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> there will be no putting the toothpaste back into the work from home tube. This is true, but it's also dangerous. The lizardfolk [1] have learned that WFH works, that's the good news. The bad news is that nothing prevents said lizardfolk from taking the jobs right out of our pockets and shipping them to places where workers have even fewer rights than in the US. COVID-19 isn't over, and it is still capitalism's Chernobyl. It might, however, first hurt American workers because it is also possibly nationalism's Chernobyl. People accept national governments when those governments protect them, either from foreign invaders, or from the private-sector smeg-thugs called "employers". The success of WFH has proven that most work can be done anywhere. This isn't just bad for local real estate barons; it's bad for nations. Western governments have done a piss-poor job, over the past 40 years, of protecting their own people from their bosses... but what happens if they can't even do that? The world becomes ungovernable. WFH eviscerates false consciousness, which is a good thing (acceleration) but dangerous. We no longer pretend work is the most important thing in our lives, a "passion" because we somehow lack the imagination to conceive of better uses for our time than subordinate labor. (We still do it, and competently, but not for 50+ hours per week.) The bosses no longer pretend to be invested in our careers or to see us as future colleagues rather than disposable subordinates. Work becomes a commodity, a trade of (too much) of one's finite time for (too little of) an artificially scarce commodity called money. And that's really fucking depressing. "Antiwork" on Reddit (which is mostly just meme posts at this point) is just the beginning. ---- [1] No, I don't believe the corporate upper class are literal reptilians. It's important to use imagery like this to dehumanize the private jet set, in order to prepare the public in case peaceful means to remove these people from power are exhausted and we have to go into the second half of the alphabet, so to speak. |