Even if there is more than a modicum of exploitation at work in the
hyperemployment economy, the despair and overwhelm of online life
doesn’t derive from that exploitation—not directly anyway. Rather, it’s a
type of exhaustion cut of the same sort that afflicts the underemployed
as well, like the single mother working two part-time service jobs with
no benefits, or the PhD working three contingent teaching gigs at three
different regional colleges to scrape together a still insufficient
income. The economic impact of hyperemployment is obviously different
from that of underemployment, but some of the same emotional toll imbues
both: a sense of inundation, of being trounced by demands whose
completion yields only their continuance, and a feeling of resignation
that any other scenario is likely or even possible. The only difference
between the despair of hyperemployment and that of un- or
under-employment is that the latter at least acknowledges itself as an
substandard condition, while the former celebrates the hyperemployed’s
purported freedom to “share” and “connect,” to do business more easily
and effectively by doing jobs once left for others competence and
compensation, from the convenience of your car or toilet.
....Even if productivity has increased mostly to the benefit of the
wealthy, hasn’t everyone gained enormous leisure, but by
replacing recreation with work rather than work with recreation? This
new work doesn’t even require employment; the destitute and unemployed
hyperemployed are just as common as the affluent and retired
hyperemployed. Perversely, it is only then, at the labor equivalent of
the techno-anarchist’s singularity, that the malaise of hyperemployment
can cease. Then all time will become work time, and we will not have
any memory of leisure to distract us.
- "Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User"
descensus Averno facilis est