Adrian Gray

“We were inundated with food. Delivery, vans from local supermarkets arrived, laden with crates of booze, fine chocolates, cooked meats, exotic fruits....
What once had felt necessary, then abundant, now began to feel obscene. In part, we revelled in that obscenity. We took pictures of ourselves awash with food, not, just eating it, but rolling in it, lying on it, burying ourselves in it. When people found this offensive, we simply absorbed and digested their disgust in much the same way as we re-absorbed the shit we produced from our bodies. Zelma, in particular, enjoyed this aspect of what we did. It harked back to her adjustment of adverts. Her violent hatred of consumerism. This isn't our life, she wrote in the caption of a particularly excessive and indulgent image - Kim lying on her back while from above eight bottles of champagne were emptied over her face - it's yours. The post attracted a particularly high level of outrage. What was this? People wanted to know. Was this a protest? Or just debauchery? Were we anti-consumerist, as many seemed to feel we should be, or in fact, hyper-consumerist, an idea which some people found it offensive as the idea that we were some sort of plague cult. (p.266)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“But what aren't you doing already? What more can you possibly do?’
‘I guess he means the team stuff’, I said. ‘The bonding. The camaraderie I've never really been –‘.
‘Don't start judging yourself’, she said sharply. ‘Don't start seeing yourself in the light of those kinds of standards.’
‘No, but it's true. There's always been the part of work I've struggled with, the unquestioning side. The feeling of joining in. I've always tried to do it at this kind of remove. Maybe what he's saying is –‘
‘Of course you've done it at a remove. How else are you supposed to do it and still be you?’
‘But maybe those days are gone’, I said. ‘Maybe I have to accept that. Maybe there just won't be those kind of jobs anymore - the ones where you can roll out of bed and staggering without speaking to anyone and keep your head down and just do it, you know? maybe this is what work is, now’
[…]
‘Definitely. Simple tasks can be automated. They've already almost got the machine learning to do what you do. It's about what else a human can bring to the table, which is, literally, their humanity.’
It was possible, I realised, to imagine. A semi-global future in which the bulk of paid human employment would revolve not around hard skills, but around the messy, blurry business of interpersonal success. A new divide would open up, between the well liked, The easy to get along with, and the awkward, The rude, the unfriendly. I pictured the encampment on which I had lived, filled not as it was then, with migrants, unfortunates, hard drinkers, the out of luck. But instead, the abrasive, the poorly adjusted, the excessively reserved and painfully shy. (p.136-7)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“Sometimes, looking back, I try to isolate a moment to change, a day or a night on either side of which things were demonstrably different. I never succeed. Partly, I think, is because it's simply not possible. Outside of sudden, violent events, changes is ongoing; we measure it only by holding what we've become against the memory of what we once were. But it's also because, in that space, at that particular time, We were so enmeshed in change, so completely caught up in it that singular, momentary factors became lost and blurred. Day and night slipped their boundaries. Our bodies ached, contorted, then were numbed with narcotics and went slack. My fingernails became sharp, then broken. In regular life, the life we'd left, we would have managed these processes, checked them, turned things back to how they were and how we liked them. There, in that concrete room, we surrendered ourselves to time and all its effects. The heat was unrelenting, pooling us in sweat and thickening the stink in which we lived. (p.271)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“I understood, too, what was upsetting my supposed benefactors. This wasn't about my work or my Instagram feed, or whatever uncomfortable email or phone call. Ryan and Seth had received this morning from whichever of their corporate partners was currently on edge. This was about the extent to which I would seem to be playing my role. Just as I had come to understand that in the world of Pict it wasn't enough simply to go to work and go home - that there was, in addition, and expectation of some deeper, human contribution - so too, in the context of this programme, this opportunity, it would never be enough simply to point to the material gains I had made. They needed me to be not only successful, but happy, evolved, gratefully aglow. It was my job to make them feel good about themselves and to help them package up that satisfaction for the consumption of others. In my mind, I saw their vision: me, on a podium or stage, perhaps giving a TED talk, gushing about the life in the change in my life they'd occasioned. (p.165)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease