I spent much of the weekend, while not working, searching for a tool to help me work better: faster, more comfortably.*

Daily I suffer the humiliation of a body that must bend, twist, grope for a tool that allows me to cut, move, shape and place media in a way that will make it more persuasive.

The tools available are, as often happens, good enough for most. And exceptionally good for those with access to capital.
On the left: cutting edge experiments by tech experts in 2020. On the right: an off the shelf workstation from 1985.

I was using a non-linear video editing system in 1995. I am using one in 2020. In the quarter-century that has elapsed, the computer has become a gajillion times more powerful. And the physical interface between my body and that computer has degenerated.

We do not care about the working body. We do not care about the worker. We do not care about the dignity of work. 
A thousand years ago, I would be in search of a better knife. I would have a hard time finding the materials and the know-how to create such a tool.

Today, the materials and know-how are all at my fingertips… I could become a “maker”, and teach myself to code and build the exact tool I need. So why am I complaining?

Because there are now nearly 3 million people working in the “computing industry” in the USA and our tools for working with computerized materials have not improved in decades.

What do we call new in today's workplace? A standing desk, a chat tool and video conferencing. These are relatively old, rudimentary tools.

Of course, you know why this is happening. Because workers are commodities, replaceable, expendable. Because the “real growth” is no longer in labor but in financialization. 
Dignity.

From the Latin, dignus. That which has worth. Versus that which is worth less. Or worthless.

The time we spend working is deemed worth less. So the tools we use are slower than they should be, less precise than they can be, less joyful than they must be for life to be sacred.

In sum, I’ve spent the last 9 months surveying the state of tech in keyboards (our main interface device with the all-encompassing digital world we now live in) and the new developments are: a regard for 1980s tech driven by people who play PC video games.

As I often say, this is sub-optimal.

Labor will never matter to capital. But without labor, we are less than human.

We would not be homo sapiens if we were not homo faber.

We exist because we collaborate.

When we cease to collaborate, we die.

To co-labor is not just to put our shoulders behind the same impossible weight in an effort to push it forward. That’s not a Sisyphean effort. That’s John Henry. (His caste status cannot be overemphasized.)

To co-labor is to care about how we all work: to focus on the quality of work.

What we need and deserve is the diametrical opposite of “WeWork”. 

And I don’t know when we’ll get it.

FWIW, the Green New Deal smartly brings together two strands of this death cult: our disregard for byproducts and our disdain for workers.

It is not by chance that a system that overvalues immaterial bodies (corporations) does not value pollution, and similarly devalues humans, as both workers and, simply, living beings.

In passing, the corporatist politics of Leonard Leo, William Barr and Amy Barrett should clarify what exactly "right to life" means. And, yes, it rhymes with right to work.

"Siri: what does 'work' look like?"

Pause for a moment to reflect on the historical fact that we celebrated the phrase "you're fired!" Many people are saying that perversion is delighting in "unhealthy" activity. For example, when the abused identifies with abuser. "You're fired."

In search of the body politic in a time of a reigning death cult.

 Last night, I spotted a curious sign hanging at the entrance of our local supermarket (unionized).

It begins with an image of California's governor wearing a mask and proceeds to inform that per the Governor's Mandate, customers must wear masks.

The message is clear. "Don't be mad at us", "blame him." For what? For stating that we should collaborate.

That the corporation that owns the store cannot say: "Wear a mask inside our building because we don't want you to kill our workers or customers" tells you everything you need to know about our state of affairs.

That mask wearing is contestable, like Climate Change has been, tells you everything you need to know about who wields power in our society and to what ends.

Hope Hicks is 31. Stephen Miller is 35. Jared Kushner is 39. (Mark Zuckerberg is 36.)

There will be many, many more “Trumps”. We have built a system to celebrate the performance of work while abandoning work and workers. 

Until we invest in labor itself, we will be ruled by an elite that knows no shame. Because they know not dignity. 

May your labors be rewarding even if they are never rewarded.

Take care
 

Footnotes

*I may have also loaded the Twitters a few times to see if the King’s Two Bodies had finally been found; alas, still searching.