Processed World magazine was founded in 1981 by a small group of dissidents, mostly in their twenties, who were then working in San Francisco's financial district. The magazine's creators found themselves using their only marketable skill after years of university education: "handling information." In spite of being employed in offices as "temps," few really thought of themselves as "office workers." More common was the hopeful assertion that they were photographers, writers, artists, dancers, historians or philosophers.
Beyond these creative ambitions, the choice to work "temp" was also a refusal to join the rush toward business/yuppie professionalism. Instead of 40-70 hour weeks at thankless corporate career climbing, they sought more free time to pursue their creative instincts. Nevertheless, day after day, they found themselves cramming into public transit en route to the ever-expanding Abusement Park of the financial district. Thus, from the start, the project's expressed purpose was twofold: to serve as a contact point and forum for malcontent office workers (and wage-workers in general) and to provide a creative outlet for people whose talents were blocked by what they were doing for money. [link]
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What is a bad attitude? I'd say it's a general unwillingness to submit to the conditions of wage-slavery. It's demonstrated most dramatically in a surly, uncooperative manner on the job, but must usually be more subtle. The worker with a bad attitude is always looking for ways to work less (procrastination, losing things), to surrender less time to the job (coming in late, leaving early, long breaks and lunches, lots of sick days), to further private pleasures and human interaction on the job (talking a lot, smoking dope), and by doing one's own creative work on the job.
A bad attitude is a fundamentally normal, human response to the utter absurdity of most modern work. It's a mystery to me why more people don't demonstrate a bad attitude--i suppose it's because they fear unemployment and/or lost income and have learned to smile and hide their true feelings. Of course I've done that too, and all too often. You can't get a job in the first place without smiling and lying through your teeth!
Sometimes people don't demonstrate bad attitudes because they actually enjoy their work. Why people enjoy work is harder to explain, but I postulate three basic reasons: 1) the work is a convergence of avocational interests and paying work (this is extremely rare); 2) the work, though boring and/or frustrating, is preferable to the individual's life with family, or friends, or lack thereof; and 3) going to work saves one from finding and creating meaning, of deciding what's worth doing (this is obviously not an explicit motivation, but I think it is a subterranean spur). In the latter two cases, the job serves as a safe haven from the vacuum of meaninglessness in which this society would otherwise leave the individual. Providing economic security reinforces this feeling. [link]
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Los Alamos never lapsed into its pre-war lassitude. Within a few years the thermonuclear bomb had been created, and it was then that my father arrived. An astronomer from Toronto's David Dunlop Observatory, a Ph.D. student with the University of Chicago's Nobel prize-winning astrophysicist Chandrasekhara, my father came to Los Alamos to work in "T (for 'for Theoretical Physics) Division," a group that was responsible for the development of newer and more useful nuclear weapons.
(...)
The hazards were both as hidden and as distant as the sites themselves, but inevitably the military and civilian worlds overlapped. A schoolmate of mine lost a few limbs to a relic of a simpler form of war. Someone had found an old bazooka shell in a remote range and had dropped it off a cliff a few times. It didn't explode, and thinking that it was a dud, he took it home, His kid found it in a closet and took it out to show friends. It was dropped on the sidewalk, and the detonation tore the arms and legs off of several children and killed a little tyke who was riding his brand-new birthday bicycle past the house.
The town's unique product was so common as to become normal. The only way I can remember its sinister aspect bothering me was in a recurring dream I had when I was about six years old. In it I am floating in outer space. Dimly seen against the stars are floating things, which I thought of at the time as resembling "tractor parts." They are drifting together in small clumps, and when two unknown pieces meet everything will end. I'm unable to stop any but a very few. I would awaken in panic, unable even to scream. These dreams faded away harmlessly in a year or so.
(...)
In later years we discovered drugs. My friend DJ overdosed on belladonna when we were about 10 and I never saw him again. The city has long had a notorious drug "problem" among its youth, which mirrors the alcoholism among its adults. The wife of one of the directors was a substitute teacher and a horrible alcoholic, embarrassing us with her simple tests (which she accused us of cheating on) and her incoherent singing in music class. Both of my parents were alcoholics, my father almost losing his clearance before he quit drinking with the aid of the Lab's alcoholism program. It may be that the isolation contributes to it, but it's also a sign of stress—the employees can't talk about their work, can't really question it, and can't escape from it.
(...)
Despite the elaborate security (fences, guards, numbered copies, badges, and so forth) the code words and euphemisms, the inhabitants of this unique village were not ignorant of what they did. The machinists, computer techs, secretaries, and the like may not have "the big picture," but the physicists and mathematicians in the weapons groups, as well as the administration types, saw it well enough. They, probably more than anyone else, know what nuclear weapons can do. The original scientists were very concerned about the role of the bomb, discussing it in political terms, not just technical ones. The questions raised were often profoundly disturbing to them. The later scientists saw themselves as distinct from the military on one hand, and from the policy makers on the other. They rationalized that they were not responsible for the final decisions. My father made an illuminating reference to this view of the lab's position when he said of the Pentagon, "Don't confuse us with those bastards."
There is an inherent schizophrenia in this position. My father pointed out that the various directors of the lab (Oppenheimer, Norris Bradbury and Harold Agnew) would say, in effect, "Nuclear weapons are one of the greatest threats to the planet today. A solution must be found or we will perish." Then, without a perceptible shifting of mental gears, they would add, "It is our mission here at the lab to develop the best and most useful weapons." From one side of the mouth speaks the humanist, and from the other the company man. [link]
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Though CLODO's emphasis on computer technology reflects a specific area of expertise and interest, they are ideologically close to the other saboteurs of the region: they claim to work as an ad hoc grouping, associating around particular actions and interests, and eschew the notion of themselves as a formal organization. They have no rigid rules and principles and tolerate considerable diversity among individual participants; they distinguish themselves from traditional left groups by their rejection of a "vanguard'' role, their explicitly anti- authoritarian playfulness and a sense of humor that they wield as an ideological weapon. [link]
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Now consider the bureaucracy of the future, where regulation books have been replaced by an integrated information system, a system that has been given language. Terry Winograd, an AI researcher, quotes from a letter he received:
"From my point of view natural language processing is unethical, for one main reason. It plays on the central position which language holds in human behavior. I suggest that the deep involvement Wiezenbaum found some people have with ELIZA [a program which imitates a Rogerian therapist] is due to the intensity with which most people react to language in any form. When a person receives a linguistic utterance in any form, the person reacts much as a dog reacts to an odor. We are creatures of language. Since this is so, it is my feeling that baiting people with strings of characters, clearly intended by someone to be interpreted as symbols, is as much a misrepresentation as would be your attempt to sell me property for which you had a false deed. In both cases an attempt is being made to encourage someone to believe that something is a thing other than what it is, and only one party in the interaction is aware of the deception. I will put it a lot stronger: from my point of view, encouraging people to regard machine-generated strings of tokens as linguistic utterances, is criminal, and should be treated as criminal activity." [link]
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When the new labs opened, a rift developed between the original scientists and the new group. In science these days, molecular and cell biology is "in." Chemistry and biochemistry still play a basic role, but biological disciplines such as physiology, which consider the whole organism, are "out." At the universities all the aspiring biologists want to study genetics. As a result, their overall outlook tends to be limited to the microscopic level at best.
For the first few years of the genetic engineering labs, Rob, the plant physiologist, was down in the dumps. He had been counseled that his specialty -- the study of the overall plant and how it reacted with the surrounding environment -- was no longer where it was at. To be more employable he needed to get into molecules. When the labs developed plant lines that had to move into the greenhouse, and then outdoors into an actual field, it became apparent that the molecular and cell people didn't know the first thing about whole plants. They didn't consider, for example, that if you move a gene that influences a certain stage of growth, it might affect the overall maturation of the plant.
(...)
In an infinite range of possibilities, the industrial sponsors are having a bigger say than ever before in what science is actually developing. The universities are busy organizing academic biotechnology consortia to facilitate the flow of basic research to industry (in return for funding and a piece of the patent action). The ties between academia and industry, always present, have reached unprecedented levels in the case of biotechnology.
(...)
Genetically engineered herbicide tolerance is an interesting case in point, though it's not a project at the labs where I work. The agrichemical companies became the biggest backers of genetic engineering of plants in the early 1980s. They invested early, and financed full scale in-house research labs. Finding a specific gene that carries a specific trait is one of the difficulties of genetic engineering.
(...)
The research stops here--the skills developed toward gene isolation and manipulation are put on hold while the rush to product development takes over. Imagine the implications of spraying all the timber plantations in the semi-wild with herbicides. But there is no research into these ecological consequences -- research dollars are committed to bringing products to market as soon as possible.
(...)
Back in our labs, the push is also on. I've asked a number of scientists how they feel about herbicide tolerance being the pilot product of genetic engineering? How do they feel about the way the technology they develop is actually applied? Stephanie smiles, and though she is the leader of the molecular biology group, she just shakes her head and says she's glad herbicide tolerance isn't one of our projects. Rob also shakes his head, doesn't say anything. He's already had the funding pulled out from under projects he's worked on at two other labs, losing his job both times. He's not too anxious to make any statements. Pete, busy at the chemistry bench, shrugs his shoulders and acknowledges that funding is everything. "You work on what they are willing to fund."
Steven, one of the younger scientists, once confided to me that the herbicide tolerance work is dangerous. He was labeled a liberal by the rest of the group for being against the attack on Iraq. This relatively mild political stance made his lab mate so uncomfortable she stopped speaking to him. He recently left the labs to go back to graduate school and study environmental law. Two years ago, another young cell biologist left for law school. He, however, was going to be a patent attorney. [link]
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For Shorris, totalitarianism is the process of destroying autonomy. Corporate totalitarianism idolizes efficiency in its bureaucracies and takes its ideology from industrial psychology, management textbooks and classes. The result is a microworld where the autonomy of human beings is systematically thwarted.
(...)
A public relations man and his friend, an engineer, have fights through the years about the way different processes or products are described to the public; the engineer wants more technically precise language, the PR man wants to make an impact by keeping things simple. The author notes the use Nazi Germany made of simplifications (and could also have put in some analysis of how Reagan and Co. do the same). What emerges is an insightful glimpse of language: "Simplifications are perfectly opaque. . . simplifications impose "one-track thinking' upon the listener; they cannot be considered. . . In its use as propaganda, language passes from the human sphere to that of technology. Like technology. . . it does not recognize the right to autonomous existence of any person but the speaker. To disagree with the language of the technological will is to disobey." But one can, and Shorris does, disagree with and disobey the language of the technological-propagandistic will. [link]
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There is a pretense of friendliness among all office employees regardless of their rank. This "nice'' atmosphere works conveniently to legitimate the hierarchy. If it seems that everyone is equal and has an equal chance to climb the ladder, the ladder itself appears as the emblem of this "equal opportunity.'' All this makes for an extremely subtle set of power relations.
Rather than through raw confrontation, power is reinforced by imbuing the entire office terrain with its symbols through things like dress, the size of one's desk or workspace, and "perks.'' In such a setting, people may try to reduce their powerlessness by playing the game of privilege or forming alliances with those more powerful than themselves. Indeed, this type of behavior is almost required for survival in a typical office. [link]
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Sometimes, when a station janitor was sick I would have to do two complete floors. We all get sick a lot, probably because we're exposed to everybody's garbage and because they cut off the air conditioning at 6:30 p.m. to save money, meaning we breathe the stale, dust-laden air all night.
(...)
While you're vacuuming you can hardly hear anything; my ears would ring from the noise. Commercial vacuum cleaners are built without any noise reducing insulation. I understand that Hoover once marketed a soundless vacuum cleaner and it crashed because people associate power with noise and thought it was wimpy. Sometimes I used to turn around and find the foreman, watching me vacuum, with his arms crossed. I'd cut it off and ask him if I was doing a satisfactory job of running a damned vacuum and he'd just walk away. [link]
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I decided to try other careers for a while, which resulted in a 16-month stint as a temporary word processor and a near nervous breakdown. No matter what the job situation I would leave at 5 p.m. fuming at my dumb-shit bosses, who bolstered their feeble egos by generating a feverish pace of work; a pace which, I soon realized, masked the work's meaninglessness. This was also about
the time I started reading Processed World, which awoke me to the fact that wage labor was a no-win situation. Whether word processing for the law firm or thought processing for the university, the employee always loses, financially, psychologically, and emotionally.
It also became clear that any kind of career whatever under capitalism was a sham-and especially so in the 1980s. Professionalization, I realized, was nothing more than a tremendous ruse to get a swollen baby-boom generation to compete harder than its parents for fewer jobs while feeling more important. [link]
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Nor can these programs cope with the causes of the stress which drive people to drugs, namely intense work paces, boredom and bosses. The EAP's job is to fit the "maladjusted" workers to the company's norms, not to campaign for lighter workloads or socially useful work. Even Newsweek, in its story on "Drugs in the Workplace," concluded that the real roots of drug abuse lie in the fact that "many jobs are. . . like torture. . . these people bring mind-altering drugs to ease the boredom, the tension and the stress of doing their job." Once an "abuser" agrees to seek help for a substance problem, the usual "treatment" is a new, legal drug, e.g. methadone, darvon, valium. Individuals are then coached in how to go on living with just the right amount of drug use, and are offered prescriptions for new drugs.
(...)
Unfortunately, the existing methods of "rehabilitation" are dubious at best. They are characterized by two basic kinds of "treatment": a new drug to replace the illegal one, or going cold turkey in a halfway house. The regimen in the halfway program usually involves breaking the addict's individual spirit and reimposing respect for outside authority (we can imagine that there might be another type of halfway program in which people genuinely helped each other out and created a new community of affection and support, without the crutch of authority). Following these prerequisites the reformed junkie is trained to work (or look for work) instead of using drugs . . . unfortunately, most jobs lead one right back to a desire for drugs, and a desire for the big money to be made from selling drugs. [link]
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JOB APPLICATION
I'd like to apply for a job.
Yes, the job you have available;
my manner is most saleable
and I hope you'll find me suitable
for $5.15 an hour.
I really have the skills, you see,
I've been to university
and though I studied history
I've found my heart to truly be
in men's ties and socks/glass figurines/the discount shoe industry.
What makes me think I'd be good for this job?
um, I love working with people.
...and I love riding the subway an hour and a half each way;
let's see, add those hours to my day
and I'll be making a whopping $3.75 an hour!
oh, no — sir — I do want the job. Can't you tell by my suit?
No, actually, I don't own a dress;
I don't feel comfortable, I confess.
But hell,
for $5.15 an hour
I'll endeavor to wear some colors other than black—
um, I enjoy working with the public, and I'm good with money...
Oh yes, you're right
all us girls are good with money—
yes, that's charming, yes, how funny.
You know, I like a good work atmosphere
where the boss says whatever he wants
and the rest of us just listen...
I'm a very fast learner
and I promise that if you give me this job
I'll be the perfect subhuman
and never let my contempt shine in my worshipping eyes!
I love working with people,
and let's see — what else was I going to tell you?
No, I don't expect vacation pay
and yes, I'm available every day
and though I don't like the evil way
you're looking at me, I've got rent to pay.
And yes, I can start on Saturday.
— Meryn Cadell
The Reason We Work So Hard
Perhaps the reason we work so hard is
the same reason the beaver
must always keep gnawing down trees,
Otherwise its teeth which never stop growing
curve back into its jaws
so it can't eat
and dies in agony,
Except what grows in us is not
our teeth, but
our knowledge of death—
our own and everyone we love—
which keeps gnawing at us,
And like ants, bees, termites
who can't help themselves
and are forever busy,
So we, too, are caught, caught
in a desperate work routine
from which there is no escape.
We can't help ourselves,
although poets try,
Although composers, dancers, actors,
photographers, potters, painters,
sculptors, singers, musicians try,
although saviors and bodhisattvas try,
although beautiful cocks, tits cunts,
buttocks try…
– Antler
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