The Sheep Look Up

Just over a wk. ago, we noted some aspects of the New Feudalism, as offered here.

Age makes a difference, workplace experts say. Baby boomers longed for a corner office and expected to separate their work lives from their home lives.

"Younger workers' lives are all integrated, not segregated," Rivard said. "They have learned to work anywhere — at a kitchen table or wherever." Many don't feel a need to spend time in company quarters.

It raises its ugly head again at The Daily Dish.

Rob Horning explores the thinning line separating business and our personal lives as production and consumption merge. Money quote:

What makes this potentially worse is that such work (being online and contributing or organizing information, sharing), so much closer subjectively to consumption or self-actualization, will register as meaningful and will feel like progress. Perhaps this sort of work (sometimes called immaterial labor), combined with welfare payments, could be the foundation of a less exploitative social order in which what people do “for a living” actually seems to constitute the meaning of their life, and no one is left “unemployed” and rendered socially worthless. But under our current conditions, immaterial labor mainly makes life more precarious, and taints the things we ordinarily would enjoy doing with an urgent anxiety. We can’t just be ourselves; we have to make ourselves a personal brand that we desperately need our friends, i.e. networked nodes, to buy into.

Fucking robo-sheep.