vitellan’s Reviews > Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone > Status Update

"Slowing down the rate of our connections, rather than collecting people like they’re business cards or stamps, and making those connections deeper and more meaningful, luxuriating in them, is itself a step toward liberation."

"The neoliberal era’s expansion of the sports industry seems to both reflect and be reflected in its political conversations. Pro athletes are sponsored by companies ranging from Wheaties to Nike to Visa; politicians, meanwhile, use sporting metaphors for everything they possibly can. That sports are not, in fact, anything like real life doesn’t seem to matter."

"With the feeling of autonomy comes the feeling that long work hours are a choice; they become a status symbol rather than a sign of unfreedom."

"Gamification is almost the antithesis of “playbor”—a way to pretend that the same old backbreaking manual work is “fun,” a game you can win."

"There’s an app for that, and the app’s founders have no doubt been breathlessly hailed as technical geniuses, even though their real innovation is finding new ways to skirt labor laws. The result has been the gig economy—a patchwork of short-term non-jobs performed by nonemployees who are barely getting by." Really the summary of this book.

(outsourced emotional labor of moderation) "Astra Taylor called the process Fauxtomation, whereby actual humans perform jobs that most people probably assume are done by algorithm."

"“Users made Google a more intuitive product. Users made Google,” Joanne McNeil pointed out. But that didn’t mean users owned Google. How was their labor—the labor of producing data, of producing a “user experience” that necessitates other users to be meaningful—to be calculated?"

"That sense of middle-class scarcity can lead at all levels to wanting to pull the ladder up behind you, whether that be the tenured professor ignoring the struggles of the adjunct down the hall, or the graduate student breaking the strike, or the adjuncts themselves casting aspersions on “those” workers."

"Perhaps the best example of the simultaneous deskilling and deprofessionalization of higher education and its corporate takeover is the for-profit college."

"Until the aftermath of World War II, the term “stress” was rarely used to describe something that happened to humans; researchers, though, began to apply the term to the wear and tear on the human body caused by, among other things, psychological strain on the job. By the 2000s, it had overtaken physical ailments as a cause of absence from work."