthening of the workday and workweek, the decline of real wages, the reduction or elimination of non-wage protections from the market (like fixed pensions or health and safety regulations), the proliferation of part-time work, and the decline of unions. At the same time, norms regarding the organization of work have also shifted. Temporary, project-oriented employment models are proliferating. Employers are no longer expected to provide job security or regular hours, and employees no longer expect those things.

But the degradation of work is not a given. Increasing exploitation and immiseration are tendencies, not fixed outcomes ordained by the rules of capitalism. They are the result of battles lost by workers and won by capitalists.
The ubiquitous use of smartphones to extend the workday and expand the market for shit jobs is a result of the weakness of both workers and working-class movements. The compulsion and willingness of increasing numbers of workers to engage with their employers through their phones normalizes and justifies the use of smartphones as a tool of exploitation, and solidifies constant availability as a requirement for earning a wage.

In this way, our hand machines fit seamlessly into the modern world of work. The smartphone facilitates contingent employment models and self-exploitation by linking workers to capitalists without the fixed costs and emotional investment of more traditional employment relations.

Smartphones ensure that we are producing for more and more of our waking lives. They erase the boundary between work and leisure. Employers now have nearly unlimited access to their employees, and increasingly, holding even a low-paid, precarious job hinges on the ability to be always available and ready to work. At the same time, smartphones provide people constant mobile access to the digital commons and its gauzy ethos of connectivity, but only in exchange for their digital selves.

However, discussions of the peddling of digital selves by gray-market data companies and Silicon Valley giants are usually separate from conversations about increasingly exploitative working conditions or the burgeoning market for precarious, degrading work. But these are not separate phenomena — they are intricately linked, all pieces in the puzzle of modern capitalism.

This isn’t just lofty theoretical wool-gathering, and it certainly isn’t just about telephones. Freud taught us the purpose of life was to love and to work. This essay is about the intensely personal nature of our work, and its about the social consequences of our labor, and especially who gets the benefit of it. That’s just about the most important thing there is.

Link.

Check out the website. You might like it.