“Darling, do you remember when we said, before we have kids we should have a pet and before that a plant to see if we can handle the responsibility?”
“Yes, sure! Why do you bring that up?”
“Well, the basile withered again.”
There is a difference between “btw etymological this used to mean that but since X we use it in other contexts as well” and “no, you are wrong”. The difference is one is fun at parties, the other is not.
You are right that not all Bullshit Jobs have the idle time I’m talking about but enough to create this culture. But I can’t say it better than he himself:
One might imagine that leaving millions of well-educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet—which is, potentially, at least, a repository of almost all human knowledge and cultural achievement—might spark some sort of Renaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place. Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media, especially when one considers it in the light not just of the rise of bullshit jobs but also of the increasing bullshitization of real jobs. As we’ve seen, the specific conditions vary considerably from one bullshit job to another. Some workers are supervised relentlessly; others are expected to do some token task but are otherwise left more or less alone. Most are somewhere in between. Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one’s shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others—all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock ’n’ roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state. What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 2018 (p. 382 of 895 in my ebook version)
I think you misunderstand my position. I’m not a cultural pessimist saying social media made us all into mindless zombies. You can use social media very actively by putting much thought into your posts and conversations and researching them thoroughly. And there is alot of stuff you can mindlessly consume at home long before the internet.
What I’m saying is that Bullshit Jobs created a whole new demographic with time on their hand to idly use online (since they work on computers) but not enough to be productive. As I wrote in another comment, in the time between meetings when a mail might come in or your boss might bump into you, a social media timeline is the way to go. You don’t have a TV in office but access to the internet.
I would argue that forums are somewhere on the continuum and the “direct predecessor” of social media if that makes sense. You already see in which topics something happened which isn’t too different from following a Facebook page.
On your last point, I disagree. Time is relative. There is a difference between free time you can actively plan and idle time between meetings where your boss could bump in any time. At the end of the day looking back, you might have had enough time to write an article, but there could always be a call coming in so you end up using that time looking at cat photos and arguing with strangers about football.
This might depend on the kind of BS job though. Graeber described a wide variety and for some, your argument works but not for all.
I didn’t read it yet but wanted to share that according to Graeber, the rise of social media (and podcasts btw) came with what he calls “Bullshit Jobs” (in the book of that name). Before that, browsing the web was a much more active process, you searched for forums, clicked on a topic you are interested in or went on websites and clicked through them, always deciding what to click on.
With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions. That’s something you can do at work when you have some free time and something might come in. It’s not anymore “I want to know XYZ” but “Let’s see what’s new” if that makes sense.
Maybe you wrote so many papers AIs were trained on that they basically copy your style
You wouldn’t kidnap a baby
No smartphone inside, just cotton living in the moment
The game ends with the capitalist movie to another society
I’m a simple person. I see a linguistic meme, I upvote
I totally go soon, just one more, … ok this is the last, … it didn’t count, just this one, … oh damn, I’m closed to 20 already, I didn’t wanted to get there but now that I’m here, … at 40 this happens again, right? Let’s check, …
So the “vaccination” chip had a precursor, I see
Watch me stealing the meme!
Fuck, I didn’t know
Tzpical tzpo when used to German and English kezboard lazout
“I was waiting for you”