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Title: World Processor
Author: Jacob Silverman
Date: 2014
Language: en
Topics: anti-work, community, anti-technology, review
Source: http://thebaffler.com/salvos/world-processor

Jacob Silverman

World Processor

“I’m unemployed now and should be typing my resume. Typing a resume

becomes more and more like typing a suicide note, and yet choosing not

to work is a kamikaze mission.” - anonymous San Franciscan, Processed

World, issue 7

Consider the plight of the office drone: more gadgeted-out than ever,

but still facing the same struggle for essential benefits, wages, and

dignity that workers have for generations.

Utopian reveries spill forth almost daily from the oracles of progress,

forecasting a transformation of Information Age labor into irrepressible

acts of impassioned fun. But we know all too well the painful truth

about today’s ordinary work routines: they have become more, not less,

routinized, soul-killing, and laden with drudgery. The contrast between

the glum reality of cubicle labor and the captivating rhetoric of

Internet liberation, which once seemed daft and risible, doesn’t

anymore; now it’s only galling. In recent years, for instance, the term

“creative” has been captured by advertising agencies, who’ve bestowed on

it a capital C and made it into a noun, a coveted job title meant to

signify Mad Men–style braggadocio. But all this business-card-ready term

usually denotes is someone who writes copy for Google AdWords or applies

Photoshop filters to an image of an anatomically impossible woman in

carnal embrace with a bottle of vodka.

Even software programmers, once the Brahmins of the new economy, must

contend with diminished status. The costs of launching a company have

declined, so everyone is doing it. Direct your thanks to the glut of

cheap engineering talent in Russia and India and the boom market in

cloud computing, where a half-dozen companies control the digital

infrastructure of hundreds of others, including Snapchat, Netflix, and

the CIA. Please donate to your neighbor’s Kickstarter on your way out,

and don’t mind the venture capitalists lazing nearby—they’ll still

manage to get theirs, as bankers usually do.

Every city hungry to attract high-spending digital workers, from Austin

to New York to Chattanooga, now lays claim to its own Silicon district,

and lavishes potential corporate recruits with tax breaks and face time

with the mayor. But the cyber touts in city government suffer their own

version of the digital workplace’s bait and switch. In place of, say, a

stream of tax revenues to revive decrepit public transport, they’ll end

up with a smartphone app that links commuters with gray-market taxi

drivers. At the same time, disconsolate holders of humanities degrees,

who once may have caught on in a human resources, customer service, or

speechwriting department, have found their jobs outsourced or automated.

A glut of digital labor markets—oDesk, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk,

TaskRabbit—lets companies summon pliable workforces on demand (a

postindustrial reserve army, you might say) and deploy them at the

stroke of a cursor to perform tasks that in better days would have gone

to full-time employees: checking on store displays, organizing

documents, performing transcription, writing newsletters. Even

translation has become digitized and highly distributed; users of the

Duolingo language-learning app are unwittingly translating

articles—gratis—for BuzzFeed, CNN, and other media giants.

Such are the perverse rewards we reap when we permit tech culture to

become our culture. The profits and power flow to the platform owners

and their political sponsors. We get the surveillance, the data mining,

the soaring inequality, and the canned pep talks from bosses who have

been upsold on analytics software. Without Gchat, Twitter, and

Facebook—the great release valves of workaday ennui—the roofs of

metropolitan skyscrapers would surely be filled with pallid young faces,

wondering about the quickest way down.

The Theory of the Sub-leisured Class

So what has happened, exactly, to the noble dream of the creative

workplace? Is it simply that the giddy, VC-fueled idealism of the first

wave of web startups was always destined to come crashing down into the

pinched, clock-watching rounds of glorified make-work that have long

bloated the days of insurance clerks and budget auditors? Or is there

some more revealing and insidious dynamic at play here? Was the noble

dream really a nightmare all along?

This latter option seems the likeliest. After all, the dramatic downturn

in the quality of white-collar labor hasn’t come about due to any slough

in the core project of boosting worker productivity. Quite the opposite.

As technology has advanced, so has productivity, just as the sunniest

macroeconomic forecasters would expect. But the workers most responsible

for carrying out improved routines of productivity are reaping none of

the gains. It’s not just that technological innovation has failed to

bring about a more equitable, less labor-intensive society, contrary to

the predictions of our daring prophets of leisured abundance from the

1950s onward. It’s also that the lords of capital have used the very

promise of technological revolution to extract ever more value from

workers. Stock indices and corporate profits hover near all-time highs

precisely because in the last forty years, most Americans’ wages have

barely kept up with inflation, much less increased in proportion with

their output.

Technology, from an Excel spreadsheet to an assembly-line robot, may

make aspects of our jobs easier. But that’s at most a collateral aim;

the real point of technological improvement in the office has always

been to make us more productive. The “Great Speedup,” as this phenomenon

has been called, involves us working harder and longer, even when we’re

not in the office, than we ever have before. With history in mind, one

can say that the introduction of new workplace technologies has been

more about increasing profits for corporations and less about addressing

the problems of workers or rewarding them for their feverish output.

There’s no indication that this pattern is set to change.

To grasp how deeply such patterns are rooted within the twenty-first

century workplace, it’s important not to look forward, as the hucksters

of digital capitalism are forever urging us to. (Stare long enough at

the futurist mirage and you might forget that you blew your department’s

slush fund on a Jeff Jarvis lecture.) Instead, let us travel backward in

time, to the very cusp of the Information Revolution. Amid the first

stirrings of dissent in Northern California, long before tech moguls

were granted the dubious prestige of celebrity, a leaderless collective

of disenchanted office workers put out a subversive periodical—a

magazine called Processed World. First published in San Francisco in

April 1981, the magazine now serves as an invaluable repository of all

the mistaken, venal, and authoritarian guiding assumptions of the great

digital reorganization of work. The brain trust behind Processed World

was composed of people—many of them steeped in radical causes,

environmental activism, and Situationist-type affairs—who began to

identify the features of today’s high-productivity, low-content

corporate workplace. Standing on the frontier of the new Information

Economy, they took stock of their working lives and despaired at what

they saw—and they made special, mordant note of the new technologies

that didn’t make their work lives any easier or more meaningful.

These would-be revolutionaries were eager to see the automated world’s

long-promised bounty of self-determined leisure bear fruit at last. They

had plenty of marketable skills, but what most of them really wanted was

time—to write and paint and act and organize. Some of them didn’t want

to work at all. Others preferred not to give themselves over to big

corporations and bureaucracies that offered them little in return for

their labor. Most of all, they wanted their lives to be their own. Still

animated by the antiwar radicalism of the previous decade, they were

also bruised by the failures of 1968. Consequently, the magazine, if not

its contributors, adopted no official ideology. They knew what they were

against: wage labor, authoritarianism, war, nationalism, and the state

itself. But they weren’t always sure what they wanted in its place.

Figuring that out would be a challenge; it would also be the great

project of the next fourteen years, during which Processed World would

publish thirty-two issues (give or take),[1] participate in numerous

acts of protest, street theater, and sabotage, and launch a range of

other initiatives, from Critical Mass, the cycling event now held in

hundreds of cities worldwide, to the preservation of some of San

Francisco’s history in what may have been the last era a poor person

could move to the Bay Area and still manage to get by.

Though its circulation peaked somewhere around four thousand copies,

Processed World found an eager audience. Beginning with the second

issue, the pages filled up with letters praising the magazine for

finally talking about work and its discontents. Readers shared stories

of corrupt unions, malignant bosses, profound existential boredom, and

the recovery of some of their dignity through protest and mischief. They

also argued with Processed World’s writers, who were only too happy to

return the volleys. Many of the letter writers simply offered thanks. As

one reader marveled in the July 1981 issue, “THERE’S INTELLIGENT LIFE

OUT THERE!! WE ARE AT YOUR SERVICE.”

But Processed World did much more than supply to depressed office proles

a therapeutic outlet. The magazine also managed to diagnose some of the

issues that still animate radicals today: housework, sex work, and other

unacknowledged forms of labor; unionization and its limits; income

inequality; the precarity of the typical worker; corporate power; the

state of exception that comes with permanent warfare (embodied then by

the Cold War and later by the first Gulf War); and the ways in which the

computerization of society was changing work, often to the detriment of

workers. In the writing—essays, poetry, reportage, fantastical short

stories about rebellious paper-pushers taking over San Francisco’s

financial district, only to be brutally put down by government

soldiers—one can also find the beginnings of today’s revolt against

Silicon Valley and its pernicious mix of libertarian economics,

techno-utopianism, and the deracinated remains of the sixties

counterculture.

As Processed World veteran Dennis Hayes explained it to me, “We were

really examining social history. We were asking questions that went

unasked. We were asking, ‘What’s the value of a job that creates no

value? Or that simply creates more work?’”

Speed Up, Power Down

In an Information Age “largely mute about the experience of work—its

meaning, its purpose, who decides what should get done, by whom, and

how”—Processed World was talking about little else. The magazine’s

twentieth-anniversary issue, published in 2001, surveyed our blasted

landscape of false hopes for a simpler, leisure-enhanced American

working life. An essay by Hayes, “Farce or Figleaf: The Promise of

Leisure in the Computer Age,” traced how computerization of the

workplace has coincided with the Great Speedup. As Americans work more

hours than ever, Hayes noted, the former utopian promises of automation

have given way to the added burdens of computerization; we now work more

not only at our own jobs, but also at learning to manage the

ever-changing digital infrastructure of our lives. We don’t work with

computers; we work to keep up with them. (No wonder our smartphones

“push”notifications at us.) What Thorstein Veblen knew in 1904 bears

repeating: “Wherever the machine process extends, it sets the pace for

the workmen, great and small.”

“For most,” Hayes wrote, “overwork is not elective, it is part of a new

social contract.” Just as temporary, freelance, and other “gig” work was

supposed to be liberating in the 1980s—a fallacy that the earliest

Processed World issues joyfully skewered—computers and information

technologies were supposed to make work more efficient, more creative,

and less onerous. Instead, we spend more time on more tasks, whether in

the office, on the road, or at home, tethered to what Hayes calls “a

mobile and instantly interruptible workplace.” The too-frequent

introductions of new software only increase the pace of the upgrade

cycle, leading to boom times for manufacturers and support staff, while

“those of us who work with computers now have a second job: keeping them

patched and upgraded and responding to their intricate cues, messages

and glitches.” That is in addition to the many other unacknowledged jobs

we have—email being among the biggest time-sinks—all part of a

phenomenon that the computer scientist Ian Bogost recently labeled

“hyperemployment.”

By the time Hayes wrote “Farce or Figleaf,” the dotcom bubble had

already burst. The magazine had essentially disbanded, and the issue was

a valedictory one—an anniversary celebration and an opportunity for

Processed World writers to return and see just how completely their grim

prophecies about the direction of the information workplace two decades

earlier had come to pass. Hayes chose a fitting epigraph: an

outlandishly optimistic forecast from Popular Front playwright Archibald

MacLeish, who in 1933 looked forward to “a civilization in which all men

would work less and enjoy more.”

It was this ability—to take stock of the hidden history of the

degradation of the info-workplace while also reclaiming the promise of

greater leisure for America’s workforce—that set Processed World apart

from the bulk of Reagan-era ventures in radical publishing. Where other

outlets of critical thought took reliable aim at the (ample) cast of

historical villains who made up the Reagan revolution’s vanguard, the

keepers of Processed World kept their gaze fixed on history’s longer

vectors of resistance and (eventual) social change. One example: Members

of the Processed World collective were instrumental in starting the

Critical Mass bike ride in 1992; they also published an article about a

1896 San Francisco bicycle protest in which riders, by rallying for

better-paved roads, not only anticipated the protest tactics that would

be deployed by Critical Mass a century later, but also paved the way,

quite literally, for “the car culture that contemporary bicyclists” now

hope to undo. The Processed World crowd knew from whence they came.

But where exactly was that? And what can Processed World teach us about

today’s radical press, the organs now trying to lead the vanguard

against the world’s bullshit jobs (as David Graeber has memorably dubbed

them) and technological determinism?

No Apologies

Anarchist credentials aside, the closest thing that Processed World had

to a leader must have been Chris Carlsson. A longtime San Franciscan,

Carlsson claims the fistful of titles that comes from being

self-employed for thirty-odd years—“writer, San Francisco historian,

‘professor,’ bicyclist, tour guide, blogger, photographer, book and

magazine designer.” Carlsson has been with Critical Mass, itself a

leaderless operation, since the beginning. And one of his ongoing

projects is Shaping San Francisco, a Howard-Zinn-meets-Studs-Terkel

social history project, with digital archives, public talks, recorded

interviews, and invitations for community contributions.

When I reached Carlsson by phone, he was on his bike, heading to a

farmer’s market and then a co-op grocery store. He eventually pulled

over in a quiet alley, and we talked about his life and the origins of

Processed World.

Carlsson and Caitlin Manning (the two would later have a daughter

together) met, along with several other early PWers, in a street-theater

protest group called the Union of Concerned Commies. Founded in 1979,

the UCC opposed war, militarism, and nuclear power. They held protests,

distributed satirical leaflets, and published in underground newspapers.

Some UCC members participated in the White Night riots—the street

violence that followed the manslaughter conviction of former city

supervisor Dan White, who killed supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George

Moscone. (The rioters had been expecting White to receive a harsher

sentence than he did.) Afterward, the UCC made a T-shirt featuring a

burning cop car with the words “No Apologies.” As if any clarification

were needed, the date and location of the riot were also included.

More agitation followed. The jingoistic fervor that erupted after the

seizure of U.S. hostages at the embassy in Tehran prompted UCC members

to put on fake military uniforms and perform a satirical variety show in

downtown San Francisco. They declared martial law, rationed food,

extolled the virtues of war, sang anthems, and managed to poke fun at

some Leninist factions who bore “complicity in capital’s

authoritarianism and work fetishism.”

The UCC soon fell apart, but street theater, satirical art and graphics,

and a strong sense of grievance would be mainstays of the group members’

lives, and of the cultural and social life of Processed World. As Daniel

Brook recounts in his book The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in

Winner-Take-All America, Carlsson and friends liked to “dress up as

investment bankers and bow in unison at the stock ticker in front of the

Charles Schwab building.” Marina Lazzara, one of the magazine’s poetry

editors, recalled this period fondly. “I miss those days,” she told me.

“We were really out in the streets.”

For Hayes, who would later become the magazine’s go-to source for

Silicon Valley commentary, this attitude was refreshing. “There was a

lot of leftist cant” in the air at the time, he said. The members of the

PW collective “were actually funny—really funny. I started chatting with

them. They radiated warmth, humor, and a kind of point of view that went

way underneath what was going on at the time in the way of political

protest.”

The magazine continued to straddle the line between sarcasm and playful

derision, its pages filling with parodic advertisements, gallows-humor

cartoons, provocative photography, and reprinted Dadaist leaflets

excoriating work. While large chunks of PW are available on its official

website, processedworld.com, many of these graphical elements aren’t;

fortunately, the Internet Archive has full scans of the magazine, and

Verso brought out an anthology, a meaty, oversized paperback called Bad

Attitude, in 1990.

Processed World’s “first two issues were printed on paper unknowingly

‘donated’ by San Francisco’s major banks,” the magazine’s official

history recounts. For the next five years, the magazine’s collective

held collating parties with weed, booze, and potluck buffets. No one

ever got paid for Processed World except the printers—a fact stated with

bald pride in the magazine. It was a collective, volunteer effort, and

it had the rotating cast (as many as four hundred members over the

years), intermittent publication, and borrowed office space to match.

The various offices that Carlsson rented for his typesetting business

often served as what Lazzara called the magazine’s “clubhouse,” where

members would drop in to hang out, write, and argue.

“At one point, for me, it was really my social life, my politics, my

creativity, muses for my own writing,” Lazzara said. “For me, it was

much bigger than a publication.”

A sort of communitarian anarchism suffused much of what Processed World

did. But this sensibility ran alongside an angry, even militant,

approach to work and corporate America. According to the December 1985

issue, “One of PW’s principal aims is to make people feel good about

hating their jobs, not to mention despising the dullness and ugliness of

so much of life in general.” Among the celebrated forms of rebellion

were sabotage and resistance to unions—the anarchist insurgents at PW

dismissed the union world of the eighties as too pro-management and

hamstrung by the National Labor Relations Board, which had outlawed

hallowed protest tactics like the sit-down strike decades earlier and

which would only become more reactionary in the Reagan years.

This kind of attitude can seem more than a little purist, or like Left

Coast posturing for posturing’s sake, but it’s not much different from

what runs through the activist strains of the Twittersphere or in the

pages of many radical publications today. In the case of Processed

World, outrage rated more highly than ideology, and so the magazine

sometimes lacked the theorizing and institutional affiliations that

might have earned it more attention in a culture that values credentials

and easy categorization. PW also placed a premium on first-hand

experience—many contributors began as letter writers or people who

encountered a PWer distributing the magazine on the street—something

that today’s labor press might take heed of. The magazine’s amateurish

execution (and I mean this in the best sense) gave PW a certain air of

testimony, all the more so because a number of its writers, both out of

a sense of fun and self-protection, chose to write under pseudonyms.

PW’s dispatches from the working world were often rough-hewn and

unfinished; they went in unexpected directions and contained sudden,

moving confessional moments. They also were generally insightful about

the power dynamics of the office and the petty tyrannies of bureaucratic

regimes.

In issue 6, for example, one anonymous correspondent, a “Personnel

Management Analyst Trainee for the State of Tennessee,” recalled being

hired to create detailed job definitions for 3,200 government positions.

The consultant arrived on the first day to find eight colleagues working

on this project without having completed one definition—and each was

supposed to be three hundred pages long. They had been working on this

task for two years. The ironies and indignities amassed from there: the

project was only approved to satisfy a capricious judge, it would take

so long that the definitions would be out of date, an upcoming election

might require that they start over again. The writer concluded, “I had

to work toward writing job definitions that would never be finished, and

if finished never used.”

This was but one among the magazine’s darkly comic dispatches from the

absurdist trenches of the overmanaged workplace. Others gestured at

something more haunting, such as the anonymous San Franciscan who wrote

in issue 7, “I’m unemployed now and should be typing my resume. Typing a

resume becomes more and more like typing a suicide note, and yet

choosing not to work is a kamikaze mission.” It was to this group—torn

between the exigencies of white-collardom and the seeming impossibility

of living as one chooses—that Processed World ultimately spoke.

The Machine, Raging

San Francisco has changed dramatically over the last thirty years. It

has been thoroughly gentrified, and become rich in a way that few

American cities have before. Its radicalism, its poor and working

classes, its patches of squalor, much of its analog culture—these

once-distinguishing features have fled east across the bay, to Oakland.

Like so many of us, they’ve been priced out.[2]

The tech backlash precipitated in journals like Processed World has also

come of age. The cleaned-up version appears in the op-ed pages of our

biggest newspapers, alongside news articles about the latest cuts in

food stamps. Contrast this with a different, and likely more honest,

form of dissent: crowds of bitter people holding placards (“Public $$,

Private Gains”; “Stop Displacement Now”) while blocking the paths of

Google buses, for example. The op-eds are understood to be the prudent,

measured thoughts of experts. The protests are seen as bizarre,

“misplaced” (a natural complaint for an industry obsessed with

efficiency), and offensive.

What to say except that this is a sign of a pitiable softness?

Protest—actual bodies in the street—has become so rare, and so fully

prey to a reflexive and deeply unearned cynicism, that it’s practically

gauche, the hopeful incursions of the Occupy movement notwithstanding.

Who wants to make such a mess? Who can get over his or her own practiced

nihilism?

If they were to be faced with the raucous,

are-they-serious-or-aren’t-they militance of the Processed World crowd,

today’s financial and tech elites in San Francisco or New York would

probably just walk around it, perhaps asking the nearest police officer

for assistance. (The state is there to help.) A stunt like the End of

the World’s Fair—a “carnival of celebration and refusal” concocted by PW

in 1984 after President Reagan, in a People magazine interview,

suggested that we might be living in apocalyptic times—would be chum for

a jaundiced media. That is, if it didn’t first die a thousand small,

ignoble deaths on Twitter.

Many of us know we work bullshit jobs; others would be only too happy to

have one, to escape the suffocating anxieties of living on the margins.

Those employed in socially useful jobs—teachers, nurses, social

workers—must contend with low pay or, if they agitate for something

more, being vilified.

The point is to make something out of one’s disillusionment. Today, we

have many smart, young, angry writers. Occasionally they sneak into

legacy newspapers and magazines, or a New Yorker staffer will

code-switch and bare his inner Marxist in an interview with Salon.

Whether to reach larger audiences or exorcize their own guilty

fixations, these radicals tend to hold up pop culture and celebrity as

the prism through which their politics flow. Racism is important, but

when you can talk about it in the context of Miley Cyrus or

Macklemore,[3] it’s relevant.

Along the way, the sense of community and common cause epitomized by

Processed World has been sublimated into the incessant branding and

self-promotion from which none of us appears immune. We are all living

precariously, and so we tread water by competing for the occasional life

preserver thrown out by the attention economy. Do your job well and

maybe the Washington Post, the Daily Beast,or the latest buzzy new-media

property will hire you as its token leftist columnist. Hit the jackpot,

and you’ll become the next Chris Hayes.

Who can blame them? It’s now so expensive to live in a coastal

metropolis that one hopes to sell out at least a little bit.

The remaining members of Processed World have become victims of some of

the same forces. Over the last three years, Carlsson and Lazzara have

seen an increasing number of friends evicted from San Francisco to make

way for the tech nouveau riche. “It’s a tidal wave of displacement. All

of our friends are leaving,” Carlsson said. “It’s like a trauma that

people are living through.”

It’s become passé to blame our machines—in our individualist society,

you are the sole author of your failures—but consider this: to those

whose work appeared in Processed World, the introduction of computers to

the workplace was a political act. The computerization of the workplace

brought regulated workflows, surveillance by managers, deference to the

dictates of software, and a machine with which you couldn’t keep up. It

meant a noticeable loss of autonomy and a dawning sense—seen in the

rapid turnover guaranteed by planned obsolescence—that productivity and

growth had become ends in themselves. The most dangerous -isms turned

out to be those preceded by “Ford” and “Taylor,” and they exerted their

ultimate hold by becoming technologized and dispersed throughout our

homes, our offices, our cars, and our cities.

In a 1982 essay, three PWers wrote, “It is not hard to imagine that in

the very near future most people will carry out their jobs in front of

TV screens.” It’s one of those delightfully naive predictions that’s

appreciated all the more because it so rapidly became antique. But

there’s something unexpectedly apt here about the phrase “TV screens,”

with its aura of anesthetizing entertainment. In 1982 an office computer

was almost certainly just a machine for work. Now, the same machines we

use for work can also provide a salutary escape—into something

meaningful, sure, but maybe just into something distracting and numbing,

enough to get through that day’s particular soul-deadening meeting or

performance review. Work has been allowed to conquer our lives in part

because there is now no difference between the tools we use for work and

for play. These tools are always with us, and so we are always available

to our jobs. Maybe we’d be able to do something about all this bullshit

if we weren’t forever standing in it.

The essay, titled “Roots of Disillusionment,” ends with a consideration

of why it’s so difficult to imagine, much less enact, a new social and

political order. The members of Processed World hoped for a world

defined by voluntary social and labor relations, “a freely, genuinely

cooperative and communal world, in which the individual would be

realized rather than suppressed.” It was a hazily defined goal, sure;

they would always be searching, always be resisting the calls of

competing ideologies and petty sectarianism, or giving up and going to

work for Apple. But just as it had been in the sixties, that process was

part of the point:

"Some of these experiences were disillusioning too—a good many former

activists and communards turned sourly conservative after concluding

that free collectivity was impossible. But others still remember the

successes, partial as they were, the moments when people felt they had

the power together to make their own history, to become anything they

might desire to be. They carry with them a blurred snapshot of utopia."

That snapshot is worth holding onto. As we joylessly compete for

ever-shrinking rewards, it might even provide some small inspiration.

[1] Thirty-two issues appeared in the magazine’s initial run. An

abbreviated issue, referred to as number 33 1/3, appeared in the spring

of ’95, with others following in 2001 and 2005.

[2] Swap in “Manhattan” and “Brooklyn,” and you have the same story for

New York, though the pattern is repeating itself in Brooklyn now.

[3] Or whichever famous name fits the news peg.