Generation Bubble

In Dubious Battle: Co-creation and the Coming Insurrection

Unfortunately for radical revolution, political and counter-cultural activists open-source innovators were most likely the sort of people the Invisible Committee were expecting to mount the insurrection, to seize upon the general atmosphere of crisis to reconstitute life on a different footing. But the Committee fail to grasp that entertainment and labor have been merged: “Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the manufacture of any product,” they claim. “We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us.” This is not all that paradoxical either. The “living labor” is no longer bound up in the goods as in their meaning, as in the process that animates their circulation. And that labor manifests as entertainment or self-fashioning — the authors point out that “producing oneself is becoming the dominant occupation of a society where production no longer has an object” and argue that “it now becomes possible to sell oneself rather than one’s labor power, to be remunerated not for what one does but for what one is, for our exquisite mastery of social codes, for our relational talents, for our smile and our way of presenting ourselves.” The crucial difference is that this effort is paid for not in wages but in attention.