Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Outspoken by Pluto)

Office work becomes an empty parody of real human social life. A dried-up husk of having to pretend to laugh, having to pretend to care, engage in small talk and business talk indefinitely. Futures postponed; emails answered.

A few years ago, workers in a London Tube station decided, of their own accord, to write quotes on the service updates whiteboard in their ticket hall. The quotes were a mixture of the sentimental, the humorous, the earnest, the capital I-inspirational, and occasionally, the genuinely moving. People took pictures of the board and shared them on soc

At the level of the individual, this means the exploitation of what Han (after Johan Huizinga) terms ‘homo ludens’ – the playful elements of human personality – and the gamification of work. This means the merging of work and leisure, with work increasingly resembling play, and leisure treated as something we can and should make profitable; each ho

This means that when we criticise work, we often come up against fear and confusion.

How we work is shaped not by technology alone, but by existing relations of power.

Developing power is about winning power, with the goal not merely being heard, of making the case, but of winning power to transform the world, not to merely tinker round its edges.

The project of feminism is, in part, a method of calling into question ‘the natural’.

However, it is possible to say that the emotional demands placed on workers, alongside the precarity and lack of control over their time at work, and their time in general, further problematise the idea of continuously improving working lives.

While this balance between the side and the main gig can and does shift across different periods of capitalism, what is really significant to this moment is not just the amount of time spent on side gigs, or hustles, or second jobs, but that hobbies and interests are approached as something that could be or even should be monetised. This is the job